Simon Peter from the linked Damian Thompson thread above lays out a very thorough repudiation of Damian’s argument. I shall reproduce it here:

“Damian has taken the opportunity provided by Daniel’s blog so that, in a sense, he is being opportunistic. Has his opportunism succeeded?

Damian writes vehemently in favour of the continuing established status of the CofE, even though he is a Catholic and a religious writer who comments on Anglicanism fearsomely, at times.

What are the big consequences that Damian tells us about, consequences so terrible that dis-establishment must not be considered by anyone in authority?

Firstly, “Disestablish the CofE now, and millions of people will cease to be nominally Christian…..I’d argue that our society desperately needs nominal Christians…”

According to Damian, our society “desperately” NEEDS nominal Christians”. Because this is so important for Damian’s argument, so desperately important, you would expect some reasons as to why nominal Christians are so desperately important to our society.

He does not give a reason, not a single reason!

Surely if he had a reason in mind, he would have quickly and easily put that in. After all, he has found the time to rubbish Rodney Stark and others to call them not just reductionist but “absurdedly” reductionist.

I suggest that if Damian did actually have an argument or two for the desperate need that society has for nominal Christians, he would have used them. Without doubt!

The reason, therefore, why there is not a single argument in favour of nominal Christians continuing to exist in Britain is because Damian can’t think of any.

Damian concedes that these millions of nominal Christians are not saved but they are desperately needed by society. How? In what way? What do they do that is so important for society?

He hasn’t told us except that they confess their Anglican Christianity when filling out forms.

His second argument is that it would be “a fate worse than death” to have “radical” Islam dominating our religious landscape.

His argument is so weak that he has to invoke “radical” Islam to paint a dreadful scene of religion in our country.

Why not “moderate” Islam in preponderance? Because moderate Islam might get on with lapsed nominal Christians rather well.

His second argument presupposes that “our religious landscape” with its liturgies, bishops, decaying churches and emphasis on Pelvic Theology is worth keeping.

What do the secularists think about this? Damian hasn’t mentioned them and yet they form a secular “landscape” which is far bigger than the religious one?

If they preferred a landscape in our country which was non-religious, then, because they are in the majority, this would satisfy more people than the current situation. The churches would still be there to use as halls, libraries, homes etc.

For my part, nominal Christians add little or nothing to our society for being nominal Anglicans. They add nothing significant to our society for being nominal believers, and this is why Damian cannot think of a single good reason for the continuation of Anglican nominalism.

So, “disestablish the CofE now, and millions of people will cease to be nominally Christian.” What disadvantages will there be? I can’t think of any!

One advantage may well be in what arises from the ashes of nominal Christianity. Like a bankrupt business can be transformed by commercial death into something viable and valuable, so Christianity in the UK could become something precious and pleasing to those who believe.

But death or, if you prefer, bankruptcy has to take place first. So, disestablish the CofE for if it survives in the religious market place it will be fitter and leaner and more suited to what the remaining religious people want.

If it fails to survive something different and better may well take its place.

And finally, let the atheists and agnostics, the secularists, take care of Islam in our country if it becomes a threat and radical, as Damian warns us.

They are in the majority; they must take the responsibility for the landscape in which they have the predominance.

So, disestablish the CofE! Damian has not produced any arguments of substance, to my mind, as to why this process should not take place.

His “fate worse than death” is jaundiced scaremongering since, if Islam is the predominant religion in our country, Secularism will be the predominant culture nevertheless.”

Pope Benedict XVI also recognizes value in the disestablishment of a state church in this recent article: Pope: Church-State Separation a Sign of Progress.

Perfect, Mr. Johnson. Amen to your analysis and enlightenment of Damian Thompson. Hope he ‘gets’ the message…it will help him the rest of his Christian life.

Well, the Anglicans had two, Wesley and Whitefield, but are/were there great Roman Catholic evangelists?

I’m not as familiar with this sort of thing as I need to be but there was an entire order of them, the Dominicans. Bishop Sheen could bring the heat back in the day. And I’ll put Benedict Groeschel up against any preacher of any Christian tradition anywhere in the world.

In addition to Fr. Groeschel, I would highly recommend Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, the Franciscan priest who is the official Preacher to the Papal Household. He is a very gifted evangelist – you can find out more about him and his writings at http://www.cantalamessa.org.

