The Future of Brexit Britain: Anglican Reflections on National Identity and European Solidarity

By JONATHAN CHAPLIN & ANDREW BRADSTOCK

The traumatic debates provoked by the EU referendum have subjected the idea of British identity to relentless and painful interrogation.

How might Britain as a multinational state understand its own defining moral and political commitments in relation to its European neighbours? If, as many suggest, a resurgence of English nationhood has been the driving force behind Brexit, how might the Church of England, as the ‘national Church’ in England, and its neighbouring Anglican Churches, respond to this and the many other missional challenges they face?

Those of us still wondering what to make of Brexit – including reflective Christians, politicians, journalists, think-tanks and religious leaders – will find much to stimulate thought and discussion here. The contributors have a wealth of specialist knowledge of the churches, Brexit and the EU; they draw on this and the legacies of Anglican – and more broadly Christian – social and political theology to offer their rich and nuanced responses to a range of crucial questions.

‘Seeks to challenge Christians of all views to imagine a future with hope.’ Dr Anna Rowlands

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780281084302

JONATHAN CHAPLIN & ANDREW BRADSTOCK

Dr Jonathan Chaplin is a Member of the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge, Theos Research Associate and co-editor with Gary Wilton of God and the EU (Routledge, 2016). Professor Emeritus Andrew Bradstock has been researching, teaching and writing about the relationship between faith, politics and social engagement for more than 30 years. From 2009-13 he was inaugural Howard Paterson Professor of Theology and Public Issues at the University of Otago where he established and directed New Zealand’s first Centre for Theology and Public Issues. He is the author of David Sheppard: Batting for the Poor: The authorized biography of the celebrated cricketer and bishop (SPCK, 2019).

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Introduction

The UK formally left the political institutions of the European Union on 31 January 2020. As this book went to press (August 2020) the terms of the UK’s future relationship with the EU remained ­undecided and looked set to take many years to resolve. However, the traumatic debates evoked by the referendum and the tortuous ­political processes subsequent to it have subjected the question of ­British – and especially English – identity to a relentless and painful interrogation. This book presents theologically informed reflections from Anglican voices¹ in Britain and Ireland on a searching question thrown up by Brexit: what visions of national identity will guide Britain’s future sense of itself after its decision in 2016 to leave the European Union?

We are entering a complex landscape and two clarifications are immediately called for.

First, we have already had to employ three words to describe the geographical provenance of the book – Britain, UK and ­England.² This inevitable terminological diversity reflects two realities that pervade our discussions: that the UK is a multination state, yet one in which the English nation remains overwhelmingly dominant; and that, while the four Anglican provinces in Britain and ­Ireland (the Church of Ireland embraces the whole island of Ireland) speak ­primarily to their own nations, on the question of Brexit all are bound to address the UK situation as a whole.

Second, by ‘identity’ we are referring to how Britain understands its own defining moral and political commitments as a nation or community of nations in relationship to its European neighbours. Our ­primary interest is not in historically rooted cultural traditions but rather in moral and political vision, while recognizing that such a vision is ­always culturally mediated. This is essentially contested territory: we confront a plurality – increasingly a cacophony – of disputed accounts of what that identity, vision and relationship are and should be.

While we have been able to include voices from Ireland, ­Scotland and Wales, most of our contributors represent the Church of ­England. A new assertion of English nationhood – critics say ­‘nationalism’ – has been one of the driving forces behind Brexit, presenting the Church of England, as the ‘national church’ ­within ­England, with an especially acute missional challenge. English ­Anglicans are not only the most numerous; they have the most work to do. But whenever the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ appear in this book, the complex – and, as this book shows, deeply controversial – question of their relation to England, to the UK and to our closest neighbour, Ireland, is always close at hand.

The question of Britain’s future vision of itself in the light of Brexit quickly opens out into a range of complex and far-reaching issues inviting theologically informed ethical and political reflection. In this book we have chosen to concentrate on three.

