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Seeing the new title of King Charles’ wife, the queen consort, on Queen Elizabeth’s death has left me a surprised and befuddled American. I would love to hear about the Church of England’s role in modern British public life from those who know about it.
The Backstory
As a child I was taught in school that King Henry VIII founded the Church of England because he wanted a divorce from his wife, which Roman Catholic doctrine would not allow. But this is misleading. What Henry sought from the pope was in modern terms an annulment; Henry’s wife Catherine was the Holy Roman Emperor’s aunt, and the pope’s political and military situation was precarious, so the pope stalled. This led Henry to claim supremacy over the church and get the English clergy to grant his annulment. The Church of England still regarded divorce per se, dissolving the valid marriage of two living spouses, to be impossible.
Fast-forward four hundred years to 1936. The new King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom proposed to marry Wallis Simpson, an American in the process of divorcing her second husband. The prime ministers of the Commonwealth realms were not prepared to accept a disreputable queen, and publicly flouting the church of which Edward was in principle the head threatened to create a constitutional crisis. He decided to give up his throne and his responsibilities to marry her anyway. His brother became King George VI, and George’s daughter Elizabeth became the heiress presumptive.
Prince Charles’ Reprise
In 2002 the Church of England decided to allow the divorced to remarry in church – depending on the circumstances and the pastor. In other cases it may be possible to have a church blessing service after a civil wedding.
This is what Charles, Prince of Wales, did when he married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. His ex-wife having died, his divorce was presumably no impediment to the marriage, but her ex-husband was still living. Neither of his parents attended the civil wedding, though they did attend the blessing afterward. Queen Elizabeth acknowledged the awkwardness by announcing that Camilla was to be known as Duchess of Cornwall rather than Princess of Wales while Elizabeth lived and as princess consort rather than queen afterward.
The constitutionality of this decision was disputed, and it wasn’t clear whether Charles would follow his mother’s wishes once he was king. So I was surprised when, on Queen Elizabeth’s death, references to Camilla as queen consort occasioned no commentary. It turns out that in February Elizabeth changed her mind and spared Charles the trouble.
What does this imply about the Church of England?
It’s nothing new for the powerful or influential to demand that Christian churches capitulate, and it’s hardly unprecedented for unprincipled pastors to grant those demands. It may be that Elizabeth’s piety and Charles’ sense of duty were the only things that kept him from a church wedding in the first place. But I can’t escape the impression that the Church of England has ceased to be a legitimacy-granting institution beholden to God, at least in principle, and has come to have its own legitimacy judged by how well it follows the Zeitgeist.
Representatives of the Church of England’s laity narrowly turned down a measure in 2012 that would have allowed women to become bishops; some of those voting against the measure were conservatives who opposed the change and some were progressives who thought the measure didn’t take a hard enough line against the conservatives. (The change went through in 2014.) The Archbishop of Canterbury said at the time:
Where does all this leave the Church of England? I’m interested in insights from anyone who has them, but I would particularly love to hear the perspectives of English Anglicans and other members of state churches.
Oh, this is nothing new. Go back to the 1927 controversy over the Book of Common Prayer; the Church of England wanted to make changes to the liturgical forms of service, updating and revising the 1662 version. Parliament said "nope". The CoE said "But we have the right to decide our own prayers", tried a second time, Parliament again said "nope".
Chesterton wrote an essay about it:
It wasn't until the 1960s that they eventually got a book of Alternative Services through, though the original 1662 and the proposed 1928 versions can be used on an individual basis in dioceses at the bishop's discretion (as I understand it).
So Parliament has the last word over any changes, and if Parliament says "okay, divorce is fine", then the CoE has to catch up somehow. Now that divorce is legal, they can't do anything about that. They can refuse to have church services for the divorced who remarry when their former spouse is still alive, but that gets painted as being cruel and inhuman etc. so they have to make some shift about allowing blessings not marriages. Same with gay marriage and so on.
