Rendering unto Caesar?: The Politics of Church of England Clergy since 1980

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive D. Field
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Degree Of Separation ◽  
Analysis And Synthesis ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Ideal

ABSTRACTThis is the first systematic attempt to chart the evolving political views of contemporary Church of England clergy. The article is based upon a comparative quantitative analysis and synthesis of eighteen national and four local surveys conducted between 1979 and 2004. Ministerial opinions on the state's influence on the Church and the Church's influence on the state are both considered. Ten specific conclusions are drawn. While the clergy generally cling to the concept of an Established Church, they are very critical of some of the traditional manifestations of that establishment. They also mostly think it highly appropriate for the Church to intervene in the world of party politics, and not simply on moral issues. In this they are positioned ahead of the thinking of many of the committed Anglican laity, for whom a degree of separation of religion and politics remains the ideal. The academic, ecclesiastical and political implications of these findings are briefly explored.

Practicing Civility in Two Canadian Congregations

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia Bean
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
Leadership Role ◽  
Opinion Leaders ◽  
Lay Leaders ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Conservative Christian ◽  
American Churches ◽  
The Church

This chapter contrasts the role of opinion leaders in the two Canadian churches. As in both American churches, Canadian lay leaders were expected to model orthodox positions on theology and moral issues, as part of their leadership role. But, unlike in the American churches, this moral conformity was combined with an acceptance of political diversity within the church. Both Canadian churches contained networks of conservative Christian activists who wished to mobilize the congregation around abortion and homosexuality. But politically conservative activists were unable to set the tone for the church's public life, since other prominent members held other political views. As a result, less politically engaged members did not receive clear cues about partisanship from the opinion leaders around them.

ELIZABETHAN PURITANISM AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN POST-MARIAN ENGLAND

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 899-919 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT HARKINS
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Political Controversy ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTThis article presents a new perspective on Elizabethan puritanism. In particular, it examines the ways in which the memory of Marian conformity continued to influence religious and political controversy during the reign of Elizabeth I. Drawing upon extensive archival evidence, it focuses on moments when the chequered pasts of Queen Elizabeth, William Cecil, and other chief officers of English church and state were called into question by puritan critics. In contrast to the prevailing narrative of Elizabethan triumphalism, it argues that late Tudor religion and politics were shaped by lingering puritan distrust of those who had revealed a propensity for idolatry by conforming during the Marian persecution. This fraught history of religious conformity meant that, for some puritans, the Church of England had been built on unstable foundations.

scholarly journals What Does the Liberal-Conservative Scale Measure? A Study among Clergy and Laity in the Church of England

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Village
Keyword(s):  
Rating Scales ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Function Analysis ◽  
Empirical Measure ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scale Measure ◽  
The Church ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes ◽  
Church Tradition

Abstract The Liberal-Conservative (LIBCON) scale is a seven-point semantic differential scale that has been widely used to measure identity within the Church of England. The history of the development of liberalism in the Church of England suggests that this scale should be associated with specific beliefs and attitudes related to doctrine, moral issues and church practices. This study tests this idea among a sample of 9339 lay and ordained readers of the Church Times (the main newspaper of the Church of England) using twelve summated rating scales measuring a range of beliefs and attitudes. Of these twelve variables, eleven were correlated with the LIBCON scale. Discriminant function analysis produced a linear function of these variables that correctly identified 35% of respondents on the scale, and 69% to within one scale score. The best predictors were scales related to either doctrine or moral issues, and these performed consistently across traditions (Anglo-catholic, Broad church or Evangelical) and between clergy and laity. Scales related to church practices suggested ‘conserving tradition’ was also involved in the liberal-conservative dimension, but this was less so for clergy and for Evangelicals. The scale is commended as an empirical measure of one dimension of Church of England identities, especially if used alongside a parallel scale measuring church tradition.

Hobbes’s Erastianism and Interpretation

2021 ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
A.P. Martinich
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter is a response to Jeffrey Collins, who maintains that Hobbes was Erastian and promoted Independency and irreligious views. The author agrees that Hobbes was an Erastian; the Act of Supremacy made Erastianism law. Hobbes’s support for Independency was hedged at best. Some of his other views are original and non-standard but not intended to be irreligious. The author shows that Collins sometimes omits crucial evidence or draws the wrong inference from the evidence. Hobbes worshipped according to the rite of the Church of England, and his justification for the unity of religion and government was in line with the ideal of ancient Israel taught in the Old Testament. Hobbes argued that Christianity is not politically destabilizing and tried to reconcile Christian doctrine with modern science. The author’s reply to Collins is guided by the idea that interpretation is a form of inference to the best explanation.

