Unlike either of his two most recent predecessors, Welby appeared to relish the executive side of his job. He knows that networking is meat and drink to an effective operator. Though the Church of England, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Church of Ireland and the Church in Wales continue to shrink, there is evidence of a tailing off in decline across some quarters. Where misgivings about the direction of travel arise, they tend to centre on the price paid for shiny Evangelical/Charismatic takeovers of smaller congregations which have thereby lost their traditions and distinctiveness.

It was misgivings about Welby’s style that gave rise to Save the Parish, a movement set up in 2018. Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew-the-Great in London and one of Save the Parish’s leading members, argues that both money and personnel would be available for threatened churches if there had been better management. He points out that the Church Commissioners’ assets total well over £10 billion, and that more Anglican priests are being ordained in England than two decades ago. Save the Parish also argues that the amalgamation of parishes in dioceses including Truro, Leicester and Sheffield is ecclesiological – namely driven by a sense among Evangelical bishops, especially, that the parish structure is dispensable. Meanwhile, money is held to be wasted on new projects that amount to reinventing the wheel.

“Take the purchase of a former Chinese takeaway in Manchester,” comments a priest in the city. “At least £7 million was spent on this venture. Several clergy and a youth worker were recruited. Yet it was only a few minutes’ walk from the 12th century parish church, where the incumbent would have given an arm and a leg for investment on that scale.” This example is not seen as untypical. Another source told me an unnerving story about St George’s, Portsmouth, a more or less viable church that was taken over by HTB when a problem arose with the city centre premises the church-planters had originally rented. “The congregation were told that they could keep their Sunday-morning parish eucharist for year one. But it was made clear that after that, drumkits and a big screen would take the place of the altar.”

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Save the Parish campaigners judge that current forms of church reorganisation are highly damaging. Its mission is to reverse what it describes as the accelerating process of “church closures, parish amalgamations, clergy reductions, increasing parish shares, expanding bureaucracy, mindless central initiatives and general bad governance that are strangling mission at the grassroots level”. Other clerics, while sympathetic to Save the Parish, nevertheless question the value of binary solutions. One of my friends recently spent a year helping out at a cluster of rural parishes in East Anglia. “Many of the churches concerned are on their last legs,” she told me. “Even if it were possible to provide more clergy — and that would be a big ask — it’s not clear what kinds of strategy could simply rebuild traditional Anglican worship from the ground up, except in certain places.”

A priest of great experience close to retirement, she makes several other germane points. One is that church-planting and initiatives such as “Messy Church” — informal worship in café-style conditions — have kept people who might otherwise have fallen away, and drawn in others who might never have attended worship in the first place. Another is that diocesan projects are usually bottom-up processes. The Church Commissioners’ interest is piqued by attractive-sounding proposals. It is no surprise to learn that Evangelical parishes have in the main been quicker off the mark with their funding applications. An archdeacon who himself has a high-church background expressed the matter in salty terms: “Whenever I find that Anglo-Catholics get money, they tend to buy a new set of vestments, but Evangelicals employ a youth worker.” He insisted that, on the whole, “Evangelicals have been more strategic, better organised, more able to exploit contemporary culture — perhaps for obvious reasons — in ways that mean they have a bigger footprint among student populations in particular.”

Another cleric in northern England expressed a less nostalgic view: “Fortunately, we are not polarised between slick HTB plants on the one hand — which may be culturally appropriate in parts of west London but can lack self-awareness about how they appear elsewhere — and Save the Parish on the other, which can become a little like nostalgia.” He has retired with his wife to live a mile or so from the parish church and “the parish priest is never seen on the estate and no one from this estate is a regular worshipper there. Where parish priests have responsibilities beyond the luxury (found in London but not far beyond) of a single parish, the fiction of universal cure of souls within the parish becomes even more ridiculously hard to maintain.”

There was greater agreement among those with different outlooks on the thinning out of theological education in the contemporary Church of England. A major chapter of the recent past has been the rise of St Mellitus College, co-founded in 2007 by the then Bishop of London, Richard Chartres. In the view of some, however, the college is a victim of its own success. Having become a franchise with outposts across the country, it now offers non-residential (and thus much cheaper) training to about a quarter of all ordinands. ( It is also worth noting the high number of candidates for ministry in the C of E: 591 priests were ordained in 2020, almost 15 times the number of new Catholic priests in the whole of Germany.) The current Dean of St Mellitus, Russell Winfield, has emphasised the priority given to academic rigour. But I also heard private complaints that elsewhere in the country students are not learning biblical languages or receiving a solid grounding in theology.

Concerns about a sparse intellectual diet are repeated by critics of the Church’s current leadership. “I regularly encounter bishops with very little theological scholarship or depth,” comments a priest who has served as an episcopal adviser. “This poses enormous problems. There is now not a single diocesan bishop who has taught theology at university level.” His charge in essence is that the “Go for growth” cast of mind much evident under Welby has promoted assumptions that the show should be run by successful middle managers who have demonstrated that they can boost congregations. The shift underlying this change is influenced by changes to vacancy-in-see committees, now usually dominated by local voices. These representatives are likely to say that appointing a theologian could be a good thing in theory, but the best candidate for preferment to the bench is a parish priest.

My friend from East Anglia was gloomy: “We face a really unfortunate mix. Shrinking organisations have very few options. The choice on my own patch is stark. Do we strip the countryside of resources because there are very few people who go to church there, and favour the city, where lots more people attend church? Or do we strip the city of its resources to better prop up the countryside, where churches are in such obvious decline? There are very few good options.” And, she adds, “the dilemma is replicated across the Church of England in so many different contexts”.

Add to all this negative publicity about safeguarding — along with endless debate on sexuality — and it is easy to sound dispirited. But that verdict strikes me as over-hasty. On child protection, the Church is not different in kind from secular settings such as sport and education, where many outrages also took place in less transparent times. Everyone I spoke to while researching this subject insisted that the welfare of minors is now taken with utmost seriousness by British and Irish Anglicans. Meanwhile, sexuality remains a hot topic because it dovetails with wider teaching on biblical authority and the limits of diversity. In response to Living in Love and Faith, a long-awaited report, the Bishops have presented the General Synod with prayers for blessing same-sex unions, a move against which conservatives are fighting hard. Parishes and deaneries across the land remain divided for the same reason as the Catholic Church is split; it is too soon to tell whether a question that has already polarised the Anglican Communion will trigger a formal schism in the Church of England, or (more likely, perhaps) a peeling away of traditionalists to other Christian folds, as happened with the ordination of women. What seems certain is that Anglicans face biting headwinds ahead.

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Does all this tell in favour of disestablishment? Not necessarily. Jonathan Chaplin, author of Beyond Establishment opposes the notion of a state Church on the grounds that it generates “conflicting and inevitably compromising expectations”. He adds that disestablishment ought to be accompanied by the shaping of a positive vision of how the state should engage with religious bodies generally. This would contrast with French-style laïcité, in which the state supervises a thoroughly secularised public realm, where religious identity is largely invisible, and religious voices silenced.

