The UK is one of the last western democracies with a state religion: the Church of England.
The Church's entanglement with the state is bad for both.
Join our campaign to disestablish the Church.
CAMPAIGN ALERT: Support the disestablishment bill
In November 2023, a private member's bill to disestablish the Church of England was selected in the ballot.
Please write to your MP and urge them to support this bill, to make the UK are more equitable and democratic country for people of all religions and beliefs.
Since our founding in 1866, one of our primary objectives has been disestablishment of the Church of England: its formal separation from the state.
More than 150 years later, census figures show most people in England and Wales are not Christian. Surveys consistently reveal a similar picture in Scotland. The case for disestablishment has never been stronger.
Disestablishment means the Church would no longer have privileged input into government - but also that government could not involve itself in the running of the Church. Both sides would gain autonomy. This is why support for Church-state separation can be found within the CofE itself.
There have been many proponents, religious and non-religious, for church-state separation, and there are a wide variety of motivations for supporting this reform.
The existence of a legally-enshrined national religion privileges one part of the population, one institution and one set of beliefs. Removing all symbolic and institutional ties between government and religion is the only way to ensure equal treatment to citizens of all religions and none.
The Church of England has enjoyed significant privileges relating its established status for many centuries. These privileges have remained largely unchanged despite the massive and continuing reduction in support for the Church in the UK. It is highly likely that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future, making the Church of England's continuation as the established church unsustainable.
- Christians are a minority in Britain. In Wales and Scotland the majority have no religion.
- Just 1% of 18-24 year olds say they belong to the Church of England.
- Less than 1% of the population regularly attend Church of England church services.
The Church of England is also out of step with the UK public on several key issues: it remains opposed to same-sex relationships and allows parishes to reject women as bishops and priests. These discriminatory positions cannot be reconciled with the Church's status as part of the UK state.
And no institution with the shameful historical record of the Church of England safeguarding and abuse should retain its privileged role in the British establishment.
The existence of a legally enshrined national religion privileges one part of the population, one institution and one set of beliefs. Removing all symbolic and institutional ties between government and religion is the only way to ensure equal treatment of citizens of all religions and none.
Take action!
1. Write to your MP
Ask your MP to support the separation of church and state
2. Share your story
Tell us why you support this campaign, and how you are personally affected by the issue. You can also let us know if you would like assistance with a particular issue.
3. Join the National Secular Society
Become a member of the National Secular Society today! Together, we can separate religion and state for greater freedom and fairness.
Latest updates
Norway continues the long process of disestablishing the Lutheran Church
Posted: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:07
Major steps toward the disestablishment of Norway's state church, the (Lutheran) Church of Norway, were passed by the government on March 16 in its weekly session with King Harald V.
Expected to be adopted by the Parliament (Storting) in May or June this year, the proposals will make changes in the country's constitution as well as in other church legislation, the Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs announced.
"I hope we have now prepared a good basis for the Church of Norway to be an open and inclusive national church, also in a multicultural and multi-religious setting," Minister Rigmor Aasrud (Labour Party), said in a news release.
The Constitution will after this no longer prescribe that "the Evangelical Lutheran religion should remain the state's public religion," but only that the state's basis will be "our Christian and Humanist heritage," the Ministry said.
The appointment of bishops will be transferred from the King (Government) to the Church of Norway National Council, and the appointment of cathedral and district deans to the diocesan councils. Also, the government minister of church affairs and central civil servants handling such matters will no longer be required to beChurchofNorwaymembers.
"This is a necessary and most welcome step on the road to a more independent church," Churchof Norway National Councilmoderator Svein Arne Lindoe told the Vaart Land daily.
"We are happy that the government is now following up the 2008 political agreement on the future relationship between state and church, by proposing legal changes that will make it possible for the Church of Norwayitself to appoint its leaders," Lindoe said.
Even after the proposed changes have been passed by the Storting, Church of Norway bishops, deans and priests will continue to be employed by the state. And although the king's role as "summus episcopus" ("highest bishop") — a title created by the Lutheran Reformation in Denmark-Norway in the 16th century — will be gone, the constitution will prescribe that the king "shall continue to profess the Evangelical Lutheran religion." This is in accordance with the wish of the present king.
