The Fellowship, established in 1990,is an interdenominational organisation that supports the Conservative Party and works to draw more professing Christians into association with the Party.
Alistair Lexden, the Conservative Party’s Official Historian, spoke to some 50 members of the Fellowship attending a lively training conference at Conservative Campaign Headquarters in London on October 19. He stressed the fervour with which the Tory Party attached itself to the Church of England when it first emerged on the political stage, alongside its implacable Whig opponents, 335 years ago. Passionately opposed to Roman Catholicism, the Party was convinced that all Protestants in England should worship in one national Church, a principle that set it at odds with the thousands of Protestant nonconformists who rejected that proposition. In the well-known adage, the Church of England became known as ‘the Tory Party at prayer’. The Whigs were infinitely more sympathetic to Protestant dissenters. A deep sectarian division was created which lasted until the second half of the last century and had a profound –and generally harmful-- effect on British politics.
In the nineteenth century many Conservatives—as the Tories then became officially known—were reluctant to accept the dismantling of the special status that Anglicans enjoyed in public life, the financial support that all householders were obliged to provide to the Church and the monopoly it enjoyed over university appointments. The Liberals associated themselves with the cause of reform in church and state, gaining a political ascendancy that was successfully—though briefly—challenged by Sir Robert Peel’s great reforming government in the 1840s. It was only when politics came to be dominated by the issues of Empire and the Union with Ireland in the 1880s that the Conservatives (who now took to describing themselves as Unionists) gained the upper hand. These great questions drew some non-Anglicans to the Unionist side, though most remained loyal to the Liberals. Many Unionists were devout Anglicans, no one more so than the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury who combined a mastery of both party and nation as Prime Minister for over thirteen years at the end of the Victorian age.
In the twentieth century the party remained closely associated with the Church of England, though in a less aggressive fashion. Leaders like Stanley Baldwin and Harold Macmillan, both strong Anglicans, worked hard to unite all sections of the population behind their ‘one nation’ politics. Those seeking nomination as Conservative candidates, however, could still find themselves in difficulty if they were not members of the Church of England. Today virtually no trace remains of the interdenominational strife that has marked so much of British history. The Conservative Party’s task now is to assist in working for a close understanding between different faiths—a task, Alistair Lexden suggested, that would be easier to accomplish if Christians assert their beliefs with pride and conviction ,so gaining the respect of other faiths.