Is there a role for an established or national church?

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Certainly not!

I’m English, and prior to 2013 was a practising Anglican. As an Anglican I was welcomed in Catholic churches, and now as a Catholic, I have been welcomed in Anglican churches. I think it depends on the area. Generally, people in the South of England are often regarded as more rude than people from the North of England. I live in the Midlands of England, which sits between North and South, so you get people of both types here.

My late father, who was an atheist until the day before he died when he asked to be received into the Catholic Church, was always welcomed in both Anglican churches and Catholic churches that he visited with me. In fact, whenever I left him alone and came back to him, he was deep in conversation with some cleric! Both Catholic and Anglican clerics predicted he would become Christian at some point. They got that right!
 
Every country has an established church of some kind. There is actually no such thing as “secularism”. Either God or Satan will rule a nation. There is no middle ground. Right now, Satan controls most, if not all, nations, hence why we see his religion of evil on the rise.

The hard reality is that separation of Church and State is actually un-biblical. God Himself condemned the children of Israel for not only privately worshipping idols, but also for publicly worshipping them. The people were commanded to offer public worship to God. Everyone from prince to pauper was required to publicly adore the True God in the official rites He established. If the official religion was rejected, God punished the people until they restored the true faith back to public use.

In any case, religion is actually a public thing, not a private thing. Just look at the Religion of Wokeism that is now officially mandated in society. If you don’t profess the Creed of Wokeness, you get “cancelled”, which is just another way of saying excommunicated! Soon, the public religion of every nation will be that if Antichrist, and no amount of people touting “separation of church and state” is ever going to change that!
 
EmilyAlexandra said:
On the other hand, I also attended some services at various middle-of-the-road and High Church Anglican churches, as well as some Catholic churches, and I was a bit like being invisible. I got the impression that they didn’t really have a way of getting to know newcomers at all.
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This is because we Catholics see attending Mass in a very different light than many of the Protestant denominations and non-doms. Going to Mass is not a social event, it is not a time to catch up with friends, make plans for coffee later, or any of that. Mass is a time of celebrating the liturgies of the Word and of the Eucharist. Our focus is on Jesus Christ, not each other.

While we participate in the Mass as a group, we are doing so individually. We respond together but we are there to make our own offerings to Christ, to offer our prayers and intentions to him, and to receive the Eucharist if in a state of grace.

To many this will seem as though we are unwelcoming. We are not as a rule, most of us are more than happy to speak to guests before or after Mass outside the Nave. In many Catholic Churches you will not hear chit chat before Mass. Coming into Mass a kneeling to pray is sacred time, a time to prepare ourselves for Mass. I hope that helps with the concept that Catholic’s aren’t friendly to visitors.

As far as a national religion in the US. A big fat NO. This country, which is the only one I can speak on, was founded on the idea we are able to practice our religion freely. We have an elected leadership, changing every 4-8 years. I can’t even imagine what it would look like.
 
No doubt that is true. In case you had not guessed, the town to which I was referring was Brentwood. As you will know, it’s very white, very middle class, very conservative. Perhaps most damning of all, it’s in southeast England! 🤣 A few years ago, my husband and I went to a funeral Mass at a Catholic church in the very deprived and very black area of southeast London where I grew up. An elderly Irish woman sat next to us in the church and explained what was going on during the Mass. After the service, we got talking to a West Indian gentleman who was so enthusiastic that he tried to get my husband to join the Knights of St Columba. A colleague from Romania has taken me to a Romanian Orthodox church, and I have subsequently visited with friends to show them how beautiful it is. I have generally found Romanians to be very friendly people.
brown_bear said:
But tell me: is this the case all over England? Are Anglicans kind and Catholics rude?
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As @(name removed by moderator) says, many other factors are involved. For example, people in the north of England are generally much friendlier than people in the south. Quite a few years ago, I was working on a public sector project in one of the most deprived neighbourhoods of Liverpool, one of the poorest cities in the UK. One morning, I arrived early and found the building locked up. A local guy I’d met once or twice before turned up, found me waiting around in the cold, and took me back to his house (which happened to be in the same street) for a cup of tea. On another occasion, one of the women took me by surprise with a suggestion of going to the swimming pool. I said it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d need a swimming costume, so I’d pop into the town centre and buy myself one. She said she had a swimming costume that would fit me and went home and got it for me. I cannot imagine either of these things happening in London.

