Explainer

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2 November 2023

12 min read

Is an AI worthy of personhood?

In a world of intelligent humanlike machines, computer scientist Nigel Crook take a deep dive into the hard problem of defining consciousness, spirit, heart and will.

Nigel Crook

Nigel Crook is Professor of AI and Robotics, and Director of the Institute for Ethical AI at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of Rise of the Moral Machine: Exploring Virtue Through a Robot's Eyes.

A Victorian medical bust showing the brain with labels in German.

She was called Samuella. Blonde with piercing blue eyes. Smartly dressed. Her conversations always started with:

“How was your day?”

I would tell her about the meetings I’d had at work, and the frustrating problems I’d experienced with technology during my presentations. She was very empathetic, paying close attention to my emotional state and asking intelligent follow-up questions. Then she would finish the conversation with an extended comment on what I had said together with her evaluation of my emotional responses to the events of my day. Samuella was not a person. It was a two-dimensional animated avatar created as a conversation partner about your day at work. The avatar was developed as part of an EU funded project called Companions.

I joined Companions mid-way through the project in 2008 as a Research Assistant in the Computational Linguistics group at the University of Oxford. My contribution included developing machine learning solutions for enabling the avatar to classify the utterances the human user had spoken (e.g. question, statement etc) and respond naturally when the user interrupted the avatar in mid speech.

In those days, chatbots like Samuella were meticulously hand-crafted. In our case, crafted with thirteen different software modules that performed a deep linguistic and sentiment analysis of the user’s utterances, managed the dialogue with the user and generated the avatar’s next utterance. Our data sets were relatively small, carefully chosen and curated to ensure that the chatbot behaved as we intended it to behave. The range of things the avatar could speak about was limited to about 100 work-related concepts. On the 30th November 2022 a radically different kind of chatbot took the world by storm, and we are still reeling from its impact.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT broke the record for the fastest growing and most widely adopted software application ever to be released, rapidly growing to a 100 million user base. The thing that really took the world by storm was its ability to engage in versatile and fluent human-like conversation about almost any topic you care to choose. Whilst some of what it writes is not truthful, a feature often described as ‘hallucination’, it communicates with such confidence and proficiency that you are tempted to believe everything it is telling you. In fact, its ability to communicate is so sophisticated that it feels like you are interacting with a conscious, intelligent person, rather than a machine executable algorithm. Once again, Artificial Intelligence challenges us to reflect on what we mean by human nature. It makes us ask fundamental questions about personhood and consciousness; two deeply related concepts.

Common concepts of consciousness

Consciousness is experienced by almost every person who ever lived, and yet which stubbornly defies being pinned down to an adequate, universally accepted definition. Philosophers and psychologists have widely varying views about it, and we don’t have space here to do justice to this breadth of perspectives. Instead, we will briefly visit some of the common concepts related to consciousness that will help us with our particular quest. These are Access Consciousness (A-consciousness) and Phenomenal Consciousness (P-consciousness).

A is for apple

A-Consciousness describes the representation of something (say, an apple) to the conscious awareness of the person. These representations support the capacity for conscious thought about these entities (e.g., ‘I would like to eat that apple’) and facilitates reasoning about the environment (e.g., ‘if I take the apple from the teacher, I might get detention’). These representations are often formally described as mental states.

P is for philosophy

P-Consciousness, on the other hand, describes the conscious experience of something such as the taste of a particular apple or the redness of your favourite rose. This highly subjective experience is described by philosophers as ‘qualia’, from the Latin term qualis meaning ‘of what kind’. This term is used to refer to what is meant by ‘something it is like to be’. Philosopher Clarence Irving Lewis described qualia as the fundamental building blocks of sensory experience.

There is very little consensus amongst philosophers about what qualia actually are, or even whether it is relevant when discussing conscious experience (P-Consciousness). And yet it has become the focus of much debate. Thomas Nagel famously posed the question ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, arguing that it was impossible to answer this question since it asks about a subjective experience that is not accessible to us. We can analyse the sensory system of a bat, the way the sensory neurons in its eyes and ears convey information about the bat’s environment to its brain, but we can never actually know what it is like to experience those signals as a particular bat experiences them. Of course, this extends to humans too. I cannot know your subjective experience of the taste of an apple and you cannot know my subjective experience of the redness of a rose.