But Chaplin also has the grace to acknowledge the extent of support for the status quo in other faith communities. Tariq Modood, the Muslim political scientist, speaks for many in holding that the vestigial nature of Anglican establishment expresses a recognition of religion’s public character. It is thus less intimidating to minority faiths than a triumphant secularism. (I have regularly heard Hindu, Jewish and Muslim friends express gratitude for the way bishops in the House of Lords speak up for faith in general, rather than just their own version of it.)

At another level — earthier and for that reason all the more compelling — stands the novelist Anne Atkins’s defence of the status quo. Having lived in a number of inner-city vicarages for many years, she has seen lives turned round seven days a week “because we are the Established and official Church of the nation”. When you’re at the end of your rope, she adds, you hold fast to what you recognise. “Far fewer strangers would have rung on our… door — desperate, lost, poor, cold, or without a passport — if we’d been non-denominational, however much purer in heart and freer of fault we might have been.”

Atkins’s comment points to a reality insufficiently acknowledged by secularists and believers alike. The Churches — and Christian endeavour generally — form the largest source of social capital on earth. That will remain true, whatever the scale of institutional failings or the wrongs committed by individual believers.

The Church is in a desperate state. Covid was an absolute disaster. Being asked to close our churches — and to people in great need — sent a signal that we were not really there for our flocks in their hour of need. I was barred from entering my church to pray, but allowed in to check things for insurance purposes. So much for priorities. Understandably, people left in their droves. And many never came back. While the average weekly attendance in church rose by almost 5% in 2023 to 685,000, the third year of consecutive growth, we are still well below pre-Covid numbers. Might we recover? Perhaps. But it will be a struggle. Will the leadership heed my suggestions?

***

1. Burn down The Machine

Many of the clergy have burnt themselves out trying to arrest the death slide. In October, Dr Liz Graveling, senior researcher for clergy wellbeing at the Church of England, delivered a lecture to the Clergy Support Trust. The figures she outlined are staggering. More than one in five clergy is clinically depressed; one in three is mildly depressed. We are isolated, demoralised, knackered. We feel profoundly unattended to and are worried about our personal finances. As a vicar friend of mine commented with typical understatement: “It’s just not as much fun as it used to be.”

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A big part of the reason for the demoralisation is the fact that, under Welby’s tenure, the Church has reinvented itself as a top-down bureaucracy. Evangelicals, like Welby, have always thought they know how to do evangelism best, because they have a number of large and numerically successful suburban churches. Welby took his big business experience, allied it to his very particular evangelical zeal, and set out to impose it on the rest of us. The churches that subscribed to the Welby formula got central funding, smaller and less evangelical ones didn’t. The problem is: what works in London suburbs doesn’t necessarily translate well to Little Snoring, or indeed inner city Leicester.

Whereas the Church was previously a model of subsidiarity — vicars were little Popes in our own parish, as detractors might say — we are now the little people fronting a burgeoning machine of impenetrable complexity. Work that was once done on the ground is now done in distant committees. Churches used to be like corner shops, all managed locally. We are now in danger of becoming a chain. It is called Vision and Strategy and comes with a whole new grammar of administrative Christianity we are now expected to know by heart.

So much of the local energy — and money — that was once spent on the ground is now taken up responding to the demands of the centre. This is what Welby and his followers call “the work”. And “protecting the work” was the reason for his initial refusal to resign. He knows the next Archbishop may well burn the whole thing down, as well she should.

2. The next Archbishop should be a woman.

Credit where it is due, Justin Welby introduced female bishops as soon as he could. He also nudged forward on gay relationships — telling The Rest is Politics podcast back in October (and I paraphrase) that his own line was now that gay sex within a faithful and committed relationship is not some great moral or spiritual crime, and that same-sex blessings should be permitted in church. But he failed to make any of this church policy. The next Archbishop needs to complete this, and make it clear that the Church does not think gay sex is sinful, indeed that it is every bit a gift from God as straight sex. Conservative evangelicals will leave the Church over this, and so be it. We cannot remain in a twilight zone between condemnation and affirmation: it drains too much energy. We have to decide.

But, arguably even more important, this should be carried out by a female Archbishop of Canterbury. Watching yet another pale, male and stale company man in a purple shirt go on Newsnight to intone the party line is more depressing than I can possibly imagine. These men, their life force drained by time spent in artificially lit offices going through the minutes of the last meeting, have been terrible at communicating the excitement and phenomenal good news of the Gospel. And over the past weeks, they have been excruciatingly inept at dealing with this existential crisis. Many of them will have to go. And we need someone who can relate and be relatable. And also, crucially, someone who is trusted to deal with the safeguarding crisis.

My pick would be Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani, currently Bishop of Chelmsford. “I’m not so comfortable with the language of ‘Vision and Strategy’ being deployed in the church,” she confessed to a congregation at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge a few months ago. Too secular in its thinking, too obsessed with growth charts, as if the success of the Church were down to us and not down to God. And way too powerful. In exposing all this before, the Bishop had received what she described a “slap on the wrist from central church” — after which the congregation burst into laughter and applause.

More than this, though, Bishop Guli has a compelling story. Her maiden speech in the House of Lords was described by Patrick Kidd in Politics Home as “a powerful and very personal debut from Chelmsford that had several peers wiping away tears and saying it was the finest they had heard”. Iranian born, Bishop Guli comes from high end Anglican stock: her father was a Bishop of Jerusalem, her grandfather a bishop in Iran. The family was forced to leave Iran after the revolution, after which Bishop Guli’s 24-year-old brother was murdered by Iranian government agents. Someone with this kind of background is unlikely to engage in the kind of cheap moral posturing we see all too often in the Church.

And women, especially mothers, must be more trusted to deal with Safeguarding. In 2004, Francis-Dehqani stepped back from full time church ministry to look after her children. This is not what you do if you are an ambitious cleric on the make. But the deep church establishment really doesn’t want her because of her hostility to “the work”. And they will almost certainly try and block her appointment. Unfortunately for them, there is no one else of the right age on the Bishop’s bench with the gravitas and relatability to do the job.

3. No more swanning around the world

Bishops — and Archbishops in particular — are far too busy. They have an impossible job, with a fire hydrant of problems spraying across their desk. Their capacity to deal with issues is thwarted by their penchant for foreign travel. Only this year, the Archbishop made a 12-day tour to Guatemala and Central America. He had just returned from Zanzibar. Between September last year and May this year, he clocked up 48,000 air miles (while regularly preaching about climate change), including two trips to the Middle East, to New York, to Armenia, to Rome (twice). He has also been to the Congo, to Pakistan, to Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, when the crisis was swirling, he was supposed to have been in Tel Aviv with David Lammy. But the Archbishop does not work for the Foreign Office. He should prioritise the needs of the Church of England. The clue is in the name. Too busy being a global statesman, he had no time to follow up the letters he received from survivors of abuse. This is what brought him down.