In the light of the fractures revealed and caused by Brexit, what kind of a nation does Britain aspire to be, both as an independent self-governing (and multinational) people with a unique history, and in relation to our European neighbours with whom we share insoluble ties of history, trade, culture and faith?

How should Britain express international solidarity with our European neighbours in a context of global political upheaval, advancing globalization, resurgent nationalisms, threats to a rules-based international order, failures of international institutions, persistent terrorism, deepening inequality, environmental degradation – and, now, global pandemic; and what kind of EU do we wish to see emerge?

What role, if any, could Anglican and other churches play in deepening the debate about the foregoing two issues and in contributing towards a process of post-Brexit ‘reconciliation’?

It might be thought that such questions ought already to have evoked a significant response from the Church of England. It is ­England’s national church ‘by law established’, continues to regard itself as such and, in spite of a precipitate decline in membership in recent decades, is still perceived as such by many outside it. Yet for a variety of reasons, some canvassed in these pages, the Church of England refrained from expressing an authoritative collective view on Brexit.³ Many individuals, including Anglicans, have ­entered the debate, but the Church of England has remained ­officially ­silent on the merits of Brexit and, until very recently, on the route through or beyond it.⁴ By contrast, the (Anglican) Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church in Wales, and the (Presbyterian) Church of ­Scotland – ‘Scotland’s national church’ – issued pointed interventions (in favour of Remain).⁵ Yet by virtue of Anglicanism’s presence in all four nations of the UK and in Ireland, as well as in many European nations (in the Diocese in Europe),⁶ some claim that it may be in a position to initiate fruitful conversations on ‘Britain after Brexit’.

Accordingly, in an attempt to help remedy that deficit, this book presents a collection of essays representing a range of Anglican standpoints on the question of Britain’s future moral and political vision ­after Brexit. It makes no claim to comprehensiveness, whether political, geographical or theological. To the editors’ regret (and in spite of their best efforts), white males are heavily over-represented in the book.

Although most of its contributors are members of the Church of England, it does not claim to speak on behalf of the Church of ­England. It does, however, seek to speak from it (as well as from its neighbouring provinces), to it and beyond it. The book is not ­remotely a definitive, or even a representative, statement, rather an initial stimulus to what must become a much richer and wider debate.

The book does not seek to advance a single view on the merits of Brexit as such. Some contributors have offered passionate views on the question and levelled pointed critiques at their opponents. The book may at times make for uncomfortable reading. But, overall, it aims to focus more on constructive directions for the future (not that those will be comfortable either) than on diagnoses of the past. Its main horizon is the longer-term issues noted above ­rather than those dominating the polarized and acrimonious debates of 2016–2019. In the face of the superficiality and widespread disregard for truth that marked such debates, the book aspires to offer some deeper ­reflections on the tectonic movements beneath them that will shape the future of Britain after Brexit. We hope that readers will see, beyond the clashing readings of the past and present of Brexit voiced in the book, shared concerns and common aspirations for the future emerging from it.

The book is addressed in the first instance to Anglicans and ­other Christians still wondering what to think about Brexit – and, after four wearying years, still courageous enough to try. Contributors bring a range of specialist knowledge of the churches, Brexit and the EU, and seek, where appropriate, to allude to legacies of Anglican – and, more broadly, Christian – social and political theology that speak to the book’s concerns.⁷

Part 1 seeks to ‘read Brexit truthfully’. Here contributors were indeed invited to look back at and offer robust readings of Brexit itself, on the assumption that the UK cannot ‘move beyond’ Brexit or relate constructively to the EU in the future unless it seeks honestly to confront what the last four years have meant.

Part 2 intentionally broadens the dialogue beyond the largely (white) ‘English Anglican’ focus of Part 1, and seeks to ‘attend to ­diverse voices’ arising from Britain’s ethnic minorities, from other nations of the UK and from non-British Anglicanism.