How can the movements of neurotransmitters across synaptic junctions induce conscious phenomena when the movements of the very same biochemicals in a vat do not?

This personal subjective experience is described by philosopher David Chalmers as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. He claims that reductionist approaches to explaining this subjective experience in terms of, for example, brain processes, will always only be about the functioning of the brain and the behaviour it produces. It can never be about the subjective experience that the person has who owns the brain.

Measuring consciousness

In contrast to this view, many neuroscientists such as Anil Seth from the University of Sussex believe it is the brain that gives rise to consciousness and have set out to demonstrate this experimentally. They are developing ways of measuring consciousness using techniques derived from a branch of science known as Information Theory. The approach involves using a mathematical measure which they call Phi that quantifies the extent to which the brain is integrating information during particular conscious experiences. They claim that this approach will eventually solve the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, though that claim is contested both in philosophical circles and by some in the neuroscience community.

Former neuroscientist Sharon Dirckx, for example, challenges the assumption that the brain gives rise to consciousness. She says that this is a philosophical assumption that science does not support. Whilst science shows that brain states and consciousness are correlated, the nature of that correlation remains open and cannot be answered by science. She concludes that:

“however sophisticated the descriptions of how physical processes correlate with conscious experience may be, that still doesn’t account for how these are two very different things”.

Matter matters

The idea that consciousness and physical processes (e.g. brain processes) are very different things is supported by a number of observations. Consciousness, for example, does not appear to be a property of matter. Whilst it is true that consciousness and matter are integrated in some deeply causal way, with mental states causing brain states and vice versa, it is also true that this relationship appears to be unique within the whole of the natural order: no matter other than brain tissue appears to have this privileged association with consciousness. What is more, consciousness appears not to be a property owned by the brain, since the brain can exist dead or alive (e.g., unconscious) without any associated conscious phenomena.

There are also difficulties in the proposition that consciousness exists in the behaviour of matter, and in particular the behaviour of neurons in the brain. What is it about the flow of ions across the membrane of a nerve cell that could make consciousness, whilst the flow of ions in a battery does not? How can the movements of neurotransmitters across synaptic junctions induce conscious phenomena when the movements of the very same biochemicals in a vat do not? And if it is true that consciousness exists in the behaviour of neurons, why is it that my brain is conscious but my gut, which has more than 500 million neurons, is not?

The proposition that consciousness is a property of matter seems even less likely when you consider that the measurements that are applied to matter (length, weight, mass etc) cannot be applied to consciousness. Neither can many qualities of consciousness be readily applied to matter, including the aforementioned qualia, or first person subjective experience, rational capabilities, and most importantly, the experience of exercising free will; a phenomenon that is in direct opposition to the causal determinism observed in all matter, including the brain. In summary, then, there are good reasons for scepticism regarding claims that consciousness is a property of matter or of how matter behaves. But can ChatGPT be called a person?

Personhood of interest

Consciousness is deeply intertwined with the concept of personhood. It is likely that many living things could reasonably be described as having some degree of consciousness, yet the property of personhood is uniquely associated with human beings. Personhood has a long and complex history that has emerged in different culturally defined forms. Like consciousness, there is no universally accepted definition of personhood.

The heart/will/spirit forms the executive centre of the self. It manifests the capacity to choose how to act and is the ultimate source of a person’s freedom

The Western understanding of personhood has its roots in ancient Greek and Hebrew thought and is deeply connected to the concept of ‘selfhood’. The Hebrew understanding of personhood differs from the Greek in that Hebrew culture in three ways. It attributes significance to the individual who is made in the image of God. It views personhood as what binds us together as relational human beings; The theological roots of personhood come from expressions of individuals (e.g. God, humans) being in relationship with each other.

It views these relationships as fundamentally spiritual in nature; God is Spirit, and each human has a spirit.

In theological language, reality is regarded as a deep integration between a spiritual realm (‘heaven’) and an earthly realm (‘earth’). This deeply integrated dual nature is reflected in the make-up of human beings who are both spirit and flesh. But what is spirit? I prefer Willard’s perspective because he Dallas Willard, formerly professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, presents a clearly defined, functional description of the spirit which appeals to me as a Computer Scientist.