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Some will argue that the Archbishop is also the head of the Anglican Communion. This is true. Yet the Communion is a broken fellowship, with many thinking that the Church of England is already too liberal on matters of sex, while a third of the Communion don’t recognise his leadership. It is time, in short, for it to become a looser fellowship of Christians, each allowing the other a greater sense of — and I use the word again deliberately — subsidiarity. This was an idea actually invented by the Church, and one whose merits it has foolishly misplaced.

4. Shrink the Big Tent

Just as the theological diversity of the Anglican Communion cannot be held together by a strong centre (and so needs a weaker one), so too the Church of England has its own diversity problem. Traditionally, one of the best things about the Church of England has been its ability to include people from an astonishingly wide spectrum of theological opinion; from (to caricature just a little) deeply conservative evangelicals who take the Bible literally and warn darkly against sexual sin; to happy-clappy charismatics with their enthusiastic welcomes and unspeakable worship bands; to crypto-Catholics with their smoke and lace; to liberals who do social justice more than God. Broadly, we get along — though there are some exceptions. Liberals and conservative evangelicals really don’t get along, with the Church’s version of the culture wars still raging over sexual politics. This saps so much energy and turns the Church’s attention ever inward, which is a terrible look and contrary to the Gospel. While diversity is generally a good thing, this level of diversity is a problem. The next Archbishop must make it crystal clear that the Church of England welcomes gay people. And if you can’t cope with that, well there are other churches.

5. Lean into the weird

One of the most dispiriting things about the Welby era is the prominence it has given to church being normal, everyday, and relatable. Like a trendy schoolteacher desperate to be liked, the Church has been encouraged to think about its relevance — that achingly dull advice that has replaced the glorious other-worldly mysticism of saints and angels, Cranmer’s crystalline poetry, and Stanford in B flat, with crazy golf in the nave of cathedrals and overhead projectors. Jesus has been transformed from the Lord of Heaven and Earth, and the Judge of All, to my best mate, with all the gravitas of a crisps advert. Next year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, where Jesus was proclaimed by the Western Church as both fully human and fully divine. Christianity is by theological definition a tension between the immanent and the transcendent. In recent decades, the pendulum has swung too much in favour of the immanent — Jesus the social activist, Jesus the friendly listening ear, Jesus the comforting presence. We need to reclaim the difficult mysterious Jesus, the otherness of Jesus, the cosmic Jesus. Christianity needs to get just a little bit more weird and badass. More Caravaggio, less pastel. The Church exists to address the great mysteries of life — death, life, forgiveness, fear, passion, hope. Easy listening versions of these don’t make for a properly serious church.

***

I doubt the Church will consider doing any of this. During Welby’s tenure, the establishment has been captured by soft evangelicals, and the committee that decides the next Archbishop now has greater representation from the Anglican Communion. So Archbishop of Canterbury number 106 will be all too like his predecessor. Whatever the ructions of the Welby resignation, I fear the deck is already loaded in favour of a similar appointment: globalist and evangelical. The only way we will get the sort of person we need — and not another dreary “Vision and Strategy” company man — is for the revolution that unseated Welby to keep going. More resignations need to follow.

This, though, is simply my wish list. What I pray for. But it is not my prediction. That is best put by The Who: “New Boss. Same as the old Boss”.

In The Trial, published 1925, Kafka recounts the tale of Josef K., accused by a remote and impersonal authority of an unknown crime, whose nature neither Josef nor the reader ever discovers. Now, as we approach the centenary of its publication, in Britain The Trial reads less as dystopian fiction than a Telegraph headline.

On Remembrance Sunday, Essex Police visited the journalist Allison Pearson, to inform her that — in Pearson’s telling — she was the subject of a non-crime hate incident report. Allegedly this concerned something she posted on X a year ago, and subsequently deleted. But the police would not specify what. Nor would they disclose who had made the report. In a subsequent statement, it transpired that the “non-crime hate incident” was in fact a criminal investigation for “inciting racial hatred”.

The row has since escalated. Elon Musk got involved. Tories have denounced Essex Police for “policing thought”. And Starmer has declared that police should focus on actual crimes rather than mean tweets.

From America, if my most recent visit is anything to go by, Thought-Police Britain is now viewed as somewhere between a laughing-stock and tragic cautionary tale. For this is far from the first such incident. In 2021, Harry Miller took the police to court and won, for allegations of “transphobia” based on internet posts. Feminist writer Julie Bindel reports that she was visited by police for her tweets in 2019. And Sex Matters founder Maya Forstater was subjected to a 15-month “hate crime” investigation by Scotland Yard on the basis of a post, and that was only recently dropped. What these surreal incidents illustrate is the gap between bureaucratic promise and reality: one in which, the more impersonal the system, the more effectively it can be weaponised by those who understand it.

One vital function of bureaucracy is as a substitute for social trust, especially at scale. And as “post-liberal” critics such as Patrick Deneen have observed, a liberal social order that declines to embrace a unified moral vision will end up bureaucratising those aspects of life that would elsewhere be governed by morality. Grievance procedures, HR departments, safeguarding, and so on all formalise governance in some aspect of public social and moral life in which we no longer agree on the common good, and hence don’t trust those in power to pursue that good. We view procedures as more neutral than people; hence instead of needing to argue morality, make judgements, or form relationships, we increasingly rely on these purportedly neutral, impersonal mechanisms to do it for us.

The allure of this promise is illustrated by a grim concurrent story: the Makin Report. It is an ugly mirror-image of the Pearson story: where Pearson is the subject of a possibly vexatious allegation of wrongdoing toward a vulnerable group, Makin documents the Church of England’s inaction in the face of genuine wrongdoing towards a different vulnerable group. The historic physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by barrister turned Evangelical lay reader John Smyth were known by senior figures in the Church, who failed in their duty to take Smythe’s wrongdoing seriously, escalate it to police, or meet with victims. The resulting row has precipitated the resignation of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I won’t mourn Welby. But I also suspect that some of those who called for his resignation were motivated by factors other than his handling of historic abuse — not least a loathing for the managerialist streak his tenure brought to the Church of England, and that has recently galvanised the “Save the Parish” movement. I also suspect that the managerialism disrespecters may find Welby’s scalping a hollow triumph: for despite his resignation, the proceduralising instinct is stronger than ever.

Christian moral language contains abundant vocabulary that would seem to fit the topic at hand — “sin” and “wickedness” remain serviceable, for example. But in the Church’s response to the Makin fiasco, I’ve seen not the language of public moral confidence but the arid one of procedure: statements about disclosures and processes, calls for more resignations, and demands for new independent bodies. This tendency is visible even at the parish level, where you can’t move for safeguarding officers even in local churches with 10 superannuated congregants all of whom have been friends for decades.

