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.
