still reflecting on the royal wedding and what it says about the role of religion in the UK.

Jonathan Chaplin and Religion, Royalty, and the Media. He concludes with the following:

But it surely is primarily responsible for how far the liturgical offerings it seems so eager to supply to what is a largely inattentive and uncomprehending nation are actually consistent with its own theological integrity, even its self-respect.

For many defenders of establishment, the royal wedding will no doubt provide glorious confirmation of their claim that the church remains the spiritual hub of the nation, sending out signals of transcendence from the heart of a unifying national celebration. For many opponents, it will raise the question whether the meaning of even a robustly orthodox wedding liturgy – for such it certainly was, as Martin Bashir so tactlessly pointed out – is effectively neutered when placed in service of a survival strategy for a political institution with an uncertain future. They will interpret the day’s events as yet further evidence of church’s captivity to civil religion, and will ask whether on April 29th the church really “served” the nation or rather was “used” by it. Will the church dare to have a serious discussion about that question?

The situation is quite different in the US than in the UK because of establishment. Still, there is an American civil religion, and the Episcopal Church has very often provided the setting as well as the content for the exercise of it. Witness the prominence of the “National Cathedral.” Sometimes, civil religion is relatively innocuous, such as the requirement that presidents end their speeches with “God Bless America.” It easily shades into the dangerous, however, when civil religion and Christianity are equated, as they so often are, by politicians, people, and pseudo-historians like David Barton.

Still, I’m not sure the appropriate response for concerned theologians is to adopt a neo-Anabaptist position like Simon Barrow and Nick Knisely seem to advocate. Nick Kniseley asks “Co-opting the Church?”  In response to an essay by Simon Barrow. It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to their position; it was difficult to distinguish the worship of God from the worship of the royal family during the wedding, and the prominence of the nation-state in the form of dress uniforms was especially disconcerting. Still, the Anabaptist, and neo-Anabaptist response of withdrawing, figuratively or literally, from engagement with the spiritual concerns of the larger society is troubling to me. Our sacred spaces and rituals need to be available to those who turn to them for support and meaning at times of crisis or transition. The task is to use that tentative engagement as a step to deeper involvement, all the while recognizing that such deeper commitment might not be forthcoming.

And Frederick Schmidt  on the inadequacies of our traditional-language liturgy seems to have struck precisely the wrong note a few days before the use of traditional language in the royal wedding. One of the great powers of ritual is that it can invest with great power, language that seems meaningless or dead in other contexts.

This in the context on continuing doom and gloom concerning the future of Anglicanism in the UK.

Archbishop Barry Morgan of Wales chimes in: “the Church in Wales must adapt to cope with the decline in clergy, waning investments and falling congregations.”

I do think it is time for the Church of England to be disestablished; this would free it up to have precisely the sort of theological conversation that Jonathan Chaplin advocates.