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A kind of dry rot of bureaucracy is visible everywhere. With it comes the implicit assumption that individual moral judgement and authority are suspect by definition, and the only surefire guarantee of “safety” is their removal from or replacement by systems. With doubtless the best of intentions, Welby contributed greatly to the spread of such systems. But when we contrast this proliferating moral managerialism in the Church with Pearson’s experience of moral managerialism run sinisterly wild in the police, something unnerving comes into view. If the positive intent of bureaucracy is to protect us from the wickedness that can erupt in the absence of trust, the reality is that it often provides cover for the very wickedness it was supposed to forestall.

In 1979, social scientist Malcolm Feeley published The Process Is The Punishment, a study of the lower court in New Haven, Connecticut. Here, Feeley showed how the cost in time and lost earnings of pursuing formal legal rights and due process often vastly outweighs simply pleading guilty. He argued that in this context, rights are often both formally available, but also in practice out of reach. More recently, “the process is the punishment” has become a byword for a kind of bureaucratic warfare, in a style very similar to the one Feeley describes.

Pearson’s, Forstater’s, and Miller’s experiences are cases in point. In each case, a bureaucratic “hate crime” process whose positive intent was to provide a neutral, procedural replacement for moral norms that roughly correspond to blasphemy has become a weapon used to hurt a perceived enemy. For it turns out that contra the forlorn hopes of those now implementing new processes and procedures and layers of accountability and transparency and so on in the Church of England, replacing moral authority with administration does not in fact cure the human propensity for wickedness. Kafka saw this a century ago.

The central thread in The Trial is the horror evoked by the bureaucratic monster that devours Josef K.; but a key secondary theme is the recurring role of weaponised sexual desire, whether coercive, manipulative, or otherwise corrupted. Josef K. sexually assaults a fellow-lodger; the first hearing is interrupted by a man assaulting a washerwoman in a corner; the washerwoman later tries to seduce Josef K.; other “inappropriate” sexual entanglements abound in the story, poisoning relationships and multiplying suspicion and confusion. The crucial insight Kafka provides, in the aggregate picture, is more than borne out in our modern managerial landscape: the more impersonal the procedures, the darker their moral underbelly — and the more scope they afford for coercion, corruption, and brutality.

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We find this abundantly in the Pearson fiasco: pace Welby, wherever managerialism flourishes so too will our darkest urges. What makes Pearson’s predicament so disturbing is its facelessness, and the lack of individual accountability involved. It can almost certainly be assumed of Essex Police, for example, that no one on the force is actively working to persecute Pearson. But according to The Guardian, the individual who made the report is a “public servant”. And for such an individual, their understanding of how the machinery operates, means they can easily weaponise it.

For though procedure is meant to save us from bad actors, in reality it just empowers them — as in, perhaps, a public-sector worker who would prefer a conservative journalist to stop writing. One need only pull the correct lever, and institutional procedures will rumble into gear whose operation is designed to minimise individual judgement and agency. Even if it exonerates Pearson in the end, as Forstater and Miller were exonerated, the process is the punishment.

Kafka understood, more than a century ago, that bureaucracy will never be a cure for sin or cruelty. To the extent that we trust in such systems at the expense of our capacity for moral judgement, we will only produce new sins and cruelties. And this applies well beyond sexual wrongdoing, to every one of the darknesses that lies in human hearts. Far from increasing safety and probity by eliminating moral judgement from the messy business of public life, and saving us from our own wickedness in the process, bureaucratic architecture affords new openings for just that wickedness. And these openings prove difficult to close because the process resists those individuals whose moral sense remains functional enough to see and protest them.

If there’s a crumb of comfort to be gained from this dispiriting episode, it’s in the outcry it has prompted. It had come to seem dispiritingly as though the Covid-era national character was all we had left: a mean-spirited, curtain-twitching, pettifogging snitch Britain. But this mood suggests that neither the Welbyan HR-ification of our souls, nor the hi-vis Stasi of Starmerism, have consumed us yet. We still know wickedness when we see it — even the kind inflicted via procedures that were meant to save us from ourselves.

My experience was different from that of John Smythe’s victims. I don’t remember any sort of sexual or religious element. That said, my abuser was, like Smythe, an old school conservative evangelical in his theological disposition. And the gloomy chapel corridor was where we had to wait to be beaten. Smythe beat his often-naked victims in a sound-proofed shed at the bottom of his garden. I was never asked to strip. But to be alone, as a child, in the company of a sadist, was bad enough. My abuser had a range of canes behind his study door. The thin whippy ones would cut. The thicker ones would bruise. Six of the best was what people used to say. But it was rarely just six. Night after night I would go to bed with blood in my underpants. Many of us did.

I now have a son of seven — the same age I was when I was abused. This morning he is doing what children should be doing: playing with his Lego, kicking a football about, mucking around with his brother. I say this to explain that I have no calm objectivity about this subject. “It is better that a millstone were hanged around his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” was how Jesus described his feeling towards those who abuse children. It is not a very priestly thing to say, but even that feels too good for them.

Smythe died in 2018, having abused at least 115 children and young men. The report was commissioned in 2019 and many of us wondered if it would ever be published. Then, last week, it landed with all its horrifying detail. As Makin said: “Many of the victims have carried this abuse silently for more than 40 years.” And it concludes that Smythe was able to get away with abusing so many for so long because of a cover-up by what the report calls “powerful evangelical clergy” which may or may not have included the current Archbishop of Canterbury. “The report is clear that I personally failed to ensure that after disclosure in 2013 the awful tragedy was energetically investigated,” Justin Welby said. After the full extent of Smythe’s crimes was documented by Channel 4 in 2017 Welby promised to meet with victims. But failed to make himself available to them until 2020, a full seven years after he had been officially told what had been going on. “This was wrong,” Welby has admitted.

Not wrong enough for him to resign, though. Last week, when asked if it was time to go, the Archbishop responded: “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. I’ve taken advice as recently as this morning from senior colleagues and no, I’m not going to resign for this. If I’d known before 2013 or had grounds for suspicions, that would be a resigning matter then and now. But I didn’t.”