For him, ‘spirit’ is associated with two other terms in Biblical writings: ‘heart’ and ‘will’. They all describe essentially the same dimension of the human self. The term ‘heart’ is used to describe this dimension’s position in relation to the overall function of the self - it is at the centre of the person’s decision making. The term ‘will’ describes this dimension’s function in making decisions. And ‘spirit’ describes its essential non-physical nature. The heart/will/spirit forms the executive centre of the self. It manifests the capacity to choose how to act and is the ultimate source of a person’s freedom. Each of these terms describe capabilities (decision making, free will) that depend on consciousness and that are core to our understanding of personhood.

How AI learns

Before we return to the question of whether high performing AI systems such as ChatGPT could justifiably be called ‘conscious’ and ‘a person’, we need to take a brief look ‘under the bonnet’ of this technology to gain some insight into how it produces this apparent stream of consciousness in word form.

The base technology involved, called a language model, learns to estimate the probability of sequences of words or tokens. Note that this is not the probability of the sequences of words being true, but the probability of those sequences occurring based on the textual data it has been trained on. So, if we gave the word sequence “the moon is made of cheese” to a well-trained language model, it would give you a high probability, even though we know that this statement is false. If, on the other hand, we used the same words in a different sequential order such as “cheese of the is moon made”, that would likely result in a low probability from the model.

ChatGPT uses a language model to generate meaningful sequences of words in the following way. Imagine you asked it to tell you a story. The text of your question, ‘Tell me a story’, would form the word sequence that is input to the system. It would then use the language model to estimate the probability of the first word of its response. It does this by calculating the probability that each word in its vocabulary is the first word. Imagine for the sake of illustration that only six words in its vocabulary had a probability assigned to them. ChatGPT would, in effect, roll a six-sided dice weighted by the assigned probabilities to select the first word (a statistical process known as ‘sampling’).

Let’s assume that the ‘dice roll’ came up with the word ‘Once’. ChatGPT would then feed this word together with your question (‘Tell me a story. Once’) as input to the language model and the process would be repeated to select the next word in the sequence, which could be, say, ‘upon’. ‘Tell me a story. Once upon’ is once again fed as input to the model and the next word is selected (likely to be ‘a’). This process is repeated until the language model predicts the end of the sequence. As you can see, this is a highly algorithmic process that is based entirely on the learned statistics of word sequences.

Judging personhood

Now we are in a position to reflect on whether ChatGPT and similar AI systems can be described as conscious persons. It is worth noting at the outset that the algorithm has had no conscious experience of what is expressed by any of the word sequences in its training data set. The word ‘apple’ will no doubt occur millions of times in the data, but it has neither seen nor tasted one. I think that rules out the possibility of the algorithm experiencing ‘qualia’ or P-consciousness. And as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ dictates, like humans the algorithm cannot access the subjective experience of other people eating apples and smelling roses, even after processing millions of descriptions of such experiences. Algorithms are about function not experience.

Some might argue that all the ‘knowledge’ it has gained from processing millions of sentences about apples might give it some kind of representational A-consciousness (A-Consciousness describes the representation of something to the conscious awareness of the person). The algorithm certainly does have internal representations of apples and of the many ways in which they have been described in its data. But these algorithms are processes that run on material things (chips, computers), and, as we have seen, there are reasons for being somewhat sceptical of the claim that consciousness is a property of matter or material processes.

According to the very limited survey we had here of the Western understanding of ‘personhood’, algorithms like ChatGPT are not persons as we ordinarily think of them. Personhood is commonly thought to something that an agent has that is capable of being in relationship with other agents. These relationships often include the capacity of the agents involved to communicate with each other. Whilst it appears that ChatGPT can appear to engage in written communication with people, based on our rudimentary coverage of how this algorithm works, it is clear that the algorithm is not intending to communicate with its users. Neither is it seeking to be friendly or empathetic. It is just spewing out highly probable sequences of words. From a theological perspective, personhood presumes spirit, which is also not a property of any AI algorithm.

