England

Christianity reached England twice over, and the two arrivals had to be reconciled. Augustine landed in Kent in 597 at the head of a mission sent from Rome and worked outward from Canterbury, while monks trained in the Irish tradition came south from Iona into Northumbria at much the same time, carrying a different calculation of Easter and a different monastic discipline. The Synod of Whitby in 664 decided for the Roman reckoning, and Bede, writing at Jarrow in 731, made that decision the spine of the first history of the English church and gave the English a single story about themselves.

The medieval centuries covered the country with cult sites. Canterbury became one of the principal pilgrimage destinations in Europe after the killing of Thomas Becket in his own cathedral in 1170, and Walsingham in Norfolk drew pilgrims to a chapel held to reproduce the house of the Annunciation. Monasteries held a large share of English land and much of its learning.

The break with Rome came from the top rather than from below. Henry VIII's dispute over his marriage produced the Act of Supremacy in 1534, and the dissolution of the monasteries transferred that landed estate to the crown and its buyers within a decade. What followed was a sequence rather than a settlement: reformed prayer books under Edward, a return to Rome under Mary, and the Elizabethan arrangement that kept bishops and cathedrals while adopting reformed doctrine. The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer are what that arrangement left behind, and Anglican churches worldwide still refer to them.

England is one of a very small number of places with a church established by law whose population has largely stopped belonging to it. The Church of England's senior bishops sit in the House of Lords by right, the monarch is its supreme governor, and the coronation remains a religious service conducted by the archbishop of Canterbury with an anointing at its centre. Parish churches carry legal duties toward everyone resident in the parish, whether or not those people attend anything.

Against that stands a change in the returned figures without precedent in the modern period. In the 2021 census for England and Wales, for the first time since the religion question was introduced, fewer than half of respondents described themselves as Christian, and a little over a third recorded no religion. The largest minority faiths, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism, are concentrated in particular cities and boroughs rather than spread evenly, so a national percentage and a local one can differ enormously, and the same census that shows national decline shows dense religious life in specific places.

The distance between the legal position and those figures is the live argument. Defenders of establishment describe it as a civic arrangement that keeps a place for religion in public life rather than a claim about what most people believe. Critics read the same arrangement as a privilege no longer matched by numbers. Disestablishment has been proposed repeatedly and carried out nowhere in England, although it happened in Ireland in 1871 and in Wales in 1920, and both cases are precedents the argument keeps returning to.