That Justin Welby knew nothing about the Smythe abuses before 2013 is, for many, hard to fathom. The report itself concludes that it is “unlikely that Justin Welby would have no knowledge of the concerns regarding John Smythe in the 1980’s in the UK”. Welby was a friend of Smythe, a voluntary “dormitory officer” on the Christian camps where it happened, he was in the circle of trust of Church of England evangelical Christians, and the knowledge of what was going on was widespread in those quarters. As early as 1981, reports were being written about what Smythe was up to. “The scale and severity of the practise was horrific,” one vicar wrote in the Eighties. “Eight received about 14,000 strokes, two of them having some 8,000 strokes over three years.” The young men who received these beatings would have talked to each other. Is it credible a dormitory officer, with some level of pastoral responsibility, would really be so unaware? Indeed, the whole thing was even spoken about publicly in sermons. It was, the Makin Report concludes, an “open secret amongst a whole variety of people connected with the Conservative Evangelical network”, and “badly kept”. So the Makin Report is surely correct soberly to conclude it is “unlikely” that Justin Welby didn’t know. And so, if he really did know, then this would be a resigning matter on Welby’s own admission.

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Clergy are naturally cautious creatures, and yet many are increasingly saying that the Archbishop’s position has become completely untenable. Vicars retweeting Welby Resign hashtags is not a good look for the Church. As one west country vicar wrote: “If this were any other member of clergy, a safeguarding review and risk assessment for their future suitability to continue to operate would be undertaken. Is there a reason it isn’t for Welby?” The Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie, Vicar of Charlbury in Oxfordshire, wrote to the Archbishop at the weekend: “We will continue to pray for you, but I for one will be praying that you will resign … If you will not go for the love of the institution, if you will not go for the love of its people and priests, if you will not go for the victims, if you will not go for reasons of your own embarrassment or shame, then I pray you; for love of God, and Him alone, go.”

Welby can’t survive this. And his resignation should send a necessary shock wave through the Church of England like nothing else could. No Archbishop would ever again treat the whole matter so lightly. As Kilburn Vicar Rev. Robert Thompson put it at a speech to General Synod after calling for Justin Welby to resign. “Apology, after apology, after another bloody apology will not do!”

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But this is not just about Justin Welby personally. It is also about the very way the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury is constructed. As the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, his office is massively overburdened with international work and overseas travel. Of course Archbishops love this aspect of their job – who would not prefer to be greeted by thousands of African Christians enthusiastically waving flags and greeting you at the airport rather than spending time in a failing church in Stockport? Who would not prefer to strut the world stage rather than sit in awkward meetings with victims of church abuse? But the leader of the Church of England must be able to attend to spiritual needs of England herself. The office needs to shift its priorities.

Perhaps more sensitive, though, is the fact that we have to start thinking more seriously about the place of conversative evangelical theology in the diverse flora and fauna of the Church of England. The Makin Report has attached an analysis of John Smythe by a clinical psychologist. It concludes “the beliefs and values of the conservative evangelical community in which John Smythe operated are critical to how he manipulated his victims into it”. She describes a focus on personal sinfulness, “a default sense of guilt, defectiveness, submission”, often focused around young men’s masturbatory habits. This sense of shame and sin has come to be fused into the very theological DNA of conservative evangelical theology. Christ died for our sins, he was whipped for our transgressions. And when sin is then understood instead as teenage bedroom fumblings, a toxic and pornographic brew of theology and sexual guilt is generated.

The Makin Report is a watershed moment for the Church. I’m afraid Justin Welby’s position is no longer tenable. And it is important that when he goes, we use this moment as one for a massive change of culture within the church. As a victim of cruel abuse myself, I am finding it increasingly difficult to be a public representative of a church that refuses to find it within itself to do the right thing.

Now another of Henry VIII’s creations has come up with a rebrand that is even worse. The Church of England is ditching the word church. Like the Royal Mail, it wants to prepare the public for an era of diverse operations. And the exciting new name for church is to be… I kid you not: “New Things”.

A recent study, as reported in the Church Times, of the word church — if I can still use that word — across 11 Dioceses of the Church of England (see, it’s tricky to avoid) has found that “in the past 10 years, about 900 ‘New Things’ have been started. None of the 11 dioceses used the word ‘church’ as its main descriptor of such developments.” In other words, the Church has given up on church. Not since Prince became Squiggle has there been such a daft revision.

And it has been a ruinously expensive business. At a time when ordinary parish churches such as mine are being asked for ever greater contributions to the central church coffers, the New Things corporate headquarters has ploughed at least £82.7 million into New Things. As the report explains, this “new ecclesial language” has happened “very quickly” and is “affecting an operant theology within the Church of England”. This is former oil executive Justin Welby’s principal contribution to the development of the Church of England. As the report admits, “loosed from theological roots, the conceptual framework inevitably looks for other sources for its guidance, namely business and management theory.”

Of course, what is going on here is more than just a name change. The Church of England has always been a strange beast, ecclesiologically. Henry VIII was instinctively a traditionalist. The coin in your pocket still has the letters FD after the King’s name, letters that stand for Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith. This title was given to Henry by the Pope before their falling out, and he remained proud of it, so kept it. Henry’s beef with Rome wasn’t so much theology — he just didn’t like being told what to do by some bloke in a far-away Italian city.

For Henry, the Reformation was about who was in charge, not whether the Church was still Catholic. The order of bishops, priests and deacons, the centrality of the eucharist, they all stayed. Inspired by the continental Reformation, which was always more ideologically driven, the evangelical Reformers wanted to go further, to get rid of all that Catholic ritualistic stuff. But they were held back. And so, the Church of England became a strange hybrid, both Catholic and Protestant.

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These have always been unhappy bedfellows. At best, it makes the Church of England a model for a broad tent community, a place of compromise and tolerance. At worst, it makes it a fractious place of discontent and rivalry. It is the job of an Archbishop to hold the ring, to keep this coalition of interests at peace with itself. Welby has not done this. Of the 900 New Things reported by the Dioceses, only five of them are from this more Catholic side of the church coalition. New Things “has been, and remains, essentially an evangelically driven project”.

Which is why those who want to complete the unfinished business of the Reformation — getting rid of priesthood, and all that Catholic mysterious mumbo-jumbo of the Eucharist, as they see it — have spotted their opportunity. Last month, a number of big London churches decided to commission a number of men — yes, only men — to lead services of Holy Communion without them being ordained priests. It is absolutely a central pillar of Catholic Christianity, to which the Church of England has always seen itself as a part, that only priests can celebrate the Eucharist. As Matt Parks, the Chair of the church group Affirming Catholicism explained: “Permitting a form of Holy Communion in the Church of England presided over by those who are not ordained makes a mockery of the sacraments.”

But this new status quo — whereby our New Things don’t have priests, they have leaders — threatens a vital part of our whole constitutional settlement. At his coronation, the King was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury: “Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof, as by law established in England?” The King’s answer was: “All this I promise to do.” By allowing these mock “ordinations” to take place without censure, Welby has embarrassed the King who promised before the whole country to preserve and maintain the Church of England’s essential nature.

The New Things enterprise is a centrally led project that is splicing evangelical Christianity with management theory to create something entirely new. When asked, the Church (sic) leadership says it is wholeheartedly committed to parish churches and the ministry of priests. But as the Bible says, “by their fruit will you know them”.