Part 3 tackles the question of how the UK might ‘engage with ­Europe faithfully’ in the years ahead – a formidable challenge ­given current uncertainties surrounding the shape of the UK’s future relationship with the EU and the deep disagreements persisting on the question.

Part 4 addresses the no less difficult question of how we might take tentative steps towards restoring our fractured national ­unity – of how the UK might ‘live beyond Brexit gracefully’ – and what the contributions of Anglican and other churches might be to that elusive goal.

The nineteen chapters of the book are followed by eight short responses which broaden the debate further. The first three are from prominent Anglican politicians positioned at different points on the Brexit spectrum. The remaining five speak from beyond Anglicanism. We are immensely grateful to all our contributors for being prepared to enter this difficult discursive territory and for doing so with admirable insight, intelligence and Christian generosity.⁸

Jonathan Chaplin and Andrew Bradstock

Easter 2020

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1 Of the nineteen chapter authors, eighteen are Anglican and five respondents are non-Anglican.

2 Another is ‘Great Britain’, that is, the UK apart from Northern Ireland. A fourth, the ‘British Isles’, has largely fallen out of use and, in Ireland, is only used by certain Unionists.

3 In this it was not alone: the Roman Catholic Church and some mainstream Free Churches also made no official statements. For one view of the Church of England’s silence, see Chaplin, J., ‘The Church of England needs to speak out about Brexit – here’s why’, The Conversation, 16 July 2019; .

4 In August 2019 over twenty diocesan bishops stated their opposition to a no-deal Brexit. Free Church leaders also wrote to the Prime Minister in July 2019 ­expressing concern about how a no-deal Brexit would harm people ‘held back by ­poverty’; .

5 See for example ‘Our place in Europe’, Church and Society Council of the Church of Scotland, May 2016, .

6 The Diocese in Europe is deemed to be part of the Province of Canterbury. Its bishop is designated the Bishop ‘in’, not ‘of’, Europe.

7 On Anglicanism, see for example Spencer, S., ed., Theology Reforming Society: Revisiting Anglican social theology. SCM Press, London, 2017, and Brown, M., Suggate, M., Chaplin, J., Rowlands, A., and Hughes, J., Anglican Social Theology: Renewing the vision today. Church House Publishing, London, 2013. On the churches and the EU, see for example Grebe, M., and Worthen, J., eds, After Brexit? European unity and the unity of European churches. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig, 2019, and Chaplin, J., and Wilton, J., eds, God and the EU: Faith in the European project. Routledge, Abingdon, 2016.

8 Most of the contributions were written prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and were therefore unable to reflect on its possible consequences for the themes of the book. Special thanks to those who had to compose their pieces under difficult circumstances arising from this crisis.

Part 1

Reading Brexit truthfully

1

Brexit

Competing visions of nation

Philip North

Tom is a big man in every way. After a tough upbringing he has made his own way in the world and has met with success. He enjoys a pint and a curry, his sense of humour and his use of language is wide-reaching and colourful and he loves a night out with the lads. He is also a devout practising Anglican, a hard-working churchwarden at his local parish church, a school governor and an active volunteer.

I saw Tom over dinner a few months after the referendum of June 2016 in which the nation voted to leave the European Union. His business, which relied heavily on overseas trade, had just filed for bankruptcy as a result of the extreme currency volatilities that followed the vote and consequently his home was at risk. However, he was not just sanguine. He was full of beans. ‘I knew we’d go under when I voted Leave,’ he said. ‘But it’s worth it to get back control.’

Similar stories are told by the Labour peer Maurice Glasman, whose travels around the country in 2016 included a visit to the vast Nissan assembly line on the edge of Sunderland. He asked why, given the gloomy prophecies of Nissan’s CEO about the disinvestment that would follow the UK’s departure from the EU, they still intended to vote Leave (the Leave vote in Sunderland was 61 per cent). ‘We’ve been through wars for our nation in the past and we’ll get through this,’ they told him. Again, it was worth the economic pain to ‘get back control’.

