Upon This Rock

The Archbishop of Canterbury has discovered that there is "a certain integrity" to a church which is separate from the state: an opinion he apparently held while a bishop in the Church of Wales before clarifying (or, in Standard English, reversing) his position when he became a candidate for the top office in the Church of England. There are, however, conditions: "I think the motives that would now drive disestablishment from the state side would be mostly to do with ... trying to push religion into the private sphere, and that's the point where I think I'd be bloody-minded and say, 'Well, not on that basis.'" The church's new-found integrity would evidently be horribly tarnished if the state had the wrong motives for agreeing to disestablish it; and, as someone or other makes clear in Matthew 6 i-xviii, it would certainly never do for Christian worship to be a private matter.