The Church of England - which squares the circle of describing itself as both Catholic and Protestant - has been losing its grip on the nation even since compulsory tithes and fines for non-attendance were abolished in the mid 19thC (I'm oversimplifying a bit, here - non-attendance was still technically illegal until 1969 but the last prosecution was in 1840). The nineteenth century saw the Church of England shape its implicit congregational beliefs (modus orendi, modus credendi) locally in response to the most popular competing denominations, so in the Westcountry, where Methodism was its chief rival, parish churches minimised the more Catholic practices, whereas in Lancashire, where I'm from, Anglo-Catholic forms of worship are more popular because historically Lancashire is a very Catholic county. One can call it a broad Church - I call it meretricious.
What this means is, you can walk into any Anglican church of a Sunday morning in an area you're unfamiliar with, and have no idea what you're going to get: the service can be anything from para-Pentecostal, with folk babbling and rolling in the aisles, to Anglo-Catholic, where it's hard to realise for a time that they're not following the Roman Missal. It's a huge irony, but practically speaking, it's the parish congregations who effectively determine the form of worship in their local Anglican church, so we could say that Congregationalism has triumphed. The authority of their bishops over their dioceses seems almost as titular and symbolic, as that of our monarchy.
What am I doing? I should be defending anything English, especially the dear old C of E, tooth and nail, against any hint of criticism from you wascally webels, like a good pre-Revolutionary loyalist Tory...