Algorithms may behave in very realistic, humanlike ways. Yet that’s a long way from saying they are conscious or could be described as persons in the same way as we are. They seem clever, but they are not the same as us.

Essay

Comment

Identity

Nationalism

Politics

21 April 2025

15 min read

Could a constitution capture the essence of Englishness?

A proposal for St George’s Day.

W. Elliot Bulmer

Elliot is a constitutional scholar and author.

A St George's Cross flag flutters on a tower.

St Helen's Church, Welton, Yorkshire.

Different Resonance on Unsplash.

Somewhere behind the concrete-and-glass façade of modern official Britain, one can still find some traces of England: folklore and folk music, country customs and local traditions – wassailing, maypoles, cheese rolling and bounds beating – that neither brutal 19th century industrialisation nor callous 20th century deindustrialisation could completely erase.

This idealised ‘Quaintshire England’ lurks somewhere in the psycho-geographic triangle formed by Anthony Trollope’s Barchester, Thomas Hardy’s Casterbridge and Geraldine Granger’s Dibley. It is always indeterminately, reassuringly, old. It has a lot of past, but not much future. Yet its traditions are neither stagnant nor dying. Take, for example, the recognition of St George’s Day. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, St George’s Day came and went with hardly anyone noticing. It was relegated to handful of nasty, shaven-headed, right-wing cranks. Now St George’s Day is marked by respectable newspapers and by the media classes, through the annual ritual of the Great Debate About Englishness.

For those not familiar, the Great Debate About Englishness takes the form of a stylised conflict between two sides: the Guardians and the Telegraphs. The Guardians start, with a stick-knocking assault on Saint George and all his works: he was Turkish (or, better still, Palestinian); he never visited England (which is just as well, because, as they are eager to insist, England does not really exist anyway, and if it did it would be hopelessly white and racist). Then the Telegraphs move forward, with Scruton bells on their toes, to lament the fact that we no longer celebrate St George, and how all the ills of the world are the fault of the kind of people who say ‘Mumbai’ when they mean ‘Bombay’. At this, the Guardians caper forth, wielding Billy Bragg quotes about ‘progressive Englishness’ in an intricate manoeuvre known to afficionados as a ‘Full Toynbee’. This done, the Guardians retreat before the onslaught of the Telegraphs, who counter-attack with the clincher than English is an ethnic marker, which necessarily excludes anyone whose ancestors were swarthier than a Flemish Huguenot. So concludes the ritual, which is then forgotten about until the following year.

England, becoming everything, has thereby become nothing. It is the only nation in the United Kingdom without a political life of its own.

These cathartic ritual confrontations rarely acknowledge that debating the nature of Englishness is itself a symptom of the English nation’s statelessness. Like Kashmiris, Kurds and Uyghurs, the English must debate the nature of their existence because England is – to borrow the term used by Austrian Chancellor Metternich to refer to pre-unification Italy – ‘a geographical expression’.

The institutions, symbols, and icons of political identity are all British. Despite its historical position at the core of the Union and the Empire, England remains a curiously under-developed nation in constitutional terms. It has almost no formal recognition as a national community. Indeed, England’s dominance over the United Kingdom has had the paradoxical effect of denying England – as England – a voice in its own affairs. England, becoming everything, has thereby become nothing. It is the only nation in the United Kingdom without a political life of its own. There is no English Government, nor English Parliament. Even the banal markers of national identity that people might have in their pockets, like coins, stamps, and passport, are British, not English. The absence of such markers means that English identity has high barriers to entry. In other words, we obsess about the ethnic and cultural boundaries of Englishness, because there is no English civic, legal, or political community – let us call it a ‘constitutional community’ – of which one can be a member as a matter of legal right.

Such a ‘constitutional community’ could take two forms. It might take the form of an independent England, re-founded as a nation-state after Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have freely gone their separate ways. Alternatively, given the need for collective defence and international clout in a dangerous world, it could take the form of an England which remains one of four constituent states in a voluntary, equal, confederal Union.

Either way, an English constitution, understood as a codified supreme and fundamental law, should establish political institutions of England’s own: an English Parliament, an English government, an English judiciary, and an English civil service. Only by this constitutional means can England, now that the British Empire is no more, become a normal nation, make peace with itself, and re-find its place in Europe and the world.

