Essay
Comment
Identity
Nationalism
11 min read

Strangers and identity in a global age of nationalism

Exploring inclusive and exclusive nationalism, the challenge to dialogue with those who may see things differently.

Miroslav Volf is Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and is the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

A person holds the vertical tall steel bars of a border fence.
Max Böhme on Unsplash.

Born in the former country of Yugoslavia and raised in both Serbia and Croatia, before they fought for their respective independence, Miroslav Volf has experienced nationalism and identity politics firsthand. The theologian, now based in the United States, examines nationalism and the Christian responses to its challenges. 

 

Nationalisms are surging today across the globe. A marginal phenomenon barely two decades or so ago, nationalist and populist movements have now gained political traction in many countries in response to a growing awareness of the failures and injustices of market-driven globalization. 

Christians are called to care for the well-being of their communities, and in principle, nationalism can be a way of attending to the specific needs of the neighbors who happen to be fellow citizens. Just as we care for our families, our communities, and our cities, so also we might care for our nation. We might call this form of national loyalty grounded in universal commitments to humanity “inclusive nationalism.” However, sometimes nationalist movements take a hostile turn towards outsiders. They become rooted in a sense of exceptionalism or even superiority; they become “exclusive” in the ways they think about moral commitments. 

How can we hold together our particular commitments to those around us, while also acknowledging that the command to love our neighbor is not limited to our co-citizens? 

Idols are easier to come by than we might realize. In the famous image of John Calvin, our hearts are idol factories. 

God and idols 

In giving a Christian answer to these questions concerning our fundamental loyalties, there is no better place to start than the first line of that great description of the Christian faith - the Nicene Creed:  

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”  

Only God is God; all other would-be gods are false gods making empty promises. The law God gave to Moses demands that we have no other gods before God, and that we not make for ourselves any idols. Modern people in our cultures are not often tempted to make “graven images” for themselves, or to bow down and worship things, so this may seem like a quaint prohibition.  

However, something can be an idol without this kind of ritualized service. An idol instead can be anything that we are devoted to rather than to God. Following St. Augustine, we might think of an idol as something we love more than God, that we spend more of our energy trying to attain or to please than God. Following Martin Luther, we might also think of an idol as something we trust more than God, that we rely on for security or success when things get tough. In other words, idols are easier to come by than we might realize. In the famous image of John Calvin, our hearts are idol factories. We love to commit to people, things, and ideas first, and to God second. 

Friends, families, cultures, nations are not just things that we love, but people from whom we receive important aspects of our very selves 

Turning to the question of political allegiance, then, the prohibition of idols means that for Christians, loyalty to God must come before loyalties to families, cultures, or nations. In fact, Jesus even tells his disciples that they must hate their fathers and mothers if they are to follow him —otherwise, they are in danger of idolatry! Now, the main way we can follow Jesus in our relationships with others is by following the second greatest commandment: to love our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus even heightens this command still further: we are to love our enemies and pray for any who persecute us.  

Idolatry and identity 

The things that we love, the things we pledge our loyalty to, in some sense become part of who we are. They shape our identity. This might be true of a hobby or a career in a general sense. The sentences “I am a gamer” or “I am a scientist” describe not just what we do, but who we are. This is more clearly the case with the personal loyalties described above. Friends, families, cultures, nations are not just things that we love, but people from whom we receive important aspects of our very selves. In his famous book City of God, Augustine defined “a people” as a collection of persons united and oriented by a common love. Their identity as a people simply is this shared love.  

Christians therefore must let Jesus’ commands to love others shape their sense of self. To love our neighbors is to define ourselves in part by our care for those near us. To love our enemies is to define ourselves by benevolence even for those who are far from us or who would hurt us. Since Christians are called to follow Christ first, to have no other gods before God, these new self-definitions must shape even the most fundamental loyalties in our lives. Before Christians are citizens of their respective nations, they are those who love even the enemies of their nations. 

As finite creatures, we cannot serve the whole world in one lifetime; we need to make choices about where we will choose to act in love. 

Loves, idols, and nationalism 

Exclusive nationalism, however, is just one of many ways modern politics asks us to prefer members of one group to those of another. Loyalty to our own people becomes more important than love for others beyond our nation or group. In the context of our discussion so far, then, this amounts to a form of idolatry.  

To be clear, our specific relationships are given to us by God and are good things that we ought to treasure. Nevertheless, it is often the good things of the world that are the easiest to turn into idols, by devoting ourselves more to them than to God. Sometimes, in fact, religious leaders or politicians will use Christian principles to emphasize the value of these good relationships and loyalties—but subtly it turns into a scenario where faith in Christ serves the particular loyalty, rather that loyalty expressing faith in Christ. One of the most insidious results of this kind of political theology is that it can turn Christianity into a ‘prosperity religion' or a ‘political religion'— we end up trying to use God to serve our own ends.  

Instead, the command to love not just our neighbor but especially our enemy must itself shape our commitments to the communities we find ourselves within. As finite creatures, we cannot serve the whole world in one lifetime; we need to make choices about where we will choose to act in love, and these choices are governed in part by these particular identities. These identities and loyalties, then, are instances of broader commitments. One can love one’s own family or nation in some sense first, but never at the expense of those outside. If the love of nation starts to compete with love for humanity, it ultimately betrays its own foundation.  

Our national identities must not be conceived of as firmly bounded circles serving to connect us to some only by separating us from others. 

