The position of the Church of England ‘by law established’ within the realm of England is delicately balanced. At the time of the Reformation, the key to the break with Rome was the rejection of the jurisdiction of the pope. This was achieved by the Act of Supremacy (1534), which was passed by Parliament on the initiative of the king. Other major Acts, such as the Act of Uniformity (1559) at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, which introduced a revised form of the Book of Common Prayer, were of similar importance. The key is that these and other Acts, which engineered the severance of the Church of England from the jurisdiction of Rome, the establishment of the monarch as ‘supreme governor’ of the Church of England and the Book of Common Prayer as a doctrinal standard for the Church, were all introduced by Act of Parliament. After the Civil War and the period of the Commonwealth, at the time of the restoration of the monarchy, the legal basis of the Church of England was revisited and made very clear. It was Parliament that passed a new Act of Uniformity, enshrining in law the place of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer within the Church of England. It was confirmed that the Church of England was ‘by law established’, that the monarch was its ‘supreme governor’ and that major changes in the life and doctrine of the Church have to have the authority of Parliament. It could be said that the Church of England is a ‘Constantinian church writ small’.

From 1970, the governance of the Church of England has been entrusted to a synodical system in which bishops, clergy and laity can interact. New legislative proposals (or ‘measures’) must have the support of all three houses of the General Synod – laity, clergy and bishops – before being submitted to the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament. The Ecclesiastical Committee has the power to recommend acceptance or refusal by Parliament, but not to amend proposed legislation. This is light-touch sovereignty, but it is sovereignty. This is how the delicate balance in state–Church relations – which the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill currently before Parliament threatens to disturb – is now maintained. Before I come to the situation we are in today, though, I wish to sketch three different approaches to the state–Church balance, all of which are relevant to the situation in which we find ourselves and which I shall discuss at the end of this lecture.

The first is that of Richard Hooker. Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is concerned not so much with state–Church relations as a whole but with the governance (or polity) of the Church.Footnote ² Hooker is at pains to demonstrate the rationale for a Church of England, with its Articles, its bishops and its Book of Common Prayer. He wishes to show that the Church of England is authentically Christian, but neither papist nor Calvinist. In so doing, he illuminates what, in his opinion, binds the Church of England to the polity of England as a whole, what makes it an inalienable part of the commonwealth that is England. The role of the monarch in ruling over state and Church as one united commonwealth is, of course, vital, but even more important for Hooker is a structure of laws to which all members of the commonwealth, including the monarch, are accountable. Hooker explores the nature of laws in general, beginning with the rational nature of God and its reflection in the ‘natural law’ that we can discern in creation. God's laws are rational and they make for an ordered universe. The world of nature and the human, social, political world are both grounded in the rational system of laws that God has made known for human good. It is the role of civil and ecclesiastical legislators to add to the sum of good laws for the governance of the state and the Church. It is the role of theologians such as Hooker to illuminate the underlying complementarity in the governance of state and Church.Footnote ³

When William Warburton wrote The Alliance between Church and State, which was published in 1736, he was breaking new ground. His approach was utterly different from that of Hooker. His aim, he said, was to argue for ‘the necessity and equity of an established religion from the essence and end of civil society, upon the fundamental principles of the law of nature and nations’.Footnote ⁴ He begins, not, like Hooker, with the nature of God, but with the nature of ‘civil society’, the state. He argues that nations, which exist to care for bodies, have a need for the support of an established religion (which exists to care for souls) and that religions, which have no power to defend their own interests, need to avail themselves of the power exercised by the authorities of civil society. The relationship between the two can be understood in contractual terms: they co-exist in a fruitful alliance even though their ultimate aims and goals differ:

What he is giving is a pragmatic defence of the status quo, presented with Panglossian optimism. He does not explore how the care of an established Church might extend ‘to bodies’, nor how the Church might be creatively critical of the state.

Nearly a hundred years later, in 1830, Coleridge published On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each. He was implicitly critical of both Hooker and Warburton. For him the ‘idea’ was: ‘that conception of a thing … which is given by the knowledge of its ultimate aim’.Footnote ⁶ The notion that the British state might have some discernible ‘ultimate aim’ is almost laughable, but his meaning becomes clearer when he goes on to describe the ‘idea’ as ‘a principle, existing … in the minds and the consciences of the persons, whose duties it prescribes, and whose rights it determines’. Coleridge scoffs at the Warburtonian notion that this ‘idea’ might be the product of some originating social contract:

The ‘ever-originating social contract’ – that is to say the things that in ever-renewed ways bind people together to constitute one social body or ‘organic whole’ – is what Coleridge goes on to explore. The key social group for binding people together is what he calls the ‘national church’, which exists ‘to form and train up the people of the country to obedient, free, useful, organizable subjects, citizens, and patriots, living to the benefit of the state, and prepared to die for its defence’.Footnote ⁸ This is the ‘national church’ or the ‘clerisy’, the educated and the educators within the state, who in England happen to be Christian and probably, but not necessarily, members of the Church of England.Footnote ⁹

Only when he has discussed, as part of the ‘idea’ of the state, what he calls the ‘national church’ does Coleridge turn to ‘The Idea of the Christian Church’. In one short chapter he identifies four characteristics of the Christian Church.Footnote ¹⁰ First, it ‘is no state, kingdom, or realm of this world; … but it is the appointed Opposite to them all collectively – the sustaining, correcting, befriending Opposite of the world’. Coleridge thus raised the startling and novel possibility that the Church might sustain the state (inasmuch as the state represents ‘the world’) by correcting it; the Church might befriend the state precisely by opposition. Though, secondly, the Christian Church is not in itself a state or realm, Coleridge insists on its visibility: it is ‘an institution consisting of visible and public communities’. Nevertheless, as a third characteristic, it has no ‘local or personal centre of unity … any single source of universal power’. The source of its unity and power, which is expressed and experienced in each of its local realisations, is its ‘one invisible Head’, Christ. Hence the fourth characteristic: the catholicity, or universality, of the Christian Church:

At this point Coleridge draws close to Hooker, for he sees that the ‘idea’ of the Church transcends the ‘idea’ of the state, that the generative power of the national Church – in England, the Church ‘of England’ – comes from other, transcendent sources (which Hooker identifies as ‘the laws of God’). This is what gives a national Church such as the Church of England the potential to be, at an earthly, political level a ‘sustaining, correcting, befriending opposite’ within the state.