With regard to the different churches, I think this is how I would perhaps put it: the Church of England occupies a privileged position as the established church, and with that privilege also comes an obligation to be open to all. I would consider an Anglican church to be a venue that is open to the public. On the other hand, if I go to a Catholic church, I feel it’s more like being a guest in somebody else’s property.
 
@phil19034 @Horton Based on my experiences visiting evangelical churches, I think I would tend to agree. Whenever I have been to a Catholic Mass, it very much seems that the main reason why people are there is to participate in the Mass. It seems that most people arrive, spend some time in private prayer, take part in the liturgy, and then they go.

When I’ve been to evangelical churches, it seems quite different. People arrive early, spend some time catching up with their friends, then somebody calls the meeting to order and there is some “worship” which is often like a small rock or pop concert. Then there is the sermon, which is often more like a lecture lasting up to an hour. Then there are prayers, testimonies, more worship, perhaps some people experiencing gifts of the Holy Spirit, and finally an invitation for anyone who wishes to give their life to Jesus to come up to the front of the church to be prayed for. Afterwards, there’s more catching up with friends, invariably some drinks and snacks, possibly a full lunch or dinner. As the services are often held in a venue that is not actually a church, people feel free to talk and eat and drink in a way that they wouldn’t in a normal church.

I get the impression, which I think is probably correct, that Catholics (and some other fairly traditional denominations) generally regard the church as somewhere they go to worship God. With the more extreme evangelical churches, on the other hand, going to church seems to be almost a combination of entertainment, education, and a social gathering. People I know who belong to these churches always attend various groups and courses and so on. It’s often described as “fellowship”, “discipling”, and being “edified” or “built up in the faith”.
 
EmilyAlexandra said:
People I know who belong to these churches always attend various groups and courses and so on. It’s often described as “fellowship”, “discipling”, and being “edified” or “built up in the faith”.
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Catholics have fellowship too, but that typically happens during the week or on a Saturday, not usually on Sundays.

The exception would be in Personal Parishes (non-geographic parishes) and parishes in transient areas where most people don’t have family close by (like military bases/towns, retirement areas, etc)
 
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EmilyAlexandra said:
I get the impression, which I think is probably correct, that Catholics (and some other fairly traditional denominations) generally regard the church as somewhere they go to worship God. With the more extreme evangelical churches, on the other hand, going to church seems to be almost a combination of entertainment, education, and a social gathering. People I know who belong to these churches always attend various groups and courses and so on. It’s often described as “fellowship”, “discipling”, and being “edified” or “built up in the faith”.
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Yes. Mass is not a social event. Mass is not about us, the parishioners, Mass is about Christ. Before COVID many parishes would have a coffee hour after at least one morning Mass or some other social type gathering.

We also have many apostolates and organizations people can get involved in. Some parishes have more, some less. There are many ministries a person can do within a parish such as helping with sacrament preparation for the kids, religious education, RCIA and many more. There are women’s groups, men’s groups, couples groups, moms groups, bible study groups, and so on.

It is not as though there is a void of fellowship or social activity within the Catholic Church, rather it is more of knowing the right time and place for the social activity. Having converted from Protestantism and seeing the move from more of a structured worship service in that denomination from when I was a kid to today when it is very much like these big entertainment services that happens to be faith based.

With much of our society so focused on only what each individual wants and wants right NOW and that being an accepted norm for many, a national church/religion would most like look like the ‘Church of Me’.
 
I have no special knowledge of this area, and I wonder if @EmilyAlexandra would agree that there is still a sense of apartness in English Catholicism, such as one would not experience in Methodism or amongst Baptists, and derived perhaps from the long history of discrimination, and also perhaps from the time when Catholics were not permitted to attend non-Catholic services, giving Catholicism an enclosed look to those outside.
 