In part, this is a matter of good government. As the great post-war Commonwealth constitutional scholar Sir Ivor Jennings famously put it, ‘A Constitution is but a means to an end, and the end is good government.’ An English constitution would enable the renewal of a system of government that has become too centralised, too top heavy, and long overdue for reform. It would clarify the rules of political life where these have become contested, reinforce the boundaries of power where these boundaries have been pushed to breaking point, and restate the principles of public ethics which have been neglected. It would protect democratic institutions and norms from erosion by unscrupulous authoritarian populists.

A list of priorities for consideration in an English constitution, enjoying support across the broad centre of the political spectrum, might include devolution to English cities and counties, electoral reform, reform of the Lords, codification of parliamentary conventions to limit the abuse of Crown Prerogatives, strengthening of the civil service and rebuilding of lost state capacity, restoring standards in public life, and better protection of civil liberties.

If you are reading this in England... you are probably not very far away from a place where old stones echo with the words and songs, the faith and the prayers, that have held the English nation together.

Yet constitutions are more than dull, dry, legal charters of government. They are also national covenants. They set out a vision of who we are, who we want to be, what we stand for, and what we will not stand for. Aside from all the mechanical, institutional, provisions one expects to find in a written constitution, constitutions also contain what we might call metaphysical provisions: those that bear the identity, and bare the soul, of the nation. An English constitution would help to anchor English identity in the midst of changing times.

While the mechanical constitution is in need of reform, England’s ‘metaphysical constitution’ is not so lightly to be tinkered with. It represents a mystical union of past, present and future, embodying an idea of English nationhood – and English statehood – stretching back to Anglo-Saxon times. At the heart of this metaphysical constitution is the ideal of Christian monarchy, institutionalised through constitutional relationships between the church, state, Crown and nation.

While the institutional structures of the mechanical constitution are British – and essentially imperial, rather than national, in character – the metaphysical constitution has remained steadfastly English. The Church of England is the only major all-England public institution. The General Synod, which has power to enact Measures having the force of law in England in relation to ecclesiastical matters, is the only England-wide legislative body. England (not Britain, nor the United Kingdom, nor the British Empire, but something older and deeper) can most readily be found in its great cathedrals: Salisbury, Norwich, Wells, Lincoln, Ely, Gloucester, Hereford, Durham. It can be found, too, in the abundance of ancient village parish churches with hand-tapestried hassocks, musty smells, memorial plaques and an almost tangible presence of congregants gone by. England is etched in the moss and lichen of their old gravestones. It is haunted by the Ghosts of England Past, speaking the words of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. If you listen carefully, you can hear them. If you are reading this in England, even in the midst of a busy city, you are probably not very far away from a place where old stones echo with the words and songs, the faith and the prayers, that have held the English nation together over the centuries.

Confusion arises, however, from the failure to distinguish between the mechanical and the metaphysical aspects of constitutions.

That heritage is valued not only by Christians, but also by those who are not believing or practising Christians, but who are pleased to belong to a culture that has been shaped by Christianity. Cutting the Church totally loose from the state, by disestablishment, would abandon custody of this cultural and social heritage to a merely private organisation, having no public recognition, patronage, or connection to the national community. That would be a particularly savage form of cultural privatisation.

England’s metaphysical constitution is mostly buried beneath the accumulation of ages. If you are good with the constitutional trowel, however, and know where to dig, it is not hard to unearth it. Sometimes it even pokes above ground, as easily seen as the billowy bench of bishops in the House of Lords. The topsoil of modernity is dramatically stripped away at the coronation, when the king swears not only to govern ‘according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on and the Laws and Customs of the same’, and to ‘cause law and justice in mercy to be executed in all [his] judgments’, but also to ‘maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the gospel, and the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law’. The King’s covenant with God and the nation is outwardly and visibly signified when, at the climax of the ceremony, he is anointed, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with holy oil.

