The Church of England is the established church in England — the official state church, with the monarch at its head and 26 of its bishops sitting in the House of Lords. It is also, by attendance, a minority activity: roughly 1% of the English population is in an Anglican church on a given Sunday.
How it came about
Through a divorce. Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, the Pope refused, and the Act of Supremacy in 1534 made the king Supreme Head of the Church in England, severing the connection with Rome.
The break was initially political rather than theological — Henry remained doctrinally conservative — and the Protestant content arrived under Edward VI, was reversed under Mary I, and was settled under Elizabeth I in a deliberately broad compromise designed to be tolerable to as many people as possible.
That compromise, the Elizabethan Settlement, explains the church’s enduring character: Catholic in structure with bishops and cathedrals, Protestant in doctrine, and containing within itself a wide range of belief that would elsewhere have produced separate denominations.
The establishment
The formal privileges are real and unusual:
- The monarch is Supreme Governor, and must be in communion with the church.
- 26 bishops — the Lords Spiritual — sit and vote in the House of Lords by right.
- Senior appointments involve the prime minister and are formally made by the Crown.
- Church of England clergy conduct legally valid marriages without a separate civil registrar.
- Every parish in England has a church and a vicar responsible for everyone living in it, not merely for churchgoers — a genuinely universal duty of care that the church takes seriously.
Only one other country reserves seats in its legislature for clerics, and it is Iran — a comparison English commentators make with some regularity.
High and low
The church contains sharply different traditions under one roof:
- Anglo-Catholic or “high church” — incense, vestments, elaborate ritual, close to Roman Catholic practice.
- Evangelical or “low church” — scripture-focused, informal, often with modern worship music.
- Broad church — the liberal middle.
The arguments
The church has spent forty years in public disagreement with itself, largely over sexuality and gender:
- Women priests were approved in 1992 and ordained from 1994, after decades of debate and some departures to Rome.
- Women bishops followed in 2014, after a 2012 vote narrowly failed and caused a crisis.
- Same-sex relationships remain unresolved. The church agreed in 2023 to bless same-sex couples but not to marry them, satisfying almost nobody and straining relations with conservative Anglican provinces in Africa.
The other churches
The Church of England is England only. Scotland has the Church of Scotland — Presbyterian, with no bishops, and not established in the same way. Wales disestablished in 1920, and Northern Ireland in 1871. The Anglican Communion worldwide has around 85 million members, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as its symbolic focus.
The buildings
The church maintains around 16,000 buildings, roughly 12,000 of them listed, including some of the finest medieval architecture in Europe. Keeping them standing on a declining congregation is the institution’s most immediate practical problem, and a great many rural parishes now share a single vicar between six or more churches.