The Established Church
One
of the most seemingly archaic features of modern Britain -- and the one
that outsiders may be least prepared for -- is the "established
church". Formal secularism takes many forms, in the US, Canada,
France, Turkey; but one does get used to thinking of religion as no
proper business of the state. Not in the UK, where the Queen is
Defender of the Faith, and the Prime Minister had to wait until he had
left office before he could comfortably change his religious
affiliation. The highest position in society that anyone can aspire to
who does not happen to be the first-born of the House of Saxe-Coburg
and Gotha -- I mean, the House of Windsor -- is to marry the first-born
of this famous princely family, and a Catholic maiden, however
virginal, may not aspire to this august status. (My impression is that
current law currently restricts the spousal position to members of one
sex as well, and the constitutional status of a same-sex civil partner
of the heir to the throne is, so far as I can tell, still unresolved.)
Apparently Jews, Muslims, and Wiccans are not formally excluded, though
the tabloid press might raise a fuss if the next queen hosted witches'
sabbaths on a regular basis at Buckingham Palace. Balmoral might be
another matter...
The
most practical consequence of this establishment is that a large
fraction of the state-funded schools (called "maintained schools") are
actually subsidiaries of the Church of England. The state provides most
of the money, and the church gets impressionable children to
proselytise at will. In some parts of the country these schools are
selective and people get themselves and/or their children baptised to
get them in; in Oxford, the C of E snapped up most of the good school
sites long ago, and we'd have to travel far from home to find a
non-church primary school. Not that that would do any good, given that
daily Christian worship is required by law in all state schools. (To be precise, the communal worship must be "mainly of a broadly Christian character", "which accord a special
status to Jesus Christ") There are literally no secular state-funded
schools in the UK. You can worship whatever you want, as long as you do
it in school, rather than in, say, a church or other such inappropriate
institution.
