An Establishment the Rest of the Communion Does Not Share

Establishment remains a working feature of English public life today in ways most outsiders underestimate: twenty six of the Church of England's most senior bishops sit as Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords with a vote on ordinary legislation, and the appointment of diocesan bishops still formally passes through the Crown, exercised in practice by the Prime Minister's office acting on a name put forward by the church itself, a survival of royal supremacy quite unlike the clean separation of church and state written into the constitutions of many other nations.

No other province of the Anglican Communion carries this arrangement. The Episcopal Church in the United States was fully disestablished from the moment of American independence in 1789 and elects its own bishops without any government role whatsoever. The Church of Ireland was disestablished by Act of Parliament in 1871 and the Church in Wales followed in 1920, both becoming self-governing member churches of the wider Anglican Communion with no remaining state ties, demonstrating that establishment was always a specific English constitutional arrangement rather than an essential feature of Anglican identity as such. Establishment today coexists uneasily with an increasingly secular and religiously plural England, leaving Royal Supremacy less the vehicle of an actually Anglican nation than a constitutional artifact the church and state have not yet chosen to unwind.