Lovely post.
I suspect that I sit somewhat uneasily somewhere in the middle. Religion tends to become a pain in the arse when it gets organised, and the idea of an established state church in the Britain of 2016 seems to me a self-evident absurdity. I suspect that falling attendance and dwindling influence amongst other social changes will make the status quo untenable sooner rather later and lead to disestablishment in the not too distant future. I won't lament that.
Organisation and establishment however are entirely separate matters from whatever good the C of E may do - and that surely is beyond dispute to some extent. I would imagine - hope, in fact - that the same situation pertains to the C of E as it does with Catholicism: that's to say, a lay membership at odds with (by that I mean, significantly more liberal, tolerant, open-minded, progressive, whatever word you care to use) than the leadership. On the other hand, it could be entirely the opposite - I don't know; maybe somebody does.
I do know that there are aspects of the C of E which to me are inevitably bound up with nebulous notions of Englishness. These are the things that John Betjeman called "all the inessentials of faith" - he meant the ecclesiastical buildings and their architecture, the stained glass, the wheezy organs and often equally wheezy organists and so forth. I know full well and don't need to be told that this feeds into a hazy, highly romanticised view of Englishness and the C of E; this is the world of John Major's much-mocked elderly spinsters cycling through the mist to Evensong and what have you. These ideas didn't come out of nowhere however and do persist in the English psyche. How much of that would remain if the C of E went the way of most of its current active membership, and for how long, are fraught questions. Churches and cathedrals are expensive to keep relatively spick and span; their loss would be a catastrophic national impoverishment regardless of whether they're used for their intended purpose or are part of the heritage industry.
I think there is a significant difference between village on the one hand and town/city on the other.
I can certainly see how a village church has always been at the heart of the village, for everyone, not just worshippers, and its decline or loss is, to an extent, akin to the loss of the village shop, post office, school or pub.
But I don't think the same thing holds in towns and cities with lots of churches and also a much wider range of community amenities. I don't think a single church has anything like the same importance or visibility in those communities. So in my part of my small city there are a whole range of churches or all sorts of denominations, and they do lots of stuff - but the vast majority of that stuff is aimed squarely at their own sub-population of worshippers. If you aren't a worshipper their impact on your life is close to zero.
And it is interesting that you bring up those traditional elements that many of us non believers hold rather dear - so the feel of the wooden pews and the light through the stained glass windows. The traditional organ playing and choral singing etc. But many of those are being sidelined not by the non believers but by the churches themselves who want to modernise - so out go the pews, replaced by modern comfortable chairs. Not going to invest in an organ, nope music is now from some excruciating 'folk' group - traditional choral singing - well no interest, no-one to lead it, old fashioned, out with that.
I suspect most of the churches around my way are much more likely to be filled with traditional church choral music when they are hired out to the local secular choral societies or schools for their choirs rather than as part of their normal worship.
Sure there is a difference in the prestige cathedrals who tend to retain a recognition of the importance of traditional music, but I think this is gone or near to gone in many more local churches.
