Andrew Walker exercises keen insight here arguing that state churches that align with the government, such as England’s Anglican Church, inevitably lose the gospel.

“If you want to lose the gospel, let the government manage it. If you want to accelerate the decline of vibrant Christian witness and baptize abortion and sodomy, let the unregenerate bureaucratize Christianity for some instrumental end. Over time, we’ll learn once again the timeless truth that God’s appointed buffer to keep the gospel intact, the church, is the only institution that effectively stewards it . . . The bigger challenge, on orders of magnitude, is a creeping secularism that wishes to establish itself as America’s moral framework, which is just as much a worldview with all the theological pretensions of a religion, but which drapes itself in the language of “neutrality” only to smuggle in claims that are, unquestionably, as far-reaching as any other religion.“