Comments

• ed

  posted 12 April 2006

  Um. Unless I'm mistaken, the UK doesn't have any such separation. The Prime Minister appoints the Archibishop of Canterbury. It's the Church of _England_ for a reason. OxCam have plenty of religious stuff going on. Americans are _way_ more up in arms about church/state separation than you guys, given that the country was pretty much founded on the concept.
  
  I'm not saying it leads to better social policy or anything... but saying "the UK shouldn't follow this example" is a bit odd in this context.

• Clare

  posted 13 April 2006

  Yes we have a Church of England, but the church does not control the state here. Yes we have religious schools (and there is a lot of debate around those!) but our higher education institutions are not church run, and there are laws in place to prevent the situation that Laurie talked about from happening. Oxford and Cambridge do have religious societies, as do most universities, but they do not make policy. At our uni, a Christian society was actually disassociated from the Students Union because of their homophobic activities.
  Our government is not controlled by the religious right to anywhere near the extent that the US government is - if it was then the Civil Partnership Act would never have been pased. By and large, UK society is largely secular. Americans may get more worked up about separation of church and state, but primarily because there is more reason to.

• ed

  posted 13 April 2006

  Well, most higher education in the US isn't church run (or state run, for that matter) either. And I understand that there's a difference between not having a strict wall between church and state and havign secular government policy, which is exactly the point I was trying to make to Laurie. The fact of that matter is that the legal wall between church and state is much lower in the UK than it is over here. In fact, state funding of religious schools is both rare and _extremely_ controversial in the US, but local conditions vary due to the freedom of states to make their own decisions on this point. For example, had this happened in NY, the school would have lost any state aid immediately.
  
  And, incidentally, church-state separation isn't just something pushed by secularists here. It's also supported by the vast majority of religious folk, specifically because the lack of it in places like England has caused religion to be "secularized" (by which they mean "liberalized", I presume.) There are a number of reasons that Americans get worked up about C-S separation, and it's far more complicated than some ever-present threat of theocracy (not that I don't think that threat exists, but I do think that people outside the country tend to exaggerate it.)
  
  Anyway, my point was more that (1) this doesn't actually have much at all to do with government policy on church-state separation, and (2) the UK has less church-state sep than the US, and I stand by that.

• Robert

  posted 21 April 2006

  just a thought: states (eg US and France) which strongly advocate separation of church and state seem to have far worse faith based nastiness than the UK, which is not what you would expect from the separation. I suspect it may be because the Church of England (note, Wales, Scotland and N Ireland are all disestablished) has perfected the art of boring everyone to not caring. While religious schools are an issue here it is largely because of muslim or fundmantelaist christian ones (pushing intelligent deisgn, usually) which are the problem. Perhaps the very English compromise of the CoE has protected us from the worst of religious extremis,?

• Clare

  posted 24 April 2006

  It's true, links between church and state (and I'd say the state has power over the church more than the other way round) does seem to lead to a secularisation of religion. Not that we don't have extremes here, but to a lesser extent. In terms of the power of various churches over the running of the state, I'd far rather live here than in the States.