Our Christian tradition is complicated. Very complicated. If you know of anything more complicated on the face of the planet, please let me know. In fact, please don’t.
We have to face this complexity — even if this means discussing the history of ideas to some extent. The alternative is a debate full of muddled gut-reactions, and bad, bad articles about our endangered religious tradition, written by journalists who go to church twice a year and even then are half-drunk.
The article that Baroness Warsi wrote for the Telegraph before visiting the pope was… how shall we put this? It was not good enough. In fact it was pretty close to shameful, in its rabble-rousing anti-secular tone. This is a serious matter; it should be handled with extreme care, and without clumsy accusations of creeping totalitarianism, and fist-biting banalities about the confident expression of faith being the means to social harmony.
To be fair to the Baroness, her contribution only reflects the standards that have been set by the most vocal bishops and former archbishops. Which brings us to Lord Carey, a man who — oh dear, how shall we put this? — let us say that he does nothing to refute the intellectual reputation of Evangelicalism. He keeps on repeating, with stunning lack of nuance, the same trusty phrases about us being a Christian nation, and the established Church saving us from moral chaos, and a dangerous secularist plot being hatched by a small minority. There is no religion story in the news to which his Lordship does not feel obliged to bring his wise counsel. If a gay person wins a church raffle he pops up to contest it.
Why bother complaining about these ham-fisted interventions? Because the ‘debate’ contains almost nothing else, on the religious side. Of course many believers find talk of a clash between religion and secularism overblown, and counter-productive, but they utterly lack a competing narrative.
So what’s the complexity that I charge the debate with evading? OK: in our tradition, Christianity and liberalism are entangled. For a very long time, there was a sort of liberal-Christian bear-hug. It worked, well enough. It is now not working so well; it causes anxiety, litigation, bad articles. Can it be revived? Or is a new approach needed? We have a big debate on our hands, and in my opinion it is the most fascinating debate on the planet. Lucky us! But on the other hand, if you’ll excuse a biblical phrase, woe to us if we flunk it. Woe to us if we just chuck our gut-reactions at each other.
Here’s my horrible history lesson. The Terrible Tudors nationalized religion and also started us off thinking that we were rather politically special. We were the plucky freedom-loving nation, the antidote to those evil Catholic empires. Under the Simpering Stuarts, this aspiration became more real: constitutional liberalism was bloodily thrashed out. And at the same time the Church became more firmly established. This settlement was cavalier about religious liberty – it was less important than national unity, we decided in our wisdom. But we compensated for this by ensuring that the Church was mild, broad, semi-secular, suspicious of clericalism. When, over the next few centuries, purists demanded constitutional reform and equal rights for those of all faiths (and of no faith), they seemed rather strident, narrow, …un-English. The Church managed to seem a unifying force: in the twentieth century this involved strong approval for the welfare state, and broad approval of social liberalization. Of course we were a Christian country, with an established Church — and, more subtly, of course this Church promoted a vague unifying liberalism.
This arrangement became more questionable in recent decades: first in a gradual, drip-drip way, and then in a big fat gush called 9/11.
In the new climate, with many nonbelievers looking at faith with suspicion, the Church of England was faced with a big challenge. Could it update its traditional trick of balancing establishment with liberalism? Maybe it was an impossible task: maybe things had just changed too much — fewer Anglican churchgoers, more assertive Muslims and atheists, less sense of common culture.
Well it failed, and in a particularly dismal way. Instead of projecting the old liberal-friendly religiosity, it echoed the rhetoric of embattled faith-groups. It started doing something that it had previously wisely avoided: attacking secular liberalism. Rowan Williams is a great theologian in many ways, but he was the diametrically wrong man for this job at this time. He sought to defend faith communities, all faith communities, from alleged liberal aggression. Of course he did so with far more intelligence and nuance than his fellow bishops, but sometimes erudition isn’t enough. In a sense he sided with the Muslims against the liberals: his 2008 speech in support of the partial introduction of sharia law into the British legal system was representative of his approach. He, and his fellow bishops, should have been doing the exact opposite of this: reassuring liberals that the established Church espoused a liberal form of religion, and was wary of less liberal forms.
Put to the test, the Church of England failed to renew its establishment, it broke the unwritten modern rules of it. It allowed itself to get sucked into a culture war, to take sides.
I grew up accepting the liberal-Christian bear-hug of Anglicanism. It seemed a good thing on balance, a noble endeavour. The problematic aspect — the aura of privilege around establishment — seemed redeemed by the instinctive good-heartedness and public-spiritedness of the Church — by the fact that it didn’t behave like an interest-group, fighting its corner, defending its patch. It seemed attuned to the mood and needs of the nation as a whole.