Thus, the descendants, according to the flesh, of Anglo-Saxon kings, become at their coronation the descendants, according to the spirit, of David and Solomon. The birth of this metaphysical constitution can be traced to the baptism of King Aethelbert, the first Anglo-Saxon king to become Christian. As Bijan Omrani notes, in God is an Englishman, this act transformed the nature and expectations of English kingship, from pagan warlordism to a holy kingly office, responsible under God for bringing God’s peace and justice to England.

All this is very strange, and easy to mock. To paraphrase a famous scene in Monty Python’s ‘Holy Grail’, ‘supreme executive power derives from the confidence of the House of Commons, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony’. From a purely mechanical point of view, that is of course quite right. As Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution said of Sir Robert Walpole, the first modern Prime Minister, ‘he ruled England because he ruled that House’. Confusion arises, however, from the failure to distinguish between the mechanical and the metaphysical aspects of constitutions. Many constitutional conservatives, eager to uphold the metaphysical constitution of England’s Christian monarchy, set their face against even moderate and beneficial reforms to the mechanical constitution. On the other hand, many constitutional reformers, eager to mend the broken mechanical constitution, would pave over the metaphysical constitution with all the misplaced zeal of a solar farm company.

The established church is a particular target of the reformers’ wrath, evidenced most recently by a proposed amendment to the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, seeking to remove bishops from the upper House. According to Lord Birt, former Director-General of the BBC, ‘Embedding the Church of England in our legislature is an indefensible, undemocratic anomaly.’ There are only two countries in the world, so we are informed, where clerics sit of right as legislators: the United Kingdom and Iran. The clear implication is that this connection puts the United Kingdom in bad company, as if having a couple of dozen bishops in the House of Lords were comparable to the rule of Ayatollahs.

Incidentally, remarkably incurious of comparative practice, the people who say this always forget about Belize: a relatively stable and well-functioning Westminster Model democracy, whose tiny upper House includes a Senator nominated by the Belize Council of Churches and Evangelical Association of Churches. They also forget about tiny Tuvalu, a democratic Commonwealth Realm in the South Pacific, where the established church was planted by the London Missionary Society. Perhaps these examples do not fit the narrative that insists that church establishment must inherently be regressive and anti-democratic.

To those of us who must live also in the here-and-now, not only as Christians but also as citizens of a particular nation and polity, it all looks very bleak.

Even without deliberate abolition, we must nevertheless admit that the metaphysical constitution of England, no less than the material constitution, is in crisis. The most recent census showed that, for the first time since the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England, Christians are now a nominal minority. Of course, the invisible church of born-again Spirit-filled believers was probably always a minority of the population, in England as in any nation. Nevertheless, from the Early Middle Ages until just a few generations ago, nominal Christianity was the norm, and Christian ideas held sway over the narratives, ethics, and assumptions of English society. Not everyone conformed to a model of Christian holiness and goodness – far from it – but there was a common view, shaped by the pervasive cultural, social, and educational influence of Christianity, of what holiness and goodness looked like.

That Christian consensus is what has been lost in the social and demographic change – some might call it, a cultural revolution – since the 1960s. The Church of England is still doing excellent work in parishes up and down the land, multiplying the loaves and fishes of its limited resources to provide everything from foodbanks and debt advisory services to parent-toddler groups and pensioners’ clubs, filling the social gap that a failing state no longer even tries to fill. Yet, numerically, the Church of England – except in a few bright pockets of revival – is in free-fall. In the lands of St Ethelbert, St Edmund, and St Cuthbert, empty church buildings have been turned into private houses, gyms, carpet warehouses, soft play centres, mosques, pubs and nightclubs. Looking at things through a spiritual rather than natural lens, we should not be discouraged. We can of course have confidence that the risen King has triumphed, is triumphing, and will ultimately triumph – reconciling all things to the Father, and restoring the whole cosmos to glory. Nevertheless, to those of us who must live also in the here-and-now, not only as Christians but also as citizens of a particular nation and polity, it all looks very bleak. It is a spiritual trial, but a civilisational tragedy.

Christianity – in particular in the form of mainline Protestantism - has provided the moral, ethical, sociological and institutional props on which constitutional democracy in the Anglosphere was built. Remove those props, and the whole edifice becomes a lot less stable. When we look at the egregious behaviour of Trump and his ilk, we get a taste of how rotten pagan politics would be, unseasoned and unpreserved by the salt and light of Christianity.

