Or so says t his report .
There’s something fishy here. First of all, it was conducted by the United Nations. Did they offer respondents food for an “N/A” response? And why is Asma Jahangir, a UN “special rapporteur” (is that anything like a really good “raconteur”?), calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England? Does the C of E now constitute a violation of international human rights by its mere existence?
Here’s why: The C of E “no longer reflected ‘the religious demography of the country and the rising proportion of other Christian denominations.’ Jahangir contends the role and privileges of the Church of England should be challenged given the new statistics on the state of religion in the United Kingdom.”
In other words, according to this report, there aren’t enough Christians in Britain to justify a state-sponsored Christian church, and privileging a minority is unfair to a growing plurality (majority?).
I wonder about those stats, first of all. Two-thirds? Is Britain that far gone? Who was asked what questions about their “affiliation”? And I wonder if all these creedless Brits would continue to remain unaffiliated if they knew that their Christian heritage was one good international screed away from becoming an exhibit in the British Museum. (The “Portable Antiquities and Treasures” department, perhaps?)
I don’t believe in established churches—but whether it is time for the Church of England to fend for itself is an issue for British citizens to decide, not the United Nations or its correspondents. And even if it proves true that communicant Christians are, in fact, a minority in Britain today, there is such a thing as the democracy of the dead. Let those votes be cast as well.