The fundamental miscalculation made by the Remain side in the referendum campaign was their assumption that simply spelling out the financial consequences of leaving would result in a win. ­Cameron confidently prophesied on the BBC that leaving would ‘tank the economy’. Politicians, economists, businessmen and ­bishops lined up with a chorus of doom that would have made the prophet ­Jeremiah proud that his legacy was safe.

But it had no impact, not because Leave voters in working-class areas disbelieved the experts, but because they felt that the ­economic hit was worth taking ‘to regain control of the nation’. And the suggestion that the UK could not survive or would suffer outside of Europe merely suggested a dependency that spiked their patriotic fervour still more.

The political classes have never been able (as they have in France and Germany) to articulate a vision of the nation that is both ­patriotic and pro-European. The two are widely perceived to be ­mutually exclusive. The years of media attacks on the EU and polit­icians ­happy to gain credit for ‘getting a good deal out of Europe’ have led many people to believe that Europe, with its free borders and opaque democratic institutions, erodes British identity and undermines the sovereignty of the UK Parliament. And given the choice, a ­majority of the population decided that they loved their nation more than they loved the thickness of their wallets.

Even four years after the referendum there was still widespread misunderstanding of exactly what happened and in particular a strong tendency, not least in some church circles, to understand the Leave vote in negative terms.

Some have called it the revolt of the marginalized, assuming that it represents some sort of angry uprising by the dispossessed and forgotten who wanted to wreak vengeance on a Westminster government that is perceived to be distant, cold and unfeeling. While there may be a shred of truth in this, and the Leave vote was certainly high in areas most impacted by austerity, it is way too simplistic an ana­lysis. It does not account for the strong Leave vote in rural areas, many of which face an uncertain future with the loss of EU farm subsidies, nor for the large numbers of wealthy people in areas away from the major cosmopolitan centres who voted to leave.

Some suggest that the Leave vote was a reflection of people’s ­political naïvety and stupidity, and that they simply lacked the ­intellectual capacity to see through the ‘lies’ of politicians and under­stand what they were voting for or the complexity of the issues that were at play. This is of course a strong argument for doing away with democracy altogether and allowing a small group of technocrats to run the nation!

Others suggest that the overriding issue was immigration, that ‘control’ meant no more than control of borders and that a latent British xenophobia lay behind the vote. According to this line of thinking, the referendum represents the triumph of the sort of populism that brought Trump to power in the United States and has seen the rise of the Front National in France. But when I speak to Leave voters in Lancashire, very few want to stop immigration ­altogether, very few are openly racist and indeed many of them come from immigrant communities, especially those of Pakistani and ­Bangladeshi origin. Rather, in their view, borders that the UK government could not control were a symptom of a nation leaking sovereignty to ­Brussels and to EU institutions that felt ‘foreign’ and unaccountable.

These simplistic and negative misportrayals of the referendum result are serious because if, as Christians, we do not understand the reasons, how can we frame a coherent and relevant Anglican response? This has been a very pressing issue for us in Lancashire in the years since June 2016.

Every single borough in the Blackburn Diocese voted to leave. That included huge majorities in Blackpool (67.5 per cent) and ­Burnley (66.5 per cent) but also the university cities of Lancaster and Preston with their more cosmopolitan populations. And yet much of the church leadership, including a majority of clergy, voted to remain. It was clear that we needed to listen to our own community and understand the reasons people voted the way they did. More­over, given that gospel proclamation requires close attention to context, this was a missiological imperative. My own conclusion is that the referendum result in Lancashire was not a negative vote or a symbolic act of rebellion. In fact, most people knew exactly why they voted the way they did and had positive and considered reasons for doing so, reasons that relate to how they understood their nation.