MNathaniel said:
It sounds like you’re sort of envisioning a vague state department of non-denominational religion that staffs attractive buildings with non denominational staff that don’t really mind what you believe or what you practice, but are available to facilitate whatever rituals you prefer, in their attractive buildings with free wifi staffed by government-paid workers?
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I am not sure where I have given the impression of favouring a church that is non-denominational or generic. In countries that have established/national churches, the churches are not non-denominational or generic: they are Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox. Those are specific denominations with specific beliefs.

In the UK, the Church of England and Church of Scotland are not funded by the state, and their employees are not civil servants. The Church of Scotland is entirely independent of the UK and Scottish governments. The only way in which the UK government exerts any influence over the Church of England is that the prime minister’s appointments secretary attends the Crown Nominations Commission as a non-voting member, and the prime minister appoints one additional member of the Crown Nominations Commission when it appoints a new archbishop of Canterbury.

The advantages that I see in having an established/national church could be summed up thus:
  • It provides spiritual and pastoral care to people who would otherwise have no connection with a Christian denomination.
  • It provides spiritual leadership for the nation and for local communities.
  • It promotes a moderate form of religion in public life.
 
I have certainly heard that Ampleforth had a reputation for encouraging rather ardent patriotism and royalism and that there was also a certain amount of anti-Irish feeling there. I guess a Catholic institution which exists to groom the children of the English upper classes for entry to Oxbridge and the armed forces would feel something of a need to prove its loyalty to class and country. These would be the sort of people who say “Mass” so that it rhymes with “farce”.
 
PickyPicky said:
there is still a sense of apartness in English Catholicism, such as one would not experience in Methodism or amongst Baptists
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Yes, I think I would say that English Catholicism (as opposed to Catholicism in England) often seems more “foreign” to me than, for example, Irish Catholicism or Polish Catholicism. This may sound odd, as I am not in any way Irish or Polish, but I have always known so many Irish and Polish people that their being Catholics is no more odd to me than Greeks being Eastern Orthodox or Pakistanis being Muslim.

I think one factor that is involved is the fact that English Catholicism, in my experience, generally seems to be a religion of intellectuals and the upper classes. The other day, for example, I mentioned on another thread that the personnel of the Latin Mass Society reads like a checklist of British snobberies. Its chairman is the Hon Joseph Shaw, an Oxford don and youngest son of the 3rd Baron Craigmyle. Its patrons are Thomas Pink, a professor of philosophy at King’s College London and former merchant banker; the composer Sir James MacMillan; the newly ennobled Lord Moore of Etchingham; Lord Gill, a former Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General; and Sir Adrian FitzGerald, 6th baronet and 24th knight of Kerry, a former mayor of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Moore and Fitzgerald are also honorary vice presidents of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham along with Fra’ Matthew Festing (the former prince and grand master of the Order of Malta), the duke of Norfolk, duchess of Somerset, and countess of Oxford and Asquith, Lord Nicholas Windsor, the former Tory Cabinet minister John Gummer, now known as The Lord Deben, Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth, 9th baronet, and the bizarrely named “Squire de Lisle”, which I am sure is not even a real title.

English Catholicism seems to be under the influence of an elite who were educated at schools like Ampleforth, Downside, Worth, St Benedict’s, Stonyhurst, Prior Park, St Mary’s Ascot, etc. Many seem to be members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and/or the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George.

I think the Reformation and the subsequent persecutions also continue to loom large in the popular perception of Catholicism in England and, to some extent, in the ways in which English Catholics perhaps perceive themselves. There is very much still a devotion to the martyrs of England and Wales, and there is still a fascination (on both sides) with how the Catholic Church survived in England during those decades, e.g. priest holes (again, an upper-class phenomenon).

It would be interesting to know what proportion of Catholics in England would identify as “English” (converts and the descendants of recusants) and what proportion would identify as Irish, Polish, Italian, etc.
 
The problem with established churches is that they inevitably become a branch of the government. The Catholic Church has more resistance against this due to the priests ultimately answering to the Pope who exists outside of the State, but there’s still that tug-of-war with the government. Protestant National Churches meanwhile have no such protection because their head is usually also the head of the government - that’s why, no matter how hedonistic or sinful Henry VIII got, the Church of England never criticized him.

I think the disillusionment that resulted from this is why a lot of the European Nations with national churches also have low religiosity.
 
