Established Values: How the Church nearly lost its way over the death of Enoch Powell

IN THE END they had roped off the south transept of Westminster Abbey so that you couldn't get to where Enoch Powell's body had been placed for its "lying in" the night before his funeral. "It's not before the High Altar," a red-robed Abbey divine said, a little too anxiously, "that privilege is reserved for members of the Royal Family and Abbey clergy." It was not in the Lady chapel, for that was reserved for members of the Order of the Garter, and John Enoch Powell was elevated no higher than the rank of privy counsellor. Rather it was in the chapel of St Faith, just off Poet's Corner.

Powell, who was inter alia an amateur versifier in the mode of his hero A E Housman, would have enjoyed that. Indeed he would no doubt have allowed himself a wry little smile over the whole fuss that welled up over the propriety of whether so notorious a political figure as he should have been accorded the honour of lying, in state or otherwise, in such a shrine to British nationhood. It has been an archetypally Powellite row, confusing as it did, rules and reasoning with a more subtle political reality. Had he been alive Powell's celebrated inexorable logic, preceding as it did from a jumble of incompatible premises - he thought nationalism and free- market economics were compatible - would probably have led him into a muddle, just as it has done this week with the Church of England.

The red-robed divine continued. "You see, he's been allowed there not because he is a national politician, but because he was a warden of [the adjoining parliamentary church of] St Margaret's and was a regular communicant at the Abbey." People in that category are put in the chapel of St Faith - a third century martyr whose name is invoked by soldiers, prisoners and pilgrims and her chapel at Westminster Abbey is the one which is, in its tourist turmoil, reserved for private prayer. It is there that morning prayers are said and where members of the Abbey staff have, for the past 20 years, been allowed to lie in their coffins the night before their funeral. "Any of us could lie there," said the helpful young woman behind the inquiry desk. "Even me."

The Abbey staff were clearly under orders to back-peddle furiously since Britain's immigrant community, and those who feel hurt on their behalf, made such vigorous protests about undue honours being accorded to a man whose public life was, as his funeral address by Lord Biffen yesterday so delicately under-stated it, "somewhat turbulent".

Small wonder, for the whole sad business exposed one of the profound faultlines in the Church of England, which centres around the question of what is the role of an established church? This episode has served only to add ammunition to the armoury of the forces pressing for disestablishment.

The confusion of roles is bound up with ambivalence: the Church of England wants to enjoy the protection of the state, and draw upon its mystique, but then it wants to retain autonomy when that seems to suit it better. The questions it cannot seem to answer are these: Is the Church a national institution which ministers to the people as a whole, or is it a pastoral agency that concerns itself primarily with ministering to the needs of individuals? Are the imperatives of political symbolism greater than the needs of the Powell family?

Powell himself would have understood the broader agenda. His faith, said Biffen, was "grounded on the Church of England whose doctrine and historical role he embraced". It is through a grasp of the significance of that "historical role" that it is possible to distinguish between Powell the man - who is due all the solemnities and solace of the Church - and Powell the historical figure, who does not merit ecclesiastical endorsement.

Much has been written since his death about his "rivers of blood" speech on immigration and we have been routinely told that he did not actually use the phrase (which was in fact Churchill's). But he did speak about "watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre". He called for immigration to be reduced to "negligible proportions", and he demanded the "urgent" encouragement of repatriation. Without it the race problem in Britain by the end of the century would be "of American proportions". It was an apocalyptic vision he refused to temper with any appeal to the traditional English virtue of tolerance.

With a single speech Enoch Powell blew away the British consensus on race relations and gave legitimacy to much racial bigotry that would otherwise have been too ashamed to show its face. The damage would endure for generations. It was a speech of which, in the decades that followed, he retracted not a single word. All his other merits - as a scholar, a poet, a soldier, a parliamentarian, and an exponent of "sound money" - lived ever in the shadow of this dark deed.

An established church must make judgements in the face of such political realities. The forces of disestablishment are growing. Tony Blair's exercise of his right to reject the candidates chosen by the Crown Appointments Commission for the bishopric of Liverpool has strengthened the arm of those who protest that the Church of England must now rebel against its status as little more than a department of state, with a clerical monopoly that could be privatised just like British Rail or British Gas.

The bald fact is that theologically there is not much of an argument against disestablishment. Those who oppose it take refuge, like the Archbishops of York, David Hope, in the realisation that: "Establishment is a deftly woven tapestry. Once you start to pull out this thread and that thread, the question is how much remains." Advocates of disestablishment, such as Tony Benn, agree. "It could even destroy the Privy Council," he has said, gleefully.

The key argument for the antidisestablishmentarians is more elusive. It resides in something mystical, even transcendent, which speaks to the nation's need to acknowledge that there is more to life than consumerism and self-interest. It is the acknowledgement of the spiritual dimension to life, which is why establishment finds support among many Muslim and Jewish leaders too. The Church of England, with its formal mechanism for rites of passage - hatching, matching and dispatching - affords some kind of a collective point of contact in a world of insecurity and instability that seems increasingly stripped of its psychological anchors.

Purists will say this is not what the Church is for. But to reject the public's vague spirituality as mere nostalgia is part of the naive arrogance that has got the Church into the doldrums it is in today. And if the Established Church is to speak for the nation it must make political decisions, such as that Enoch Powell could have lain more appropriately in St Margaret's than in the Abbey itself

Before his funeral yesterday Enoch Powell's coffin lay overnight before the image of a small half figure of a Benedictine monk from whose lips issued a scroll with the words:

Me quem culpa gravis permit erige virgo suavis

Fac mihi placatum cristum delasque reatum

(From the burden of my sore transgressions, Sweet Virgin deliver me. Make my peace with Christ and blot out my iniquity).

The Church may pray that for Enoch Powell, the man, this will come to pass. But when it appears to seek to absolve Powell, the politician, from the judgement of history the possibility of disestablishment comes a step closer.