Lancashire is a proudly patriotic place. The Queen is Duke of ­Lancaster and when the national anthem is sung in church it is done with immense gusto. After centuries of sending men (and now ­women) to various theatres of war, it is a place that takes great pride in the armed forces. Acts of Remembrance are better ­attended each year and communities in Accrington and Chorley remember the Pals regiments as if they were their own sons. People voted to leave because they saw it as a positive and patriotic act to rescue a ­nation they loved from a pan-European project that was subsuming its identity and culture. And while I draw this conclusion from close listening to the people of Lancashire, I would contend that the same applies in the north east, in Essex and Lincolnshire, in Cornwall and in Devon and in most of the places where the Leave vote triumphed.

The heart of the Brexit debate is not the marginalized versus the powerful, or the rich versus the poor, or the north versus the south. It is about two competing visions of nation. One might quite reason­ably argue that it is events and decisions that reveal divisions and that, had David Cameron not made the referendum a manifesto pledge in 2015, this particular division would still remain buried. But the decision was made, the division is laid bare and now we need to understand it and seek to reconcile it.

To understand these competing visions more deeply it will pay to give some attention to David Goodhart’s book The Road to Somewhere.¹ The book has been much discussed and much critiqued, not least by those who reject as simplistic any attempt to impose ­binary dichotomies on to complex situations. (As a philosopher once remarked to me, there are two types of people, those who think there are two types of people and those who do not.) But nonetheless there are strong insights in much of what Goodhart claims, meaning that his thesis remains helpful.

Goodhart suggests that the fundamental fault-line in UK ­politics is not about class, income or geography but is between the ‘Anywheres’ and the ‘Somewheres’. The Anywheres, who constitute about 25 per cent of the population, are those whose education and world view make them citizens of the globe as much as of the nation. They tend to have university degrees, they will travel to find work and are generally socially more liberal. Though they are usually urban, place does not matter a great deal to them. They see the UK as one ­country among many and one that must work and trade as part of a ­global family.

The Somewheres, by contrast, who constitute around 50 per cent of the population, are much more tied to place. They are more ­socially conservative, they are often not educated to degree level, they will spend much of their lives in the same place and can be less financially ambitious. Globalization is seen by them as a threat rather than an opportunity. They usually live in rural areas, in small towns or in outer estates, and are concerned about the impact that immigration has on the cohesion of their communities. They take more pride in the nation, its culture, its history and its institutions. For the most part, Somewheres voted to leave and Anywheres voted to remain. The missing 25 per cent are classified as ‘Inbetweeners’.

These two sides, with their competing world views and contradictory visions of UK identity, don’t understand each other and indeed don’t especially want to. For Anywheres, Somewheres are outdated, xenophobic and do not understand the realities of a global world. For Somewheres, Anywheres are unpatriotic, unconfident in their national identity and overly preoccupied with issues of identity and equality. They are two nations, living parallel lives in parallel worlds. The destruction of the Labour Party in the 2019 election is because the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn was unable to hold together the ­alliance of these two groups.

Occasionally I see this fault-line very vividly lived out when I go to London. I leave behind me Burnley with its slate-grey terraced roofs, its stagnant property market, its low-paid jobs and its ­austerity-stricken infrastructure. But people in Burnley love their town, and it is an easy place to love and a good place to live because of its strong networks of relationships and powerful sense of itself. It is a Leave-voting town with little mobility and a highly developed sense of place. It symbolizes ‘Somewhere’ Britain.

Then I get on the train and, three hours later, having a little time to spare before my presence is required in Church House, I pop into the Faith Centre at the London School of Economics because the chaplain is a friend. It would be hard to conceive of a greater contrast. The streets around are filled with cranes and construction sites, for the economy of London is vibrant and land prices ­astronomical. The Faith Centre is located in the Student Centre, a triumph of contem­porary architecture and a place of dazzling vibrancy. As I make my way up the stairs there are billboards advertising events for a vast range of organizations and international societies, there are ­gender-neutral toilets and the flags still fly for LGBTQI+ week. The students are intelligent global citizens, breezily aware of the power that is theirs, happy in almost any nation or place.