The Royal Mail has always promised universal service provision, which means that wherever you are, your letter will be delivered to you. The Czech Billionaire, Daniel Kretinsky, who is still trying to buy the Royal Mail has committed to maintaining universal service provision for five more years. Which obviously means that after five years, universal service provision will go.

The Church of England has also been traditionally committed to universal service provision — the services being church services in every parish in every community. Just like Kretinsky, our New Things leadership, formerly known as the Church of England, thinks all this to be uneconomic or unrealistic. Which is why, for many, their parish church is not being used and no new priests are being appointed. Parish priests like your friendly postie will become a thing of the past. Perhaps there will be a New Things centre some miles away. Perhaps you will be offered a ghastly “your business is important to us, you are 16th in the queue” New Things hotline or a flashy over-designed website.

Consignia was a disaster. This will be worse.

So into that one word a whole pile of very deep stuff collapses — our relationship to the ultimate nature of things, our relationship to religion, our relationship with our own fathers. You don’t have to be Freud to find it unsurprising that Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, touched a highly sensitive nerve when he worried out loud that there might be a problem with “Our father”.

Many commentators inwardly groaned, spotting another depressing bout of Church of England wokery. And yes, the Archbishop did inevitably rehearse the idea that God is the apex predator of the patriarchy. But actually, what he said was worse than that. Much worse.

This is exactly what he said: “Yes, I know the word ‘Father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly Fathers has been destructive and abusive.” And he is clearly right that if your father beat or molested you as a child, then the word “father” will have disturbing connotations. But what the press did not pick up on was the fact that “Father” is also how many of the clergy style themselves. And if Father so-and-so abused you as a choirboy, then yes: “Our Father” may well be a problem.

In truth, things were already difficult for the Archbishop and the church he leads. For the current meeting of the General Synod in York has witnessed a crisis for the Church of England on an almost unimaginable scale — a full descent into acrimony and chaos, which will take a generation to recover from. “The Church often does the work of Satan,” one Priest wrote, after witnessing events unfold on Sunday.

He was referring to the Archbishops’ Council having decided to disband the church’s Independent Safeguarding Board, and sack its members. This is the body tasked with, among other things, looking into clerical abuse and supporting those who are victims of it. It is supposed to be independent because the Church of England has a long history of covering up its own mess. But it turns out that when its members say things that the Archbishops’ Council do not like, they can be fired and the board closed down.

As the Bishop of Birkenhead, the Church’s own deputy lead for safeguarding, put it: “Today the church is less accountable. To remove, at short notice, the strongest independent voices holding the CofE to account for its safeguarding failings makes us look resistant to robust scrutiny and challenge — which, of course, we are.” When the sacked Safeguarding officials were eventually able to speak — after much wrangling over whether they should be allowed to — they told the Synod that they had indeed been “silenced”. This is extraordinary. If the Church can silence its own Safeguarding body, what hope do survivors have?

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Even under the full glare of synodical scrutiny, it was hard to get a straight answer. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was asked directly if he had personally voted to disband the Independent Safeguarding Body. His reply indicated he has clearly been spending a lot of time around politicians (fellow Old Etonians, perhaps). “Both Archbishops wished to wait a bit,” he said, which gives the very strong impression that he and the Archbishop of York had voted against the move to disband. Later, under more pressure, the church admitted that they had both voted for it. Had it been made in the House of Commons, Welby might have faced accusations of misleading the House.

With all this in mind, let us return to Cottrell’s little aside on “Our Father”. As it happens, both of us get called Father by people to whom we have no relationship of biological kinship. It has taken me many years to adjust to this. Sunday-school children, at one of my early parishes in the Black Country, used to think it sounded hilariously like Farmer Giles. I didn’t.

But the main reason it sits uncomfortably with me is that it smacks too much of perhaps the deepest sin of the church: clericalism. Father knows best. At the time of the Reformation, clergy were known as “Sir”. In this country, it was only towards the end of the 19th century that Father became a widespread form of address for the Catholic clergy. It’s a kind of modern affectation. For the likes of Cardinal Manning, who promoted it, Father indicated some kind of exulted spiritual status, a special alignment with the ultimate Father, God.

This is odd when you come to think about it. Being celibates, Catholic clergy do not themselves father children — at least, they are not supposed to. Instead, Father indicates a spiritual kind of responsibility, akin to fatherhood, but not the same as it. Still, in some contexts, being called Father became, too easily, a mark of membership to a club — a club to which many lonely men without families would turn, for company, whiskey and good gossip. Personally, I love my membership of this club. But there is a shadow side to its exclusivity, which, to be clear, is nothing to do with its campery. One for all and all for one can ingrain a certain omertà, a sense that we look after each other through thick and thin, even when the clergy fail.

Of course, it is not just Catholics and Anglo-Catholics who abuse those in their care. Alleged perpetrators of abuse include 242 clergy, 53 church officers, and 41 volunteers who work with children. Creepy, charismatic pastors having secret “wrestling matches” with young men, or authoritarian evangelicals giving naked beatings to vulnerable adults – many of these were extremely well-connected people, with friendships at the highest level.

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What was so depressing about the “Our Father” aside was not that it was woke, but that it was absolutely true. Those who are victims of abuse cannot trust the church. And what has been the official response to all of this? Yet another report has been called for. “Mistakes have been made,” the Archbishop of York admitted, “and we need to review that and learn from them”. As he was speaking, survivors were placing ribbons and posters on the fence outside, to remember victims. The next day, this little protest had disappeared.

The church is in total crisis, defeated by defensive managerialism and a clerical circling of wagons. On Sunday evening, many had had enough. The Director of Communications for the Anglican Communion, Gavin Drake, resigned from the Synod. “I joined the Synod to make the Church of England a safer place. I have failed, because the central machinery of the Church of England will use all its power to block the Synod from doing what it exists to do.” Many in the church are fast losing trust in our leadership. Because it is our spiritual fathers that are the problem — not our heavenly one.

If vicars are often an object of projection, so much more the Archbishop. Any assessment of Justin Welby’s 10 years of office, therefore, will say more about me than him. The Archbishop is a living, breathing Rorschach test. Still: here goes.

Welby is hard to read because he is seemingly open and yet emotionally closed at the same time. Even before he landed the top job in the worldwide Anglican Communion, he was adept at not granting access to his inner world. The social polish you learn at Eton, with its arsenal of confident self-deprecation, is precisely the sort of self-protecting buffer zone that you need to survive being the nation’s punch bag.

There has been great pain in his life: dysfunctional alcoholic parents, the loss of a seven-month-year-old baby daughter in a car accident. Understandably, he has suffered periods of crippling darkness and has admitted to taking anti-depressants. He is brave in talking about his bruises, and yet also strangely hidden, both open and emotionally distant. And since he is not a natural people person, his openness can come across as scripted.