Since the early 20th century, theChurchofNorwayhas seen several rounds of deregulation of the state church status that came out of the Lutheran Reformation. Local parish councils were introduced in the 1920's, regional diocesan councils in 1933, a national council in 1969 and a general synod in 1984.
Among tasks already delegated from state to church bodies, are the appointment of vicars and other parish priests (to the diocesan councils in the 1980's) and the authority to decide liturgical and doctrinal matters (to the General Synod in the 1990's).
Terry Sanderson commented: "it is a sign of how backward and blinkered our own politicians are over church establishment. The Government is almost certainly not going to remove the bench of (currently 26) bishops in its latest reform proposals of the House of Lords, despite the Westminster parliament being the only one left in the world with such a medieval arrangement. It still defers to the Church of England over any moves to disestablishment, leading to an uncomfortable answer to the question by those claiming we live in a parliamentary democracy: "is Parliament the final arbiter on constitutional questions, or is it the Church?"
Church of England proposes large-scale expansion of its influence in education
Posted: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:14
The Church School of the Future, a 39-page report compiled by Dr Priscilla Chadwick for the Church of England, says that it intends to expand the number of Church schools and intensify the religious input into lessons. The Chadwick report calls for a new "concordat" between the Church and the Government that will "reinforce and enhance" the Church's influence throughout the education system.
The Church says that schools "stand at the centre of its mission" and that they enable "more direct engagement with children and their families than any other contact including Sunday worship". It says that schools "must include a wholehearted commitment to putting faith and spiritual development at the heart of the curriculum and ensuring that the Christian ethos permeates the whole educational experience."
The report says that "religious education and collective worship should continue to make major contributions to the Church school's Christian ethos to allow pupils to engage seriously with and develop an understanding of the person and teachings of Jesus Christ."
Church schools, it says, should be enabling children "to flourish in their potential as a child of God" and this is "a sign and expression of the Kingdom that is at the heart of the Church's distinctive mission."
The report makes clear that the Church intends to use its schools as a platform to evangelise throughout the community. In effect, it intends to make state schools into evangelical bases to promote the Church's message to people who would otherwise never choose to have anything to do with it. It says: "New approaches are needed to ensure that the Church's mission is more widely known through schools and is fully understood."
The reports says that partnership between the school and the local church will be strengthened, with a new intention to train clergy to ensure they can make maximum impact in schools. There is also a call to ensure teachers and heads are on board with the Christian message.
Talking to the Times Educational Supplement, the Bishop of Oxford, John Pritchard, who chairs the CofE national board of education, said:
"We need to point to the roots of our values, that they lie in our Christian faith, and that the life, death and new life of Jesus Christ is a touchstone for us. We want to mandate schools to be much clearer on their Christian identity."
But Revd Janina Ainsworth, the CofE's chief education officer, said there was "no contradiction" in promoting deeper study of Christianity even if schools took fewer religious children. She told the TES:
"What we are particularly concerned about at the moment is the quality of teaching about Christianity. Every child is entitled to have that kind of profound engagement with Christianity and to learn more about Christianity than other religions because of its role in the history of the country."
Revd Ainsworth said that learning about Christianity would help children with their spiritual development and denied it was a way "to turn out good, church-going children".
Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, said:
"The report reads like a hard line evangelical tract. State schools should be for teaching, not preaching, far less religious brainwashing on a hitherto unheard of scale of captive children attending their local, state funded school. This is an abuse of the children and a gross misuse of public money.
"Before deciding whether to acceded to the Church's demands, the Government should ponder the following key information omitted from the report: church attendance by the under 19 year olds has dropped by two thirds in the last twenty years and will fall by a further two thirds in the next fifteen years - and that little over 1% of the population attend an Anglican church on a normal Sunday – and they are ageing fast. These figures indicate that the Church of England should be having power taken away from it, rather than its demands for yet more power and privilege being acceded to.
"Above all," said Mr Porteous Wood, "religious schools should be shorn of their ability to cherry pick pupils to the detriment of adjacent community schools."
