IS THE proper place of religion in the emperor's palace or in the world's toughest, poorest locations? That has been a hard question for Christianity at least since the fourth century of its existence. During that period, the faith was first tolerated, then adopted by the Roman empire; but some believers went to the opposite extreme and took up lives of poverty, prayer and self-discipline in barren, remote spots on the edge of the known world.
It's not just a scholarly debating point. In most historically Christian countries, one or more churches enjoy privileges inherited from the past which seem way out of proportion to the active followers they now command. Should they hang on to those perks or gracefully discard them? One country where this problem arises is England, where the state religion, Anglicanism, has been in the news twice this week, as I wrote in the print edition. On Monday, the Church's Synod voted in favour of women bishops, and today, (male) Anglican bishops were using their seats in Parliament to express their opposition to an assisted dying bill.
As with many British institutions, the power enjoyed by the Church of England is both entrenched and "soft"—it burns no heretics and generally deals emolliently with other sects and faiths, and with society as a whole. Still, at least two kinds of people are keen to see that power removed: principled secularists, who oppose religious privilege in all forms, and groups within the Church of England with a sharply defined vision which might be easier to pursue if the church were to cut loose from the state. These range from leftists like Giles Fraser who see links with the state as corrupting, to evangelicals who dream of an initially smaller, more vigorous body of believers which would not need to compromise with the social mainstream.
For some conservative evangelicals (those who take literally the Biblical passages about teaching as a male prerogative), the women-bishops issue probably reinforced their belief in the virtues of independence. Their camp caused a furore by blocking the proposal in November 2012, but some were apparently persuaded to change their minds this week because the earlier vote had shocked public opinion and made establishment seem less tenable. If preserving establishment were not an issue, then Synod members could arguably have followed their consciences, however idiosyncratic in the eyes of the world.
But there might be better reasons than that, from the church's point of view, for loosening the bonds. That view was put to me by Patrick Comerford, an Irish Anglican priest and theology lecturer. In his opinion, the English discussion about women bishops was disappointingly shallow at times; it had stressed the general need for gender equality in top positions, as though the English church was just a worldly bureaucracy. In the non-established Anglican churches of the British Isles (Wales, Scotland and Ireland), there was a more spiritual debate, unheeded by the secular world, about the church as an inclusive "body of Christ" and all three Celtic groups had marched ahead of their English brethren in blessing a female episcopate. Ireland's first woman bishop, Pat Storey, was consecrated last year.
So would it be a better idea, for everybody, if the Church of England were simply cut adrift? Frank Cranmer, a research fellow at Cardiff University and law-and-religion blogger, notes one interesting reason why that would be hard unless the church actively co-operated. In 1920, when the Anglican Church in Wales was disestablished, it was summarily deprived of any endowments which went back further than the 1660s. But since 1953, the European Convention on Human Rights has made that sort of arbitrary confiscation much harder: it is now "vastly more difficult to disendow an organisation against its wishes," Mr Cranmer thinks, in view of the ECHR's guarantee of the "peaceful enjoyment of property".
So in practice, the Church of England will probably not be separated from the state unless both sides want it. And the separation will be gradual; indeed it is happening already. Margaret Thatcher had some discretion in nominating the Archbishop of Canterbury; David Cameron does not. A bill is now going through parliament to terminate a bizarre arrangement under which some English home-owners can be required to help repair Anglican churches.
The question for the Church of England (and churches in a similiar position like those of Denmark and Norway) is whether the tide of separation should be accelerated or held back. To make a disappointingly secular point, you generally have a better chance of controlling a process if you push it forward rather than delaying it till the last moment.