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You forgot to mention Princess Margaret and her own romantic entanglement, where she was in love with, and received a proposal of marriage from, a man who was divorced. There was an entire scandal over this, with public opinion (or at least, public opinion as the press expressed it) divided; most disapproved, but some said 'why not?' The big sticking point was the abdication crisis of her uncle, which is how her father came to the throne,and which was still exerting a lot of influence over political considerations,
Divorce was still faintly scandalous even up to the 60s. Margaret eventually had to publicly announce that she was breaking it off with her boyfriend:
Now, with regard to Camilla, it's not so much the Church of England (which has always been lagging behind society as customs change and it tries to hold the line on doctrine, while giving in on social changes due to 'pastoral sympathies'). Because it's a state church, the government can have the final say in what doctrines it does and does not get to legally enforce.
The kerfuffle around Camilla ad what title she would get was not about the Church of England disapproving of divorce; it was due to the Diana Factor. She was seen as the home-wrecker who had destroyed the fairy-tale marriage. She was The Other Woman, and Diana up to the divorce made hay of that: the (in)famous "three of us in this marriage" interview with Martin Bashir. All of this was very publicly played out in the media, with leaks, phone taps and the like being tabloid fodder.
And then Diana's death in that car crash put the final kibosh on matters. Had she lived on for years, while the temperature cooled about the marriage and divorce and all the rest of it, then things would have been easier. But at the height of the hysteria over the Princess of Hearts, even the Queen was coming under pressure for not being sufficiently supportive of her. So Camilla had to be shoved into the background, and any speculation about Charles as King has to downplay that Camilla would be Queen, not Diana. You can even see that in how she was referred to as the Duchess of Cornwall, not Princess of Wales, even after Diana's death. In fact, to cool down the excessive public heat about Diana being "denied" her rightful title, and the perception that the public would never ever accept Camilla as queen instead of Diana, the issued an announcement when Charles and Camilla got married that she wouldn't be queen, she would be princess consort:
A lot of tact and hard work went into rehabilitating her image, including work by the royals. And now it has been years since Diana died, Camilla was step-by-step integrated into the Royal Family, she gets on well with her stepsons, and now she will be Queen Consort, her proper title. She is not Queen in her own right as a reigning monarch, and she is not mother of the heir to the throne, so she is Queen by virtue of being married to the King. For the other side, see how Queen Elizabeth's husband was the Duke of Edinburgh (not King Consort) and the husband of Queen Victoria was Prince Consort (not King Consort, though she wished to create that title for him, but it was strongly resisted by the politicians).
The bit about "the queen's wishes" may seem like the usual boilerplate, but it is absolutely essential to smooth the transfer of power and for Camilla to use the title of Queen:
If you are a Loyal Subject, you can't disregard the intentions (politely phrased as a wish) of the queen as to what she wants done.
I hadn't realized the impact of Diana's popularity! That makes a lot of sense, silly as it seems to me.
That's adorable! I didn't know she had wanted to call him king consort. Royal marriages do run the gamut from the sordid to the sweet.
Victoria and Albert really do seem to have been a love match, she was besotted with him. But since the title of "king" generally meant "ruler" and not "husband of queen", there was historically a lot of reluctance to give this title to someone who married the female monarch, particularly in the days when the husband ruled the wife. They didn't want to hand over rule of the country to a foreign prince (that was a big part of the problem for Elizabeth I - how could she marry a foreign prince who wouldn't demand to be at least co-ruler, and if she married a commoner who was her subject, that wouldn't do either). It was also part of the travails of Mary, Queen of Scots; her second husband eventually grew impatient with just being a consort and demanded to be co-ruler (and he eventually ended up murdered for his troubles):
I'm old enough to remember the hysteria around Diana's death and funeral, and there really were some elements whipping up anti-royal sentiment and even criticising the queen for not being publicly emotional enough in her grief. Saying that Camilla (the wicked Other Woman who had made Diana's marriage suffer) would be Queen and not Diana would really have lit a fire. So to manage public sentiment, the statements about "Duchess of Cornwall not Princess of Wales" and "Princess Consort not Queen" were issued.
Yes, I see avoiding the implication that he ruled jure uxoris. That said, what would have been the implications if he had become co-ruler? It's hard for me to see how Britain would have been worse off for giving Albert or Philip more influence.