Most of the Catholic religious orders from the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits forward were great evangelists in their founding.

But on the topic of disestablishment, it’s good to remember that prior to the present era, a community was defined, in part, by it’s religion. That is, the members of a community were generally of the same faith, though, of course, some were actual believers and some went along to be part of the community. I think you see a fair amount of that in the conversion of England to a protestant faith in the 16th century. In the German states, the religion of the prince was the religion of the people, and so forth. Our era really is more like the early Christian era, before the Constantinian establishment, in that our beliefs form communities, rather than membership in the community forming beliefs (or at least nominal church affiliation). That’s not so much an argument for or against disestablishment; it’s a caution that we are discussing an cultural artifact that belongs to a different framework of understanding the place of the church within the community and culture.

If the Church of England really wants to disestablish (and I don’t have a real opinion on that), it needs to do two things: study the process by which the Catholic Church has adjusted to the post-Christendom reality, examining where that has gone well(arguably in the U.S.) and where it has gone badly (Quebec and France come to mind). The Church of England must also examine it’s theological disarray and figure out how it will maintain it’s institutional coherence in the face of doctrinal incoherence. Damian Thompson is correct that establishment is holding the institution together; whether that’s an argument for establishment or disestablishment is another level of argument.

Regarding the establishment or disestablishment of the Church of England… do the following questions pertain?

Does this established Church in its current state tend to glorify God more or tend to profane God more? What is this established Church’s likely trajectory, and if this projected trajectory is downhill, what are the chances of it being corrected and reformed? A Church is to proclaim the Gospel, fulfill the Great Commission, and be a House where believers can worship, praise, and adore the Almighty. Is that more likely to happen with continued establishment or with disestablishment?

IMHO, I think God would be more glorified if the CoE were disestablished, but I don’t know for certain.

I maintain that establishment of a religion is not necessarily an advantage to the established church. As an arm of government it tends to be run rather like Amtrack, or Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae. Better to cut it loose and make it compete to survive.

Dang, our Founding Fathers were smart!

For the sake of conjecture, let us suppose that the Church of England becomes disestablished. Would disestablishment have any bearing on the Anglican Instruments of Unity, and in particular, whether and by what reasoning would GAFCON (and/or ACNA) continue to have to look and/or defer to the Archbishop of Canterbury? Could disestablishment provide more of an impetus towards a conciliar, confessional ecclesiastical structure for Anglicanism? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I know exactly what Damian Thompson means, and why he brings up radical Islam. He should have left out the “radical” and just referred to Islam – the imposter religion, in all its flavours, is the enemy. His reference to “filling out their forms” is the tipoff – he’s talking about carving up the entitlement pie, and who gets listened to. At the moment, the census forms might show the demographics as “CoE – 60%, RC – 25%, Islam – 15%” (these are just made-up numbers to make an argument, I have no idea what the exact breakdown is). He’s worried that if CoE no longer is connected, even by tradition, with the nominal members who were baptized in it, the numbers will reverse. Islam will continue to grow, and what will happen when the next census reads “RC – 26%, Islam – 24%, atheist – 4%, and the rest of the former CoE “vote” trailing off into an incoherence of “unsure…no affiliation…leave blank…” and little boutique fads that don’t even register? That’s when there will be pressure for special ridings for Muslims, set-asides in the Civil Service for Muslims, quotas for “Muslim content” on the airwaves, and there will be no counterweight of even nominal Christians to oppose it, even by inertia.

Excellent post and well written. I lived in the UK for 5 years and let me tell you having (some form of) Christianity shoved down my throat at school 3 days per week did not help one bit.

“Well, the Anglicans had two, Wesley and Whitefield, but are/were there great Roman Catholic evangelists?”

Augustine, converted the Britons. Patrick, converted the Irish. Fr. Hennepin, travelled with LaSalle and converted the Iroquois, and was the first recorded white man to see Niagara Falls. Fra Juniper Serra, Catholic Missioner who spread God’s word throughout Spanish California, from San Francisco to San Diego. Fra Francisco Gomez, who travelled throughout the west, and performed the first baptisms in the Spanish west.

That is the barest minimal start.

Don’t forget Isaac Jogues and the other French Jesuits in North America. Nor Francis Xavier in China and Japan.