But, after 9/11, I lost this sense of trust in the Church. It seemed to react to the new climate with a new rigidity and bullishness. The issue of faith schools, which suddenly rose to prominence, was central for me. Instead of admitting that this was a huge dilemma, and that the case for an essentially secular state education system was very strong, the Church seemed dominated by a determination to beat back the secularists. In fact the dilemma was two-fold: faith schools were open to the charge of dividing religious and ethnic communities from each other; and many Church of England schools were open to the charge of encouraging strategic middle-class church-going, deepening social division (and — importantly for me — damaging the authenticity of church-going). The Church aggressively rejected both charges, as slurs concocted by God-haters. It seemed to have decided that liberal concerns about general social harmony were far less important than consolidating its own cultural power.
This might sound tendentious, but I think that Anglican leaders partly felt pressured by Catholics, whose punditry-presence is very strong indeed (the main weekly columnist in The Church Times is a Catholic!), into forgetting their old liberal commitments. The Catholics' tough line on the ‘secular threat’ had to be matched.
So, I felt that Anglicanism now demanded something more of me than worshipping Jesus Christ. Judging from the rhetoric of its bishops, it seemed to require me to take a conservative position in a culture war, to fight ‘militant secularism’. Well, I preferred not to. It seemed to me that political and cultural liberalism was deeply compatible with Christianity. The C of E used to understand this, more or less: it if had ceased to do so, then it was time to admit that the separation of church and state made rather a lot of sense. The thrust of Polly Toynbee’s articles on these matters seemed pretty unobjectionable. Where did that leave my denominational allegiance? Was I fated to be an Anabaptist or something? A Quaker maybe?
I wasn’t sure. I drifted away from church; it all seemed too prone to illiberal posturing. Then I moved to New York, and by grace rediscovered my native Anglicanism. I found a very cool church where we sing our Hosannas like we really mean it, and none of us is seeking to get our kids into a church school. And there is no reactionary drum-beat from the bishops in the media. This suits me. I’m even seeking ordination.
It seems to me that the true spirit of Anglicanism has flown its birth-land. In England, the perceived need to defend ‘Christian’ culture from secularists has become a sort of all-consuming idolatry. It makes church leaders feel like tough culture-warriors. It is a terrible barrier to the communication of Christ.
The article that Baroness Warsi wrote for the Telegraph before visiting the pope was… how shall we put this? It was not good enough. In fact it was pretty close to shameful, in its rabble-rousing anti-secular tone. This is a serious matter; it should be handled with extreme care, and without clumsy accusations of creeping totalitarianism, and fist-biting banalities about the confident expression of faith being the means to social harmony.
To be fair to the Baroness, her contribution only reflects the standards that have been set by the most vocal bishops and former archbishops. Which brings us to Lord Carey, a man who — oh dear, how shall we put this? — let us say that he does nothing to refute the intellectual reputation of Evangelicalism. He keeps on repeating, with stunning lack of nuance, the same trusty phrases about us being a Christian nation, and the established Church saving us from moral chaos, and a dangerous secularist plot being hatched by a small minority. There is no religion story in the news to which his Lordship does not feel obliged to bring his wise counsel. If a gay person wins a church raffle he pops up to contest it.
Why bother complaining about these ham-fisted interventions? Because the ‘debate’ contains almost nothing else, on the religious side. Of course many believers find talk of a clash between religion and secularism overblown, and counter-productive, but they utterly lack a competing narrative.
So what’s the complexity that I charge the debate with evading? OK: in our tradition, Christianity and liberalism are entangled. For a very long time, there was a sort of liberal-Christian bear-hug. It worked, well enough. It is now not working so well; it causes anxiety, litigation, bad articles. Can it be revived? Or is a new approach needed? We have a big debate on our hands, and in my opinion it is the most fascinating debate on the planet. Lucky us! But on the other hand, if you’ll excuse a biblical phrase, woe to us if we flunk it. Woe to us if we just chuck our gut-reactions at each other.