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Welby smiles to reassure, but in repose his face crackles with all the scary intensity of an officer on the Death Star; yes, a bit like a born-again Director Krennic. People say he has a thunderous temper when things don’t go his own way, which I can quite believe. Sometimes you can’t keep it all bottled up. I like Welby, but I am frightened of him.

Back in 2012, I interviewed him for The Guardian when he was still Bishop of Durham. Paddy Power had him at 6/1 to be the next vicar to the nation. We discussed woman bishops, still seen as a long way off. How would he reconcile the competing demands of those who see it as a theological necessity and those who deem it a theological impossibility? How would he square the circle, I asked? “Well, you just look at the circle and say it’s a circle with sharp bits on it,” he laughed. Anglicanism has always involved a certain amount of shape-shifting from its leadership. The phrase “all things to all men” is from the Bible, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing. Ideologically, Welby can be what you want him to be.

Here’s an example. A few days after that Guardian interview, the Rev Rod Thomas — an evangelical conservative — and I discussed who should get the top job on Channel 4 news. Thomas was against women bishops and believes homosexuality is a sin. I thought the opposite. Yet we both agreed that Welby was the right man for the job. That’s the power of a circle with pointy bits. Some see a circle, others see a square.

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Women bishops were approved within a few years, and the Church has now agreed on prayers for blessing same-sex marriages. Rod Thomas was made a bishop in 2015 and kept on board. But he is far from happy. “We should not mislead people into believing that we can ask God to bless those things that He has revealed are contrary to His will,” said Bishop Rod recently. I think he may have been more deceived than I about that circle.

Welby’s church, his circle with pointy bits, turned out to be this: a collection of morally-progressive, liturgically-charismatic evangelicals with a hint of woke. Damaged public schoolboys who find it hard to express their feelings in everyday life are often attracted to forms of worship that let it all hang out. Welby talks in tongues. The whole thing is so achingly sincere. This is surely what Prince Harry would be like if he got God. It’s the sort of religion that some of us watch through our fingers with embarrassment — like dad dancing.

With Welby, open evangelicalism has become the new centre of gravity in the Church of England. More Radio 2 than Radio 4, undemanding and depressingly easy listening. “Let’s be clear, I’m one of the thicker bishops in the Church of England”, he told me back in 2012. There remains stiff competition for this title, I can tell you. And Welby is not even close. He has a keen and lively intelligence and a steely will. But Welby’s Church of England, it might be said, no longer feels the need for academic-minded bishops. Better some B-school MBA or a Certificate in Church Planting than a proper PhD in Patristics for the modern cleric on the make.

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And here is my real beef with Welby’s Church: managerialism. The backdrop to Welby’s appointment was the banking crisis and the subsequent Occupy camp at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Church needed to get a bit more this worldly, many thought. It needed to understand finance and business. When it came to capitalism, Welby was a grown-up, having worked for Elf Aquitaine in a previous life. And 11 years in the oil industry clearly shaped his thinking about organisational structures. The old, slightly bumbling high-table, soft-power understanding of Lambeth Palace was not for him. Welby wanted to change things and have access to levers of real executive power.

But the Church of England is not set up like this. It never has been. The parish system is the very model of subsidiarity. If anything, the Church is a bottom-up institution rather than top-down. You bow to your bishop, but you don’t necessarily do everything he asks. Under Welby, however, the centre has grown ever stronger, the parishes increasingly weaker. Max Weber famously divided power into the charismatic, the traditional and the legal/rational. Welby is the first archbishop who has tried to govern through the latter.

The “Save the Parish” movement was established as a fightback. Too many bishops became middle managers, hidden behind their laptops. Directives and new initiatives came down from head office, which many of the clergy, myself included, received with an inner groan. In the face of declining attendance, we all had to learn that evangelical up-speak, and get on with the paperwork. Morale has plummeted.

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The Church’s reaction to Covid was the depressing conclusion of Welby’s legal/rational approach to power. Buffeted by abuse scandals — including that of a previous friend and mentor, John Smyth, who beat and sexually harassed young boys on Christian summer camps — Welby read the Covid situation in the light of his safeguarding nightmares. Safeguarding was the one area where rules could be imposed on the clergy. Churches were to be closed to protect the faithful from infection. Clergy were allowed into their churches to check them over for insurance purposes, but not to celebrate the holy mysteries, even on their own. The shepherds abandoned their sheep.

It was a terrible directive and a lot of us — myself included — ignored it and were put on the Lambeth Palace naughty list. The gap grew wider between the clergy and the powers that be. “If I had my time again, I would be more cautious about closing the churches,” Welby later admitted. But the damage was done. For many people, a pattern of churchgoing had been broken never to be taken up again. Sunday schools were abandoned, the vulnerable left to fend for themselves. Parish treasurers pulled their hair out as finances went into a death spiral. Zoom was never a realistic alternative for a religion that is inherently physical, all about the body and the blood.

In a couple of months, Welby will preside over the coronation of King Charles III, and the Church of England has never felt weaker. It’s not his fault. Secularisation is a feature of the Western world, not of any specifically failed leadership. But nonetheless, Welby has failed to speak the right words for our time.

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In a moment of crisis, Welby’s answer seems to be organisational restructuring — redirecting more and more resources into big, successful, glitzy, mostly-evangelical churches, while letting smaller ones wither on the vine, run by the unpaid or the retired, all exhausted. This feels like what a CEO archbishop would do. Not a pastor or an evangelist. And, most depressing of all, the whole thing seems to be an exercise in bureaucratic navel-gazing.

Welby is a well-intentioned man, but he is unable to read the room — or, rather the nation. When in 2020, he abandoned his fine 13th-century chapel to take the Easter service online from his kitchen, I imagine he thought he was expressing solidarity with those who were stuck at home. But most people didn’t see it like that. It felt like a silly gesture, a gimmick. And a kick in the teeth to those of us struggling to keep the Church show on the road.

Some say Welby will go after the coronation. I don’t know about that. But what I would want from the new man or woman is someone who could help revive the morale of the clergy. “It’s just not so much fun anymore,” said one senior cleric to me recently. On the front line, in the parishes, it feels like the Archbishop doesn’t much care about us. Or if he does, he has been refusing to show it.

So when the Archbishop this week suggested Prince Andrew is “seeking to make amends” and encouraged people to be more “open and forgiving”, he was not going out on some fashionable theological limb. He was doing what he was supposed to be doing: proclaiming the faith.

But however often Christians say the word in church, forgiveness has always been a profoundly unpopular idea, and is increasingly so in a post-Christian society. Look at the reaction to the Archbishop’s comments. People are aghast and angry. Why? Because the very idea of forgiveness can be extremely hard to reconcile with the much simpler and more popular idea of justice.