St Philip Neri, who heard confessions 18 hours per day, sometimes, and the trains had to make a special stop at the station in his town to let off the penitents. St. Frances de Sales, who printed little tracts and slid them under the doors of his Geneva community and converted tens of thousands back from Protestantism. Another bare trickle of examples…

Are you associating public speaking with evangelism? That’s too narrow.

Chris’s description of evangelizing the West reminds me of the quip that Baptists went West on foot, Methodists went on horseback, and Episcopalians went by Pullman.

I guess the question shouldn’t be who the great Catholic evangelists used to be but who they are right now. Say what you want about the approach of the open-air evangelists, the fact of the matter is that they get the job done. And I really believe that a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox “Billy Graham” could change not only the Christian landscape but the entire world.

I’d say that today’s Catholic evangelists are primarily evangelizing Catholics, which is badly, badly needed. They would include without straining my brain: Scott Hahn, Ralph Martin, Steve Ray, Marcus Grodi, Fr. John Corapi, Fr. C. John McCloskey, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.

I’m not avoiding the women, I just can’t think of the names of more than one, but I have their faces in my head, and would need to do more research.

Who’s that priest in D.C. who has converted all sorts of big-wigs? I’m blanking at the moment, but surely you know who I mean.

Were there any Roman Catholic Evangelists?: How about Paul, Peter, James, John, Thomas, Mark, Luke, Matthew, Bartholomew, etc for starters.

Chris–in recent memory, a couple of gentlemen by the names of Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger come to mind . . .

I read a story long ago that has stuck with me in which a group of men went individually into a dangerous terrain. They each could go armed as they liked. It turned out that the least armed were the most likely to survive because they were least inclined to rest on their weaponry and took threats to survival more seriously than the well armed.

Nominal Christian culture is like those well armed adventurers who wind up dying before their lesser armed brothers. A lean but more robustly serious Christian church that knows it can’t count on the aid (whatever aid they really could be) of nominal Christians is far more likely to lead to real spiritual and cultural revival and will be a much more credible answer to Islam.

For Anglicanism’s sake, for the sake of England, for Christ’s sake!, kill the CofE.

FW Ken “Who’s that priest in D.C. who has converted all sorts of big-wigs?” That would be Fr. C. John McCloskey. His book, “Good News, Bad News: Evangelization, Conversion, and the Crisis of Faith” is a good read. He was the director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC. http://www.cicdc.org/
Another is Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. http://www.peterkreeft.com/about.htm
He has written a number of books on apologetics. EWTN, is itself, a 24/7 evangelization. If your cable provider doesn’t offer it you can access it at ewtn.com and watch its programs on your computer. There have been Catholic Evangelists for two thousand years, beginning with the Apostles. How else would the Church have survived the continual attacks for two millenia? By being Established?

Benny Hinn?!?! I assume you were using him as an example of the effectiveness of evangelism qua evangelism, and not as a Christian.

Only God knows the heart. I have no doubt in my mind that Benny Hinn has brought many people to Christ and I rejoice in that regardless of what I personally think of the man. After all, as Paul told the Philippians:

Some indeed preach Christ even from envy and strife, and some also from goodwill: The former preach Christ from selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my chains; but the latter out of love, knowing that I am appointed for the defense of the gospel. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is preached; and in this I rejoice, yes, and will rejoice.

I guess the question shouldn’t be who the great Catholic evangelists used to be but who they are right now.

Me, in certain circumstances. Catholic evangelists are everywhere, just well under the radar. I myself opened my mind and heart to the Church after watching my wife live Catholicism (and JPII helped a lot). For more noted names, how about Karl Keating, Peter Kreeft or Tim Staples for starters…

I’m surprised Chris didn’t list (3) John Stott (Chaplain Extrodinary to HMQ);
(4) C.S. Lewis and (5) Nicky “Alpha” Gumbel. All Anglicans, all except Lewis clergy.

What would the biggest result be of disestablishing the CoE? It would cease to exist. Establishment – and the sense of a broad National church – is the only thing keeping the various wings and factions of the CoE together (and by extension, while the CoE stays together, the communion stays together). Establishment is the lynchpin of the CoE: take that away, and the CoE (and the communion) flies apart faster than Pu239 at Trinity.