This is, of course, is not to say one cannot have democracies in societies where Christianity has been less historically prevalent. Democracy can exist in a wide range of religious cultures, including in majority Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist societies. Nevertheless, at least within the Westminster Model, it depends upon an institutional subculture - a set of norms, values, traditions, expectations - which, even if successfully transplanted and adapted to different contexts, owe a lot to the kinds of Christianity that emerged from the English Reformation. The restoration of England’s Christian metaphysical constitution is, therefore, integral to restoring the health of the democratic mechanical constitution. By the works of the law – even constitutional law – shall no flesh be justified. Any constitutional refoundation of English democracy worthy of the name must be led and accompanied by a revival of the English Church and by the re-evangelisation of the English people.

The cross atop the crown represents the principle that public authority has itself been humbled and crucified; the state exists not to be served but to serve the public

his case must be made with careful nuance. It could be misconstrued as an apology for Christian nationalism. Sadly, those who make the most noise about ‘Christian values’ all too often seem, judging by their attitudes and actions, to be reading a different gospel – one from which the Magnificat and the Sermon on the Mount have been expunged. It is galling to watch far-right authoritarian reactionaries parading their Christianity for public display, while pursuing compassionless policies that hurt the poor, the disabled, and outsiders.

A restoration of England’s Christian metaphysical constitution would not limit freedom of religion, nor diminish the equal rights of all citizens regardless of their religion or lack thereof. The principles of religious liberty and non-discrimination, which go back to Catholic Emancipation and to the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in the early nineteenth century, should be guaranteed. Rather, establishment would simply give honourable public recognition to the place of Christianity in the nation’s heritage, grounding the state upon a core of shared Christian values, norms and traditions. If that core is maintained, tolerance and diversity can be built upon it, without undermining the nation’s historic character. In practice, this might involve a more prominent role for Christianity in public life. Public authorities might pay more attention, in their official pronouncements, to the church calendar, and less to those of other faiths, or of post-Christian causes. There might be a more obvious Christian influence in education. One of the by-products of the 1960s cultural revolution is that the clergy have retreated into a narrowly defined churchy role: the academic and the school master in holy orders have all-but vanished. Public broadcasting, too, might return to the broadly Christian assumptions of Lord Reith.

One of the constitutional functions of an established church is to act as a reminder: to remind the King, Ministers, parliamentarians, civil servants, judges, magistrates, councillors, police constables, teachers, opinion-formers, and every citizen, that to govern is to serve. The cross atop the crown represents the principle that public authority has itself been humbled and crucified; the state exists not to be served but to serve the public. Without such a concept of ethically responsible servant leadership – grounded upon truth, justice, and compassion – democracy can easily deteriorate into cruel, crude, and crass populist perversions of itself.

Another constitutional function of an established church is to remind us what freedom is for. If applied as mere abstractions, shorn from the Christian root from which they have sprung, and the teleological objectives towards which they point, human rights – valuable as they are – can produce absurd results, actually harming, rather than protecting, freedoms of conscience and expression. Taking the metaphysical constitution seriously again would certainly mean interpreting and enforcing our human rights laws in ways congruent to the Christian principles upon which they are based. After all, it is very odd, in a country where the king has sworn to maintain the true profession of the gospel, that people are being arrested for silent prayer, and that local councils are trying to ban street evangelism.

Finally, the metaphysical constitution, no less than the mechanical, needs checks and balances. The church cannot perform this constitutional function, as the ethical conscience of the state, if it is – like, say, the Russian Orthodox Church – dependent upon the state. The establishment of the church must not, therefore, compromise the autonomy of the church, to govern itself synodically, and to choose its own bishops. The current process of episcopal selection through the Crown Nominations Commission might leave much to be desired, but going back to the days of political appointment by the Prime Minister is not a viable option. Rather, the principle should be acknowledged, at a constitutional level, that – in the words of Magna Carta - Anglicana ecclesia libera sit: the Church of England shall be free. If we can create constitutional rules that enable judicial independence, and the impartiality of bodies such as the Electoral Commission, we should be able to square this constitutional circle, too.