So far, then, we have seen three very different conceptions of the relation of state and Church: Hooker's conception of complementarity within one commonwealth based on a shared structure of laws; Warburton's conception of a mutually beneficial contract between two entities that need the ‘alliance’ each offers to the other; and Coleridge's conception of a national Church, for whom the default position is that of loyal educators within the state, but which contains the potential to function as the ‘sustaining, correcting, befriending opposite’ of the state. I want now to turn to recent events that have put the relation of state and Church in the UK today to the test.

In December 2012, the Government announced, after public consultation, that it would be bringing in legislation to permit same-sex marriage. During the consultation period, the Church of England had made its opposition clear.Footnote ¹¹ The Government having announced its intention to proceed, it was left to Maria Miller, the Equalities Minister, to give more detail of their response to the Church of England's objections, and specifically to the fear that the clergy of the Church of England (and Wales) would, because of their status as registrars for marriages, be required by European equality legislation to officiate at ‘gay weddings’. To allay such fears, Ms Miller announced that there would be a ‘quadruple lock’ – the ‘quadruple lock’ of my title. She announced that: the planned legislation would state explicitly that no religious organisation – or minister – could be forced to marry same-sex couples; it would make it unlawful for ceremonies to be staged unless the faith groups conducting them had expressly chosen to do so; the Equality Act would be amended to ensure discrimination claims could not be brought against individuals or organisations that would not marry homosexuals; the legislation would specify that it will be illegal for the Church of England or Church in Wales to stage same-sex wedding ceremonies. So, a new law would have to be passed if the Church of England changed its stance.Footnote ¹²

The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act received Royal Assent on 17 July 2013. It amended the Marriage Act (1949) and other legislation so that it applies to same-sex couples. Nowhere is marriage defined, nor are limits set to marriage. It is simply presumed that the understanding of marriage current in UK law (the classic definition is ‘the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others’Footnote ¹³) can be extended to include same-sex couples. It seems to have been drafted in haste as it leaves a number of unanswered questions – for instance, about affinityFootnote ¹⁴ – but the real question I want to discuss is its likely impact on state–Church relations in the twenty-first century.

The explanatory notes to the Bill provided a reminder that under the Submission of the Clergy Act 1533, canon law cannot be contrary to general law.Footnote ¹⁵ In particular, Canon B 30, paragraph 1, states that ‘The Church of England affirms, according to our Lord's teaching, that marriage is in its nature a union permanent and lifelong, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man with one woman.’

The effect of the Act will be to open a gap between the understanding of marriage in English law and the teaching of the Church of England. It is the intention of the Government to bridge that gap by providing specific exemption from this new legislation for the Church of England and other religious bodies that are opposed to gay marriage. This is the point of the ‘quadruple lock’: to ensure that no religious body or religious minister is compelled to officiate at a ceremony to which they are conscientiously opposed, to ensure that such ceremonies are conducted with permission from the competent authorities, to ensure that those who conduct them are not vulnerable to prosecution under equality legislationFootnote ¹⁶ and, in the case of the Church of England, to confirm the illegality of any attempt at a ‘gay wedding’ without a ‘measure’ that has come from the General Synod and been recommended by the Ecclesiastical Committee for approval by Parliament.Footnote ¹⁷

What is going to happen? The Church of England will not in the foreseeable future change its position. The theological roots of the traditional understanding of marriage as between a man and a woman lie too deep. If the Church did change its position, it would be extraordinary for it to give approval to liturgies for same-sex marriage without discontinuing the use of liturgies which exclude it. If a consensus did emerge in the Church of England in favour of same-sex marriage, the Book of Common Prayer Service of Holy Matrimony would have to be edited or its use discontinued and the Table of Kindred and Affinity removed. This in itself would require amendment of the Act of Uniformity. The Marriage Service in Common Worship would have to be rewritten. The legislation required would be far more than a one-line measure.

The government does not want to pick a fight with the Church. It is therefore creating a sort of ‘ecclesiastical game park’ in which those with views it no longer accepts can hold them in circumscribed safety. This is to respect the establishment precisely from a pragmatic, Warburtonian perspective: the state needs the goodwill of the Church and the Church needs the protection of the state. The notion that the Church could on this and other issues be prophetic – the ‘sustaining, correcting, befriending opposite’ of the state – is excluded. There will be those from within the Church of England who argue that the way to break out of the ‘game park’ is disestablishment.

My argument is that the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 points to an increasingly Warburtonian, superficial, pragmatic understanding of the alliance between state and Church, which can all too easily be pulled apart. The Coleridgean notion of the Church as potentially the ‘sustaining, correcting, befriending opposite’ of the state, is excluded. So, then, is any approach indebted to Hooker which argues that the view of the Church and the view of the state on marriage should be based on a common, transcendent understanding of natural law. If Parliament, by its pragmatic redefinition of ‘marriage’, effectively privatises the traditional understanding – and the establishment of the Church of England survives – we shall have to say ‘We are all Warburtonians now’. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the ‘quadruple lock’ marks a significant step on the road to the disestablishment of the Church of England.