Fair enough, some will say, but don’t some nationalisms simply ask us to take care of America first or Britain first, rather than asking us to entirely dismiss the concerns of all other peoples? Here we must think more about what it might mean for concern for America or Britain to be actively shaped by love for our neighbors and our enemies. In particular, I want to argue that this shaping must take the form of opening these identities and communities outward—of reconfiguring them in ways that make them proactively ready for and open to, and even in some sense perhaps dependent on and learning from, those that are far away or strangers who come in need of our hospitality.  

It's easy to think we love humanity in general while feeling no responsibility to the concrete strangers in front of us. But a love for humanity that does not help us to feel this responsibility is worthless. It is just the love for an idea. The question, therefore, is not “how do my specific loyalties to my community remain consistent with my commitments to humanity as an ideal,” but rather, “how do my specific loyalties to my community encourage my commitments to the specific strangers in front of me, enmeshed as they are in specific loyalties of their own?” After all, we love our family members and our fellow citizens because we must love all human beings and we must start with those closest to us. Precisely the same logic underlies our responsibility to the stranger, the non-citizen or immigrant, in front of us. 

In light of the prohibition of idolatry, our national identities must not be conceived of as firmly bounded circles serving to connect us to some only by separating us from others. True, identities always operate on some logic of boundary, or at least of proximity and distance, or else they would be evacuated of all content. However, these distinctions must always be understood as depending on concrete relationships wherein love is demanded, and therefore also as always being open to, even being constituted by, constant renegotiation. The boundaries of our identities must be kept porous and flexible, ready to readjust to welcome the stranger. 

An example may help here. To live in the UK or in the US, for example, is, in some sense, just to have certain specific relationships to a person’s own culture, family, geographic neighbors, and so on. Family loyalty, cultural pride, and patriotism, insofar as they are virtues, are derivative virtues from following the demands of love towards those neighbors who are closest to us.  

The work of modern historians shows us how our cultural identities are products of long trajectories of exchange, conflict, and hybridity. 

However, in this day and age, to live in the UK or in the US is no less to have certain specific relationships to various groups of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, even if the machinations of globalization, gentrification, and so on try to hide this fact from us. Indeed, the histories of colonial power and imperial conquest that these nations are caught up in only serve to expand the scope and deepen the responsibility of the question: “And who is my neighbor?” The same duties of love apply to our non-citizen neighbors, in the same channels of concrete proximity; therefore, these relationships constitute an identity as a citizen of the UK or the US no less than the familiar relationships of culture and blood.  

Our very identities, thus, must be chastened by the warning against idolatry and the reciprocal command to love. The work of modern historians shows us how our cultural identities are products of long trajectories of exchange, conflict, and hybridity. Similarly, the Christian call to love our neighbor, and even our enemy, suggests that we must not be overly concerned with maintaining identitarian “purity.” Instead, we must always be willing to make space, not just “somewhere else” but in our very homes, even in our very identities, for real relationship with the stranger. This is what the open arms of welcoming embrace signify—an offer to renegotiate the space that we ourselves occupy in order to make room in love for the proximity of the other.  

Double vision 

This relativization of identities will also mean a relativization of our own claims to stable and secure knowledge. Nations and cultures typically have preferred ways of looking at the world, preferred values, and preferred ways of evaluating or proving claims to true belief. We can all think of various ‘British values' or 'American values’, for example. Importantly, we don’t usually experience these things (freedom, say) as only valuable for us, but as valuable in general, for everyone. Nationalism is then in danger of becoming cultural imperialism: our values are better than yours, and we will share them with you.   

The prohibition of idolatry again chastens us. Idolatry is not just the worship of a graven image of God instead of the real God, but also worshiping our own preferred ideas of God instead of God as God really is. God’s transcendence means that our ideas of God can never fully contain God, and therefore there will always be more to God than we can understand. This, in turn, means always being willing to let our visions of the world be challenged, even—and especially—by those we might consider outsiders to truth.  

This is not to say we must always try to get above or behind” our national idiosyncrasies. There is no such thing as a view from nowhere; neither would it be desirable, even if it were possible. Just as to be human is to be in relationship with a particular set of proximate neighbors, so it is also to have our perspectives on God’s truth shaped by our cultural surroundings. The solution is not to try to strip off these identities, to try to be “neutral” by standing further back from the loves that tie us to particular relationships. Rather, it is to always push ourselves into productive dialogue with those who may see things differently from us.   

For example, during the Cold War, Soviet propaganda highlighted the problem of race relationships in the US as the failure of capitalism. This critique was certainly not made in good faith—but it was still the case that a foreign and hostile power was able to see certain aspects of justice more clearly than some of us in the West were able to do at the time. Similarly, a refusal of idolatry means being willing to learn more about God’s goodness from other nations and cultures. This is an especially important attitude to maintain as regards those nations and cultures that might seem opposed to those good things we love about our own.  

Conclusion 

Questions of identity and the stranger will only continue to grow in importance in our increasingly global age. It is important to remember that populist nationalism is responding — and responding wrongly — to real problems with market-driven globalization. However, the concern to acknowledge human finitude and to serve God concretely where God has placed us must not lead us to idolize these particular commitments. Followers of Jesus must be those who love both their enemies and citizens of their own nations.  

The sketches offered here are invitations to act prudentially, in concrete ethical commitments, in prayerful reliance on God who gives wisdom generously to those who ask. They cut across political stances and party affiliation, representing a genuine and distinct way Christians can contribute out of their faith and to the common good. They are countercultural suggestions in an age marked by nationalistic and identitarian fervor. Most importantly, however, they are ways we can follow the God who is unconstrained by human limitations and who has made space in the divine life for sinners like us.  

Essay
Comment
Identity
Nationalism
Politics
15 min read

Could a constitution capture the essence of Englishness?

A proposal for St George’s Day.
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.