Utterly contrasting cultural contexts, and inevitably I find myself asking what (if anything) they have in common beyond being ­located within the same nation. The only answer I can find is the Church of England, for the Chaplain of the LSE and the Bishop of Burnley are having coffee and seeking to make sense of the vast gulf that lies between the contexts in which they minister.

That little vignette symbolizes for me a responsibility that now lies on the shoulders of the Church of England. Establishment may seem to some anachronistic in a secular nation, but it lays upon us a broad responsibility. We are a national church present in some way in every community (in England), charged with the cure of every soul. And that gives us a vital role to play in reconnecting post-Brexit Britain.

The problem is that we have lost our voice and an application of Goodhart’s analysis may explain why. The leadership of the Church of England is almost by definition ‘Anywhere’. Clergy are for the most part graduates; our selection processes have (until the recent and very welcome revisions) favoured professional people. ­Clergy are deployable and must necessarily move from community to community, and most voted to remain. Yet our congregations are predominantly ‘Somewhere’. In most parts of the country they are static, they tend to the socially conservative and I have very little doubt that, were we able to do a survey, we would find that a majority had voted to leave.

The result of this division (combined with a general fear among some church leaders around intervention into the world of politics) is silence. The only real contribution to the Brexit debate, beyond a couple of multi-authored letters, is the occasional call for prayer and a few platitudinous appeals for reconciliation. Yet all too rarely is this based on any in-depth understanding of what is actually going on or what reconciliation might comprise.

We need to reflect on our historic role as the national church in England in a much more challenging way, and that means a return to the Scriptures.² In his letter to the Philippians, Paul writes, ‘But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.’³ This is one of many passages in the New Testament that refer to the ‘dual citizenship’ that is so much a part of Christian living. In the first letter of Peter, when ­urging his hearers to accept the authority of human institutions, ­Peter writes, ‘As servants of God, live as free people’⁴ for their freedom comes from Christ, not from earth-bound institutions. In St John’s ­Gospel, when Jesus stands before Pilate he tells him, ‘My kingdom is not from this world.’⁵

As Christians we inhabit two kingdoms. We are a liminal ­people, located on the threshold between heaven and earth. However, it would be dangerous to pose too deep a separation between these two citizenships. Oliver O’Donovan writes:

Those who have asserted that a conception of Two Kingdoms is fundamental to Christian political thought have spoken truly, though at great risk of distorting the truth if they simply leave it at that. The unity of the kingdoms, we may say, is the heart of the Gospel, their duality is the pericardium.⁶

Our task is to live as citizens of heaven, but in so doing to interpret heaven to earth, to live fully in the current world but to the values of the next and to pray for that day when the distinction is no more. A traditional inspiration for this, dating back to St Augustine, is the letter that Jeremiah writes to the exiles in which, though separated from their true home, they are urged to ‘seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile’.⁷

As those who inhabit simultaneously two citizenships and interpret one to the other, I wonder if there is an analogy to be drawn here about how the Church of England is being called to locate itself in post-Brexit Britain. As those (perhaps uniquely) present in both nations, surely our task is to be much bolder in interpreting one to the other, placing ourselves in the liminal space. Were we able to do that, the fact that we have an ‘Anywhere’ leadership but a ‘Somewhere’ laity could become not a weakness that silences us but a strength that lends us authority to speak.

In an extraordinary presidential address given to the ­Society of Biblical Literature in 2016, and in which she brings Romans ­13.1–7 into dialogue with Simone Weil, Beverly Gaventa critiques the ­‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ which impacts so much intellectual and public life and in which our response to the other is founded on criti­cism.⁸ Referring to Paul’s resistance to ‘othering’ those with whom he disagrees, she urges an approach rooted in generosity and mutual understanding. Not ‘Why is the