STEPHEN GLOVER: I really like the Church but it surely’s turn into a self-lacerating sect, gripped by the incorrect issues – and failing to convey what many nonetheless yearn to listen to
Christmas again. In two days’ time we will celebrate the birth of Our Lord. Across Europe, pews that were once full will probably be emptier than ever.
True, in Orthodox Russia there will be a decent turnout when, on January 7, they celebrate Christmas. So also in largely Orthodox Ukraine.
Strange that two of the more Christian countries in Europe, and Orthodox ones at that, should be at war with each other.
In Roman Catholic Poland, too, there will be millions of people in church on Christmas Day, though fewer than a decade ago.
But across what was once Christian Europe, in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, congregations will be much sparser than they were a generation back.
In Britain, where only 49 per cent of adults believe in a deity, according to a recent survey, they will probably be the thinnest of all. If a Christian God is in retreat across the Continent in our increasingly secular and consumerist age, He has already disappeared from the lives of many Britons.
Justin Welby, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, has fostered a self-lacerating culture intended to burden us with guilt
Who can doubt that the many failings of the Church of England – the Established and supposedly national Church for the 85 per cent of the population that lives in England – have contributed to the alarming collapse of belief and attendance?
I feel I can be rude about the C of E because it is the Church in which I was brought up, and which my father and several relatives have served as priests. I love it, and yet it – by which I mean the behaviour of some of its senior clerics – often drives me potty.
Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday carried a story that somehow encapsulates our national Church. Clergy in the Birmingham Diocese have received an email suggesting they censor certain Advent hymns so that congregations can celebrate the birth of Christ ‘without causing unnecessary offence’ to followers of other religions. Advent is the season of the Church year immediately preceding Christmas Day.
The well-known carol O Come, O Come, Emmanuel was singled out for depicting other faiths as being ‘outside of God’s grace’. I have just re-read it and can’t fathom what the ecclesiastical busybodies are getting at. It ends on a note of unity: ‘Bid all our sad divisions cease, be yourself our King of Peace.’
The rousing hymn Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending (a favourite of Queen Victoria’s) has also troubled Church censors, who alerted clergy to research that finds ‘problematic’ the words asserting that Jesus is ‘the true Messiah’. I thought that was the whole point!
Are the authors of these admonitions mad? Or have their accommodating Anglican brains literally turned to porridge?
The same Diocese of Birmingham appears to be the epicentre of wokeness. Earlier this year, it advertised for an ‘Anti-racism practice officer (deconstructing whiteness)’ to work as part of an 11-person ‘racial justice’ team across churches in the West Midlands. The annual salary of £36,000 was appreciably more than a vicar’s.
Even Justin Welby, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, gulped a little when he heard of this nonsense, though he failed to despatch an emissary to Birmingham to ascertain whether the senior clerics in England’s second city can reasonably claim to have any functioning brain cells.
The story about Advent carols and the recruitment of a person to ‘deconstruct whiteness’ tell us a lot about the modern C of E hierarchy. Leftist, worldly preoccupations are displacing the divine. If God is disappearing from so many people’s lives, it is at least partly because He is disappearing from our national Church.
Justin Welby can’t be entirely blamed because his power is limited, certainly much more so than the Pope’s. But his obsession with the past evils of slavery has fostered a self-lacerating culture intended to burden us with guilt. Yet what can we do about the sins of some of our distant forbears?
Giving money is one idea. An internal body set up – one might almost say egged on – by Mr Welby has recommended that the C of E should pay £1 billion in reparations to atone for its historic links to slavery, which were actually short-lived and ended 300 years ago. This enormous sum of money would be far better spent on strengthening our tottering national Church.
Along with his fixation about slavery, Justin Welby has bought into ‘critical race theory’. He has proclaimed that the Church of England is ‘deeply institutionally racist’ – which is simply untrue and arguably mendacious – and called for ‘radical and decisive’ action.
How instructive that this breast-beating cleric should have ignored and possibly excused the sadistic activities of a pervert called John Smyth, who was not only well known to Welby but also a leading figure on the evangelical wing of the Church of England. It is this huge lapse of judgment that has caused his downfall.
Now we learn that the second most senior prelate in the C of E, the Archbishop of York, also showed undue leniency to an abuser, in this case a rogue priest. In his previous role as Bishop of Chelmsford, Stephen Cottrell twice permitted the renewal of the contract of the Rev. David Tudor as an area dean despite knowing that he had paid compensation to a woman who said that, as a child, she had been sexually abused by him. Mr Cottrell’s future must surely hang by a thread.
The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, showed undue leniency to an abuser, in this case a rogue priest, in his previous role as Bishop of Chelmsford
Whoever is the next Archbishop of Canterbury, it certainly won’t be Stephen Cottrell, though in other circumstances he would have perfectly fitted the bill. We may be pretty certain that the person who is appointed will be bureaucratic, wokeish and unlearned, and very probably deficient in holiness.
My poor Church. It has become a kind of sect, gripped by so many of the wrong concerns, timid and apologetic about its very existence, and faltering in conveying what many still yearn to hear.
How easy it is to get depressed. I would remain so if I did not know that there are many priests – some Anglo-Catholic, others evangelical and some middle-of-the road – who are holy, who do sincerely believe in, and preach, the Gospel of Christ.
Man does not live by bread alone. For all that this is a secular age, there is a great, enduring hunger for the numinous. Even atheists can find moving the story of how God came down to Earth and chose to be born as a helpless baby in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn.
Whether you believe that or not, you may sympathise with the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, who declared earlier this year that he is a ‘cultural Christian’. I think he means that the life and death of that baby have shaped our country and the Western world, and given us the values most of us cherish.
When I finish this article, I shall be going to a carol service in a beautiful Anglican church a mile away. People of different political beliefs and from varying backgrounds and countries will for a moment forget all the idiocies of our Church’s leaders, and be united in wonder and praise.
