Religion and Politics in Britain

Small incidents and anecdotes often reveal more about political misapprehensions than whole volumes could do. Two such concerning the nature of church-state relations in England stand out in the writer's mind. A few years before the war of 1939-45 an American clergyman who frequently visited England and the continent pointed out to him that the then dictators attached great importance to the utterances of the Archbishop of Canterbury because, knowing that he and other Anglican prelates were nominated by the prime minister, they assumed that what they said was governmentally inspired and represented what the British cabinet would like to say but preferred to have said indirectly. Hence their fury at Dr Cosmo Lang's attacks upon fascist and nazi policy. He added that even in the United States the same idea tended to prevail, so that when the Dean of Canterbury, Dr Hewlett Johnson, visited Canada and spoke in support of social credit, of which he was then an advocate, many Americans were bewildered by this apparent evidence that the British government was about to follow this policy. The second incident concerns the same period and is even more revealing. An Anglican priest who had worked in the Corean Mission stated that, because of two very simplified reports which reached the Japanese authorities almost simultaneously, the Roman Catholic missions received relatively favourable treatment, whilst the Anglican came under the close scrutiny of the police. What they had learned was that Pope Pius xi had denounced communism, whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury had denounced Japanese policy in China. It was known that the Corean Mission (which was not in any Anglican ecclesiastical province) came under the direct jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who nominated its bishop. And the Japanese believed that Dr Lang

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• Die Verwendung Quantitativer Daten in Politik- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschungen zur Neueren Deutschen Geschichte

  James J Sheehan, James J Von Sheehan•Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte•1972

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