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The Church of England is dying and irrelevant as a cultural force. Attendance numbers have been declining steadily since the 90s:
https://faithsurvey.co.uk/uk-christianity.html*
http://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/church-attendance-in-britain-1980-2015/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/07/church-in-crisis-as-only-2-of-young-adults-identify-as-c-of-e
in particular, the takeup among the young is shockingly low, and those people are your future worshippers.
Whatever cultural steps it tries to make are one or two years behind the current liberal consesus. OP brings up the rejection of women bishops: more recently, the Church said that they could not define precisely what a woman was: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11000401/Church-England-woman-decide.html, which rather raises the question of not quite knowing what something is, but whatever it is it can't gain rank in the organisation. I would put money on it not existing in half a century from now.
*Interestingly, those demoninations that are growing in number are those that actively reject established churches such as the CoFE and the Catholic Church. These churches tend to believe in some whacky things, and in some things that are incompatible with western thought. As these people are one of the few groups having children and forming any sense of cohesive community, they may be powerful players in the politics of the future.
If someone can tell me how tf you do links as you could on old reddit, that would be highly appreciated.
[square brackets for the text] (parens for the link)
remove the space between them like so
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I've occasionally remarked that the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (a church where I, unlike still the majority of the Finns, don't belong to, and never have; I'm Orthodox) is less an Evangelical Lutheran Church than it is the Church of Finland; an institution meant to offer a sort of an acceptably milquetoast spiritual backdrop to Finnishness, a certain amount of ritualism (weddings, funerals, certain national happenings etc.) for those who desire it, and also not to rock the boat too much to any direction, whether conservative or liberal - while at the same time doing a balancing act between its conservative and liberal wings and impulses to keep them all aboard, so as to, indeed, continue to function as the Church of Finland.
Church of England seems exactly like that, but even moreso. It offers a spiritual backdrop to Englishness, including to monarch-related rituals; when the needs of those monarchy-related rituals demand CoE to accomodate, its specific mission is to do so. Church of Finland has to grapple with conservative and liberal interpretations of Lutheranism, but CoE has to at least theoretically fit in people from Anglo-Catholicism to very unique forms of Protestantism.
Of course, the function of the churches is supposed to be more than just be a spiritual coating for civic nationalism, which explains why churches that are that are continually suffering, losing membership and becoming less and less relevant.
Out of curiosity, are you perhaps in KRL/Leitourgia. Orthodox Finns are rare and even rarer online I'd imagine so I'm wondering if you're who I think you are.
No, I don't know what that is.
Couple of smaller Orthodox Discord communities outside of the typical Orthobro sphere of autism. For some reason there are multiple Orthodox Finnish people there so I assumed you were one of them haha.
Interesting, but I'm not a part of any communities apart from fully local ones. I rather consciously try to stay away from the general online Orthodoxy, for reasons that you probably can very well understand. Of course it's possible I might know some of them if they live in the same parish as I do.
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There seems to be many signs of this, such as the rise of Black Liberation Theology in the church:
Of course this kind of capitulation to the zeitgeist goes back further such as 1994 when they disobeyed the instructions of Saint Paul and started ordaining women as priests. Going further back, in 1928 the Church of England started phasing out the marriage vow for the wife to "obey", which seems like it was floating with the Zeitgeist of first-wave feminism. Over the past two centuries there seems to have been a steady stream of English who were very serious about their religion converting from Anglican to Catholicism, a sign that there was a feeling that Anglicanism was somehow less legitimate (eg, John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton). Or course Catholicism is suffering from its own problems of being converged by the Zeitgeist.
And Catholicism suffering from its own problems of being converged by the Zeitgeist would be, itself, an interesting top level post with some important recent happenings that I'm (vaguely)working on, but for a variety of reasons has less institutional ability to adopt the zeitgeist and less willingness to do so.
I look forward to reading your post. I hope you are right.
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I would distinguish pressure to conform to the culture, which all churches experience, from conformance as a source of legitimacy. Women’s ordination sure does look like the latter, though. I don’t know the terms of the debate over the word obey, but I would be interested to learn them; I recall reading Legg’s work at one point, and he writes largely in terms of precedent.
I am pretty sure that the Anglo-Catholics (whether they remained Anglicans or swam the Tiber) made their arguments against their low church brethren in other terms than conformity.
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