Sixteen Anglican chaplains are understood to be spending Remembrance Sunday on active service in Helmand, Afghanistan. 'Changes in religious belief, emphasised in recent census findings, demonstrate that Christianity in general, and the Church of England in particular, can no longer be fully inclusive of the whole community, particularly when over a quarter of the population have no religion,' he writes.īonney would rather see the event stripped of all its religious aspects and replaced with 'a secular ceremony with which all can identify'.Īccording to the Ministry of Defence, there are 265 Christian chaplains serving the armed forces, including 49 army reservists. The church cannot claim to speak for everybody in 21st-century Britain, he argues.

Yet despite the monument's explicitly secular nature, argues Bonney, the remembrance ceremony retains strong Christian aspects that demonstrate 'the continuing ritual dominance of that religion – in its Church of England form – in the public life of the UK state and its annual ceremony of remembrance of the dead of war'. It is marked only with the words 'The Glorious Dead' and dates commemorating both world wars, 1914-1918, and 1939-1945. He points out that David Lloyd George's cabinet rejected the Church of England's requests for the Cenotaph to include a cross and to bear Christian inscriptions. In his paper, The Cenotaph: a contested and consensual symbol of remembrance, Bonney argues that the monument's designer, Edwin Lutyens, did not want it to have religious significance as he recognised that many of those killed fighting for the British empire in the first world war were not Christian but Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh. The Remembrance Sunday ceremony at the Whitehall monument is usually led by the bishop of London, who offers prayers for all those who have died in the service of their country.

Remembrance sunday london 2013