Here’s my horrible history lesson. The Terrible Tudors nationalized religion and also started us off thinking that we were rather politically special. We were the plucky freedom-loving nation, the antidote to those evil Catholic empires. Under the Simpering Stuarts, this aspiration became more real: constitutional liberalism was bloodily thrashed out. And at the same time the Church became more firmly established. This settlement was cavalier about religious liberty – it was less important than national unity, we decided in our wisdom. But we compensated for this by ensuring that the Church was mild, broad, semi-secular, suspicious of clericalism. When, over the next few centuries, purists demanded constitutional reform and equal rights for those of all faiths (and of no faith), they seemed rather strident, narrow, …un-English. The Church managed to seem a unifying force: in the twentieth century this involved strong approval for the welfare state, and broad approval of social liberalization. Of course we were a Christian country, with an established Church — and, more subtly, of course this Church promoted a vague unifying liberalism.
This arrangement became more questionable in recent decades: first in a gradual, drip-drip way, and then in a big fat gush called 9/11.
In the new climate, with many nonbelievers looking at faith with suspicion, the Church of England was faced with a big challenge. Could it update its traditional trick of balancing establishment with liberalism? Maybe it was an impossible task: maybe things had just changed too much — fewer Anglican churchgoers, more assertive Muslims and atheists, less sense of common culture.
Well it failed, and in a particularly dismal way. Instead of projecting the old liberal-friendly religiosity, it echoed the rhetoric of embattled faith-groups. It started doing something that it had previously wisely avoided: attacking secular liberalism. Rowan Williams is a great theologian in many ways, but he was the diametrically wrong man for this job at this time. He sought to defend faith communities, all faith communities, from alleged liberal aggression. Of course he did so with far more intelligence and nuance than his fellow bishops, but sometimes erudition isn’t enough. In a sense he sided with the Muslims against the liberals: his 2008 speech in support of the partial introduction of sharia law into the British legal system was representative of his approach. He, and his fellow bishops, should have been doing the exact opposite of this: reassuring liberals that the established Church espoused a liberal form of religion, and was wary of less liberal forms.
Put to the test, the Church of England failed to renew its establishment, it broke the unwritten modern rules of it. It allowed itself to get sucked into a culture war, to take sides.
I grew up accepting the liberal-Christian bear-hug of Anglicanism. It seemed a good thing on balance, a noble endeavour. The problematic aspect — the aura of privilege around establishment — seemed redeemed by the instinctive good-heartedness and public-spiritedness of the Church — by the fact that it didn’t behave like an interest-group, fighting its corner, defending its patch. It seemed attuned to the mood and needs of the nation as a whole.
But, after 9/11, I lost this sense of trust in the Church. It seemed to react to the new climate with a new rigidity and bullishness. The issue of faith schools, which suddenly rose to prominence, was central for me. Instead of admitting that this was a huge dilemma, and that the case for an essentially secular state education system was very strong, the Church seemed dominated by a determination to beat back the secularists. In fact the dilemma was two-fold: faith schools were open to the charge of dividing religious and ethnic communities from each other; and many Church of England schools were open to the charge of encouraging strategic middle-class church-going, deepening social division (and — importantly for me — damaging the authenticity of church-going). The Church aggressively rejected both charges, as slurs concocted by God-haters. It seemed to have decided that liberal concerns about general social harmony were far less important than consolidating its own cultural power.
This might sound tendentious, but I think that Anglican leaders partly felt pressured by Catholics, whose punditry-presence is very strong indeed (the main weekly columnist in The Church Times is a Catholic!), into forgetting their old liberal commitments. The Catholics' tough line on the ‘secular threat’ had to be matched.
So, I felt that Anglicanism now demanded something more of me than worshipping Jesus Christ. Judging from the rhetoric of its bishops, it seemed to require me to take a conservative position in a culture war, to fight ‘militant secularism’. Well, I preferred not to. It seemed to me that political and cultural liberalism was deeply compatible with Christianity. The C of E used to understand this, more or less: it if had ceased to do so, then it was time to admit that the separation of church and state made rather a lot of sense. The thrust of Polly Toynbee’s articles on these matters seemed pretty unobjectionable. Where did that leave my denominational allegiance? Was I fated to be an Anabaptist or something? A Quaker maybe?
I wasn’t sure. I drifted away from church; it all seemed too prone to illiberal posturing. Then I moved to New York, and by grace rediscovered my native Anglicanism. I found a very cool church where we sing our Hosannas like we really mean it, and none of us is seeking to get our kids into a church school. And there is no reactionary drum-beat from the bishops in the media. This suits me. I’m even seeking ordination.
It seems to me that the true spirit of Anglicanism has flown its birth-land. In England, the perceived need to defend ‘Christian’ culture from secularists has become a sort of all-consuming idolatry. It makes church leaders feel like tough culture-warriors. It is a terrible barrier to the communication of Christ.
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