I can see that being the case with Henry VIII. I’m not sure that it’s true more recently.

Edward VIII was forced to abdicate because of his intention to marry a divorced woman. The Church of England could not stop him from marrying her, but it did insist that if he did so, he could not longer remain as king. The Anglican priest who performed the ceremony, Robert Anderson Jardine, lost his position in the Church of England.

Princess Margaret was also prevented from marrying a divorced man. One possible way around this was for her to marry in the Church of Scotland, which permitted remarriage long before the Church of England did, and which is only the national church, not the established church, and does not have the monarch as its head.
 
BornInMarch said:
The problem with established churches is that they inevitably become a branch of the government.
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Not inevitable, I think. The Church of England has not become a branch of the government, and has not been lax in criticising government policies.
BornInMarch said:
Protestant National Churches meanwhile have no such protection because their head is usually also the head of the government
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Not the case with the CofE, where the supreme governor is the head of State, not the head of Government.
  • that’s why, no matter how hedonistic or sinful Henry VIII got, the Church of England never criticized him.
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I think the Church was reluctant to criticise Henry in main because even bishops don’t like to be executed. And independence from Rome didn’t bring that about: see Cardinal Wolsey, arrested for treason before the break with Rome.
 
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Also in the case of my home state of Maryland, it was established as a safe haven for Catholics by Lord Baltimore and others, only to become overridden with Protestants from neighboring colony Virginia who quickly set about persecuting the Maryland Catholics once their numbers were large enough to do so.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
When the US started out, some of the states had churches that were established in that state, with extremely unpleasant results,
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To be clear, though, multiple states still had state churches well after the Fourteenth Amendment . . . a national state church is barred by the first amendment, but the Founding Fathers as a group would be shocked by the notion that the Establishment Clause barred generic support of generic monotheism or generic Christianity. It was about neutrality between the Christian sects.

Also, the “wall between church and state” was not mainstream. Rather, it’s from a letter by Jefferson–who single-handedly compromised the lunatic fringe on church-state issues . . .
 
In the UK the establishment of the Church of England leads to having clerics sitting in the legislature. They have limited power but it is plainly undemocratic and oppressive of those of other beliefs, or of no belief.
 
PickyPicky said:
The Church of England has not become a branch of the government, and has not been lax in criticising government policies.
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Indeed. Lest anyone think that the Church of England is afraid to criticise the government:






Within recent memory, Archbishop Runcie was of course the most famous critic of the government of the day:

PickyPicky said:
Not the case with the CofE, where the supreme governor is the head of State, not the head of Government.
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A very good point. I am not sure where @BornInMarch is from, but I think people from outside the Commonwealth realms often fail to understand that although virtually all of our public institutions operate under the authority of the monarch, they are nonetheless independent of each other. I think something that is particularly confusing for Americans is the way in which we use the term “government” to mean only the ministers of the Crown, thus excluding Parliament and the courts from the meaning of the term.
 
FiveLinden said:
In the UK the establishment of the Church of England leads to having clerics sitting in the legislature. They have limited power but it is plainly undemocratic and oppressive of those of other beliefs, or of no belief.
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26 out of over 1000 peers is hardly oppressive.
Don’t worry. There’s no real difference between the Church of England bishops and the National Secular Society except for tone of language and vocabulary.
Also, the House of Lords can’t block supply bills. The best they can do with non-supply bills is to delay and amend. The latter would also require approval of the Commons if I’m not mistaken.
 
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dochawk said:
generic monotheism or generic Christianity.
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What is “generic” monotheism or “generic” Christianity" supposed to mean? There was never any such thing, particularly at the time of the American Revolution. At least any that would have included Roman Catholicism (except perhaps to a few enlightened deists).

And why any Catholic would not be eternally grateful for the Wall of Separation" interpretation is totally beyond me, as we Catholics were by far the main beneficiary. The mainstream Protestant culture was quite hostile to Catholics, and even in the early sixties, it was still A-OK to include a clause in the deed when one sold a home binding the buyer not to sell to Blacks, Catholics and Jews.

Catholics had a hard time gaining equality in the States, and without the “Wall of Separation” interpretation, it would have taken them much longer,
 
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