THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND plays a central but slightly awkward role in commemorating war dead. In the everyday life of England’s bustling, multicultural cities, the existence of an established church, historically privileged but commanding the active loyalty of only a small minority, can seem like a curious anachronism. But at certain occasions and seasons, the Church of England comes into its own as a focus of national emotion.

One such time is the national remembrance of war dead, which takes place every year around the anniversary of the armistice that ended the first world war, which came into effect on 11th November 1918. This year’s commemorations have an added poignancy because a century has passed since the guns fell silent.

As is customary, clergy of the Church of England will lead, though not monopolise, the religious part of the public proceedings in England. A Sunday-morning ceremony at the war memorial known as the Cenotaph (a religiously neutral monument in one of London’s central thoroughfares) will feature generic Anglican prayers. If things unfold as usual, representatives of many faiths, Christian and otherwise, will also play their part in the careful choreography.

Meanwhile, many of the country’s great places of worship, including Westminster Abbey in London, are hosting acts of “civic remembrance”: a revealing turn of phrase indicative of rituals that walk the boundary between the secular and the spiritual. They are an occasion on which earthly bigwigs, mayors and national politicians among them, can pay their respect to the dead, regardless of what faith if any they profess.

But the role of Anglicanism in national remembrance is even more evident in England’s small towns and villages whose focal point often consists of monuments commemorating the community’s dead from two global bloodbaths, as well as later conflicts. Whether or not the war memorial and the village church are co-located (as often happens), the two things are intimately associated in collective consciousness. Both express deep connections with generations long gone. Both articulate the feelings of a community that has endured public and private pain, and is trying to make sense of that suffering and move on.

And for folk who rarely darken the door of any place of worship at other times, it can seem natural to gather at the church, whether inside or outside, and ponder the lists of locally familiar names, recalling young men who left and never returned.

This year’s centenary will be marked by a thunderous ringing of bells across the country, recalling the peals heard by an exhausted, relieved nation in November 1918. And in England, most of those bells will be in Anglican churches and cathedrals because that is where bells generally are.

The Church of England has centuries of practice at stepping, briefly, into a central ceremonial role in a nation that mostly ignores it. But in one respect, it finds the role of commemorator-in-chief a little awkward.

Although this applies more to its clergy than its faithful, the Anglican church of 2018 is decidedly liberal, cosmopolitan and pacifist in its ethos. It can easily deplore the suffering enduring by soldiers and civilians on all sides of a conflict, but it can no longer easily accept the old patriotic rhetoric which held that the King’s soldiers “gave their lives that we might live” or were fighting “a war to end all wars”.

Thus the ritual which the Church of England is recommending this year to its thousands of places of worship goes long on reconciliation, peace and the human sinfulness that leads to war. It selects the most eirenic readings from the Bible, just as Saint Paul’s injunction to “bless those who persecute you and where possible live peaceably with all.” It suggests, for example, reading the Lord’s Prayer, the most familiar of Christian supplications, in both French and German, to make the point that the continent is now a zone of peace.

Doubtless some will grumble over this, much as Margaret Thatcher did after the British-Argentine conflict of 1982 when a service of remembrance recalled the war dead of both countries. But the Church of England has been balancing, ducking and weaving between many different constituencies and ideologies throughout its half-millennium of existence, and the chances are that it will somehow weave on.