The fourth thing that I have in mind when I talk about "establishment" is the Church of England's privileged position in state education. 

This, therefore, is the establishment that I want to defend. Against it there are two main arguments, both of them moral, one emanating from secularists and the other from within the churches themselves. I shall deal with the latter first and briefly, since I do not think it cogent.

The main Christian objection to establishment is that it corrupts the Church, constraining its freedom to speak the truth to power. To this I would respond that "establishment" can mean all manner of thing. Maybe in the past certain forms of it have spelt the Babylonian — or the Constantinian — captivity of the Church, but I cannot see that it does so now. Establishment did not prevent the Church of England from making head-on criticism of the Thatcher Government in Faith in the City in 1985. Nor did it prevent the Archbishop of Canterbury from publicly dissenting from Prime Minister Blair's decision to go to war against Iraq in 2003. Nor has it stopped him from warning the current Coalition Government against using the "Big Society" as a fig-leaf for dismantling welfare provision. 

Besides, the tying of its prophetic tongue is only one situation that the Church should strive to avoid. Another is following an uncharitable and moralistic media into a self-flattering cynicism about those who bear responsibility for governing. With regard to the latter, establishment in the form of episcopal participation in the work of the House of Lords helps to keep at least one major civil social body sensitive to the difficulties and complexities of the necessary tasks of government. And this is important when too many leaders in the churches are inclined by the liberal zeitgeist in general, and liberation theology in particular, to take a relentlessly critical view of the state, and to assume that a Christian voice has only one, prophetic register. Or, rather, to assume that prophecy always comes from the Left.