ENGLISH ‘FEMINIST’ WRITINGS AND JUDITH DRAKE'S AN ESSAY IN DEFENCE OF THE FEMALE SEX (1696)

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 727-747 ◽  
Author(s):  
HANNAH SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
Mary Astell ◽  
The Church

English ‘feminist’ writings of the late seventeenth century frequently united pro-woman arguments with party-political polemics. But although such texts have been discussed in terms of rationalist and contractarian philosophy, or as forerunners of modern feminist concerns, the contemporary issues which underscore them have been ignored. However, an understanding of these debates is vital to comprehending fully the motives of pro-woman writers, many of whom were more concerned with the survival of the Church of England than ameliorating the lot of seventeenth-century women. The underlying importance of party politics is exemplified in one of the greatest works of early modern ‘feminism’, Judith Drake's An essay in defence of the female sex (1696). Although Drake shared political similarities with other tory ‘feminists’, including the more celebrated Mary Astell, Drake's work differed radically from theirs over how an Anglican tory society could be maintained. Instead of stressing the necessity of teaching the tenets of Anglicanism to young women, as had her predecessors, Drake combined tory ideas with Lockean philosophy and concepts of ‘politeness’ to formulate an early Enlightenment vision of sociable, secularized, learning and the role female conversation could play in settling a society fractured by party politics.

Political Participation and Attitudes in the Church of England

1978 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Moyser ◽  
Kenneth Medhurst
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
English Society ◽  
The Church

It seems to be part of the conventional wisdom of British political science that English religious institutions and values do not demand much attention from the discipline's practitioners. It appears to be tacitly assumed that the process of secularization, and the relative absence of serious religious cleavages, have left such phenomena with minimal political significance. Nevertheless, Churches, and above all the Church of England, have traditionally occupied a position in English society that must leave some question marks against such assumptions. Mass politics, in an age of widespread indifference to institutional religion, no doubt has left Churches with considerably diminished scope for the exercize of political influence. On the other hand, these bodies still dispose of resources that, potentially at least, make them pressure groups of some weight. The politicization of moral issues, of particular interest to the Churches, may add credence to such a view.

Church Extension in Town and Countryside in Later Nineteenth-Century Leicestershire

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 427-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Urban Religion ◽  
Rural Religion ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Regular Contact ◽  
The Village ◽  
The Town ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Ideal

Studies of nineteenth-century urban religion have often been conducted with very little reference to the surrounding countryside. Even Obelkevich in his stimulating study of rural religion in Lincolnshire suggested that there, ‘In the Church of England, though the ideal and model of the village parish church continued to inspire town churchmen, towns and villages largely remained in separate compartments. Only through Methodism did the towns have much effect on village religious life. . . . The circuit, the key unit of Methodist organization, brought preachers and people from towns and villages into regular contact with each other and made it possible for the financial and human resources of the town chapels to contribute to the life of the outlying village chapels’. But the methodist exception is significant, not so much in a denominational sense (although the methodist form of organisation was in theory the best for this purpose) but because it is an example of a situation in which the money and men available in any one particular place were not sufficient to carry out what the church concerned wished to do there. It was therefore necessary to tap the resources of other places to help. In large towns such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, and in some of the smaller industrial towns as well, the necessary resources often had to be found within the town or not at all; and to that extent the study of urban religion on its own is understandable. But in many parts of the country rural evangelism was felt to be as urgent a priority as urban evangelism. The church of England sought to overcome the consequences of rural neglect; and all nonconformists, not only methodists, attempted to involve town members in the life of country chapels. Thus in less exclusively industrial parts of the country than Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Black Country, a genuine conflict of priorities between town and countryside could arise.

Reformers and the Church of England under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts

1980 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Christianson
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Church

During the past forty years, the religious history of Elizabethan and early Stuart England has received a great deal of attention from intellectual, social and Church historians. Because of the nature of the general interpretation traditionally followed, most scholars have found it fruitful to concentrate their research upon particular groups or individuals and to fit the ensuing studies into either a rather narrow stream labelled ‘Anglican’ or a very broad one named ‘Puritan’. While the number of biographies of English bishops and analyses of ‘Anglican’ divines has increased at a more than respectable rate recently, studies of English ‘Puritans’ and their brethren in New England have grown to almost unmanageable proportions. With all of these riches at hand, however, no recent historian has published an overall synthetic history of the Church of England under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts to match that completed by W. H. Frere more than two-thirds of a century ago. Indeed, a good deal of controversy still ranges over the boundaries and validity of such terms as ‘Anglican’ and—especially— ‘Puritan’. Plunging into that dispute, this paper will examine the nature and historiographical origins of these categories, redefine them so that they better apply to the evidence from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and spell out some of the social and political implications that spring from this modified point of view. While the argument presented here, no doubt, will neither please nor satisfy all historians working in the field, one hopes that it will provide some with a glimpse at the outlines of a new synthesis.

Elections and the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Hone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
General Elections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

Having explored in previous chapters how the circumstances of Anne’s accession affected portrayals of Stuart rule, this chapter turns to the impact of those representations on the general elections. Parliamentary elections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been largely uncontested. By the start of the eighteenth century elections had become violently partisan. This chapter explores how domestic party politics became entangled with international dynastic and religious matters at a time when the Catholic Stuarts were in exile and the Protestant House of Brunswick beckoned from Hanover. By situating major works such as Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1702–4) and Defoe’s The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702) in the midst of these elections, it uncovers rhetorical strategies and meanings that have been lost to recent scholarship.

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