The link between law and morality has been hotly debated by lawyers and philosophers over the years. This article takes as its starting point the assumption at the beginning of the twentieth century that it was the responsibility of courts and their judges to enforce and promote Christian morality. During the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that assumption has been comprehensively undone. This article examines the key points in the development of judicial approaches to law, morality and religion that have led to a completely different approach to such questions in the courts today.

This lecture – delivered before the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 became law – discusses three conceptions of the relation of Church and state: those of Richard Hooker, Thomas Warburton and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Hooker and Coleridge bind Church and state together more closely than does Warburton in The Alliance between Church and State (1736). It is argued is that the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act points to an increasingly Warburtonian, superficial, pragmatic understanding of the relation between state and Church, which can all too easily be pulled apart. The subtler positions of Hooker and Coleridge are excluded. The ‘quadruple lock’, by which the Government affirms that it protects the position of the Church of England in upholding a traditional doctrine of marriage, has been put in place as promised, but the Act marks a significant step on the road to the disestablishment of the Church of England.

This article deals with the relation between God and the secular legal systems of Western liberal democracies. It provides a normative argument for the compatibility of God and secular legal reasoning. In our age, in which believing in God is no longer socially axiomatic and the right to religious freedom protects all kinds of theistic and non-theistic religious beliefs, creeds and first philosophies, it seems contrary to religious neutrality for secular legal systems to single out God. This article instead argues that, although God and religion are inextricably intertwined, they affect the legal system in different ways because they are ontologically different. God cannot be reduced to a mere component of theistic religion. A proper understanding of secularisation might call for keeping God outside the legal system but not for driving God out of the public sphere of democratic societies. Secular legal systems are not atheist legal systems; they are legal systems ‘without religion’ but not ‘without God’. Secularisation implies some degree of minimal recognition of God as a metalegal concept. The specific degree of recognition of God appropriate for any given political community depends on its cultural and communitarian identity and should be subject to the rules of democratic procedures and majorities. This is the metalegal God.

The requirement for an oath of canonical obedience (or due obedience) pre-dates the Reformation although a printed text has so far only been traced back to 1637. It is taken by every bishop, priest and deacon, as well as by deaconesses and readers. There are few cases on the scope and meaning of the oath but the Privy Council case of Long v Bishop of Cape Town (1863) decided that the oath only requires obedience to such commands as the superior is otherwise by law authorised to impose. This case is still a binding authority, although difficulties arise as to its application in relation, for example, to national and diocesan regulations, policies and guidelines.

The autumn of 2013 saw two landmark decisions in the Anglican churches of the British Isles. On 12 September 2013 the Governing Body of the Church in Wales voted in favour of legislation to permit the ordination of women as bishops. On 20 September 2013 it was announced that on the previous day the Revd Patricia Storey had been elected as Bishop of Meath and Kildare. She was duly consecrated on 30 November 2013 and enthroned in her two cathedrals in early December. The Scottish Episcopal Church permits the ordination of women to the episcopate, but to date none has been elected to an episcopal see.

The problem of sectarianism has attracted increasing attention in recent years, particularly as a feature of hate crimes in Scotland today. The current law on sectarianism is based on the common law crime of breach of the peace and on new statutory offences which cover some categories of behaviour that have been prosecuted as breach of the peace. However, ‘the Crown frequently prosecutes a wide range of behaviours as breach of the peace when there is an (arguably more apposite) statutory offence’. The regulation regarding sectarianism might also require a reappraisal of the common view that blasphemy is no longer an offence in Scottish law.

At first glance, it appeared to be a technical and dry decision about the operation of the Places of Worship Registration Act 1855, yet the Supreme Court judgment in R (on the Application of Hodkin) v Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages was actually one of the most significant decisions related to law and religion in 2013. The Justices of the Supreme Court held that a church within the Church of Scientology could be a ‘place of meeting for religious worship’ within section 2 of the 1855 Act. In so doing, the Supreme Court overruled one of the most well-known decisions in English religion law, R v Registrar General, ex parte Segerdal. In Segerdal, although the Court of Appeal had held that a chapel within the Church of Scientology could not be registered under the Act, the reasoning of their Lordships differed: Buckley LJ and Winn LJ focused on what they perceived to be the lack of ‘worship’, refusing to define the ‘chameleon word’ religion, while Lord Denning emphasised the phrase ‘religious worship’, holding that this required ‘reverence or veneration of God or a Supreme Being’ and that this was not met in the case of the Church of Scientology, which was ‘more a philosophy on the existence of man or of life than a religion’. All of these statements have been questioned by the bold Supreme Court judgment in Hodkin, which provides guidance on how the terms ‘religion’ and ‘religious worship’ are to be understood by English law in the twenty-first century.

The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill completed its third reading in the Lords on 27 January and, at the time of writing, was awaiting the resolution of differences between the two Houses by the process commonly known as ‘ping-pong’. Concerns had been expressed by certain religious organisations that activities such as street preaching could be banned if there were complaints from residents; and the Salvation Army, in particular, with its tradition of open-air singing and brass bands, was worried that its activities might be curtailed.