Establishment today rarely means what it did in earlier centuries, when an established church could enjoy a formal monopoly on public worship and civic office was restricted to its members, since most contemporary states with an established church also constitutionally guarantee religious freedom for other faiths and for non belief, producing a hybrid arrangement, formal state recognition of one religion alongside legal protection for all others, that differs sharply from full theocracy on one side and strict separation of church and state on the other.
Disestablishment, the formal removal of a church's established status, has happened repeatedly across the modern period, including the Church of Ireland in 1871, the Church in Wales in 1920, and Sweden's Lutheran church in 2000, generally reflecting a country's judgment that formal establishment no longer matched its religious diversity or its citizens' expectations of state neutrality. The practical consequences of establishment vary enormously by country, from largely ceremonial roles, a monarch's coronation performed by an archbishop, to substantive legal privileges affecting funding, education and family law, so establishment is best treated as a spectrum of arrangements rather than a single fixed constitutional status.