Before he was arrested and ultimately burnt at the stake, the great Presbyterian martyr George Wishart dissuaded his young disciple John Knox from following him to martyrdom with the famous words, “Nay, return to your bairns and God bless you. One is sufficient for a sacrifice.”
Four hundred and sixty-eight years since Wishart was murdered at St. Andrew’s, his native Scotland came closer than expected to seceding from the United Kingdom and becoming an independent country. Although Scotland was a sovereign nation throughout his lifetime, one could make the argument that it’s been the Union with England that has helped cement Wishart and Knox’s greatest legacy, the Reformation and creation of the Church of Scotland. The Kirk’s future was also one of the more silent – but deeply contentious – issues throughout the independence campaign.
After its formal break with Rome in 1560, the Kirk was declared the national Church of Scotland in 1690, a constitutional privilege that was re-affirmed as part of the negotiations prior to the Act of Union in 1707. But it was in 1921 through the passage of the Church of Scotland Act that the Kirk cemented its role and prohibited “the civil authority any right of interference with the proceedings or judgments of the Church within the sphere of its spiritual government and jurisdiction.” The Union, once viewed as a potential threat to the constitutional privilege of the Kirk, was now its guardian.
Thus, Scottishness and Presbyterianism were synonymous – and with it reverence for the Union. Thanks to the prevalence of the Kirk, the political muscle of the Orange Order and the Freemasons, and the supposed Catholic menace emanating from Irish immigrants, Conservatives (National Liberals and Unionists) had a reliable constituency in Scotland, winning 50.1 percent of the vote and half of Scotland’s parliamentary seats at its height in 1955. However, it was around this time that membership in the Church of Scotland started to precipitously decline, and with it the very essence and faith of what it meant to be Scottish.
The decline of Presbyterianism and sectarian politics also signaled the death of Scottish Conservatism – often wrongly attributed to Margaret Thatcher who was able to rejuvenate her party south of the border but had mixed results north of Hadrian’s Wall. In the Kirk’s place emerged modern-day nationalism, energized by Scotland’s unique cultural identity within the United Kingdom, but also fueled by the economic windfall from the discovery of North Sea oil. The Scottish National Party (SNP), a fascinating cocktail of socialists and former Conservatives, gleefully stepped into the vacuum.
With Scotland getting devolved government over some domestic matters in 1999, the SNP was able to ruthlessly exploit growing hostility towards London as a result of the Iraq War, resulting in its winning a plurality of seats in the Scottish Parliament in 2007. Four years later, the SNP won a stunning outright majority, despite the fact the electoral system was designed to create coalitions. The 2010 return of the “English” Conservatives to government in Westminster was also certainly a contributing factor.
After the SNP’s victory, Scotland became embroiled in a political war of attrition – an independence referendum campaign that was officially meant to last two years, but was really initiated the day Alex Salmond’s party won its outright majority. Although support for independence fell short this past Thursday, the issue itself has certainly not been laid to rest. Throughout what was a deeply bitter campaign, questions were asked about the constitutional future of the Church of Scotland.
At least according to the government in Edinburgh, under an independent Scotland there would have been “no change to the legal status of any religion or of Scotland’s churches.” While the interim constitution would have recognized Queen Elizabeth’s continued role as head of state, leaders in the Kirk accused the SNP of being dishonest given that the interim constitution made no mention of its role. Rev. John Ross, a former Free Church of Scotland moderator, stated that in the event of independence, Christianity would be “deprived of state recognition as Scotland’s national religion” for the first time since the Reformation. The Scots’ rejection of independence meant dealing with such a fractious issue has been postponed, but only that.
In the aftermath of the “No” vote, the Church of Scotland has led the way towards national unity, with its moderator calling on the winning side to avoid “triumphalism,” while hosting a service of reconciliation with leading figures from both campaigns. After such a deeply divisive campaign in which its own constitutional privilege might have been at stake, this role is likely to keep the Kirk preoccupied in the short-term. And yet in an age of growing secularization and troubling membership numbers, the Kirk knows it faces considerable immediate challenges in conveying to Scots why they need faith and spirituality in their lives. Even with its constitutional privilege intact, one wonders whether the church might too face the ultimate sacrifice.