Justice means people getting what they deserve. Wrongdoers facing punishment: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Punishment has to be proportionate to the wrong done. The scales of justice cry out to be balanced. It is a debt that has to be paid. Yet the greasy and featherbedded Prince Andrew has obviously not paid his debt — so how dare the Archbishop speak about forgiveness? Bloody establishment, they all look out for each other.

This is where justice can take us. It was Nietzsche — no friend of the Christian faith, of course — who famously suggested that even the justice of the courtroom can have a highly persecutory tone, a mob desire for the blood of the perpetrator camouflaged by wigs and gowns. Consider also that common set-up at the beginning of the trashy American revenge movie: a crime is committed that allows us to see the various acts of response, however gruesome, as a form of moral restitution. The idea of justice allows violence to be understood as morally acceptable, unavoidable even. Justice becomes the moral word for winning. And Americans like to be thought of as winners. It is, of course, their least attractive side. And their most foolish.

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At its worst, this logic of justice can perpetuate violence ad infinitum. It can create an unstoppable cycle of vendetta — one act of justice/violence inviting another. Feuds between families can perpetuate this drama over generations. Justice is the engine of revenge. Violence is mimetic. What most frightened Desmond Tutu about post-Apartheid South Africa was the prospect of justice driving a death cycle of violence — with some never-ending response and counter-response sending his beloved country into perpetual civil war. “No future without forgiveness,” he wrote. Forgiveness was a way of breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat violence. Peace could only be established by holding back on the justice bit. Forgive your enemies. That, for all its faults, is what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was seeking to model.

In complete contrast to Tutu’s “No forgiveness, no peace”, Black Lives Matter protestors regularly chant “No justice, no peace”. One way of reading this is that we won’t give you peace unless we have racial justice. It can be heard as a moral justification of ongoing violence.

As well as perpetuating discord, the justice tradition has another related weakness: it invariably imagines that the person calling for justice is in the right. When Hamlet appeals to Polonius to treat others better than they deserve, he observes: “Use every man after his own desert and who [of us] should escape whipping”. Or in other words: if we all get justice, we are all in trouble. In the same vein, Martin Luther came to realise that he hated the phrase “the justice of God” because all of us — sinners that we are — are condemned. Only through God’s forgiveness can we be saved. OK, this is church speak. But the equivalent secular point is that all of us require forgiveness. Justice language — unqualified by mercy — points the finger at us all in the end. This is why social justice warriors end up consuming each other in an orgy of recrimination.

The Jubilee is a perfect time to think about forgiveness. This is when we try and think of ourselves as a national community, reconciled for a few hours of cake-eating and tea-drinking. The street party is a powerful way of neighbours, who may have fought for years over the garden fence, to put “being right” aside. I am an enthusiastic monarchist because I think of the crown as holding the community together in a way that is beyond political contestation. The Queen has sought to do this for 70 years. It’s part of her priestly role as it were, it’s what she was anointed for. Thank God for her.

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Jubilees seek to restore something broken or lost. At the turn of the millennium, many of us came together to lobby for the forgiveness of the financial debts that the developing world had built up over years. Jubilee 2000 asked that we wipe the slate clean. It drew upon the Biblical idea of the Jubilee — that every 50 years debts would be redeemed. It is very telling that the Judeo-Christian tradition often uses financial language – debt, redemption – as ways of talking about salvation. Back then it was the right that complained about the forgiveness of debts. These days it is often the left. Both insist upon the iron logic of pay-back, justice.

Forgiveness is not sentimental slush. It’s not being overly nice or gullible. Properly speaking, it is about the refusal to respond to wrongdoing in kind — those last two words being very important. It is not a refusal of the criminal justice system. It is a recognition that you do not get punishment proportionate to the crime — a murderer does not get murdered, a perpetrator of sexual violence does not get molested. Even more, it is a denial of the satisfaction that comes with payback. As Tutu was right to point out, forgiveness is a way of giving the community back a future, a strategy of restoration.

The reason being the Archbishop of Canterbury is the most impossible job in the world is that he has to try and say something like this within a public culture that believes forgiveness is fundamentally mistaken and wrong. It requires messy compromises. It might let people off the hook, smirking as they slink away. It might leave some victims unsatisfied, bitter that justice has not been properly dispensed.

But the alternative is a kind of endless cultural war. “No justice, no peace” is a terrifying slogan. For often, justice is the desire for revenge by another name.

Spiritually it is extremely bad for you; people are either too nice or too horrible. Expectations are unrealistic: you are a fantasy of projection and a lightning-rod for disappointment. And every day having to put up with jokes about actresses and only being able to move diagonally… The golden rule is: if you really want to be a bishop, you almost certainly shouldn’t be one.

Things are about to get a whole lot worse. Bishops are the latest part of the church now slated for reinvention — part of the twaddle-riven Welby-era revolution that is totally transforming church structures.

Traditionally, the role of the bishop is to be a vicar to the vicars, to support the frontline pastorally, and to maintain sound doctrine within the church. They are pastors who know what good theology looks like. They carry a shepherd’s crook to indicate that they have authority over their flock, to direct the wayward sheep. But for the most part, the sheep still do as they please. And for those on the more catholic end of the spectrum, they exist to maintain an unbroken link of continuity with the early church – one bishop passing on the faith to another through the laying on of hands. They have lots of symbolic responsibility and little executive authority. These days, we would call it soft power.

They have a significant role in recruitment. But when a vicar gets handed the keys to his or her church, the bishop has less power to direct what goes on there than most people imagine. Subsidiarity in the Church of England — pushing control down to the parishes — was established to maintain the balance of power within that unique ecclesiological experiment that is the Church of England: a church that is both Catholic and Protestant at the same time. Subsidiarity, and the legal freehold for vicars that has been put place to protect it, exists to make sure a catholic-minded bishop won’t go round sacking evangelical clergy, or the other way round. It’s the same basic structure that exists to guarantee freedom of thought for academics who have tenure.

But, of course, the more you protect the freedom of the parish clergy, the less authority the bishop has over them. So, whereas a Roman Catholic Bishop could ring up one of his priests and ask him — require him — to move to a new parish, a Church of England bishop could do no such thing. Which is why the CofE is a good place to be a vicar and a bad place to be a bishop. And you can understand the frustration of the bishops. They get the blame for all the bad stuff and don’t have enough authority to change it. Even more so, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Little wonder, over the past few years, the steady stream of bishops going over to Rome now seems more like a Biblical flood. They have proper bishops over there, so goes the thought, and with enough authority to resist all the things that a retired Church of England bishop hasn’t been able to put a stop to.

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The higher-ups in the Welby era have a different plan, and it is clever. Instead of seeing the administrative burden being imposed on the church as some sort of dead weight, they see it as an opportunity, as a route to power. These people no longer talk of bishops as being pastors or of the job being about ministry, they talk of “leadership” and “mission”. How my heart sinks when I hear those words.

They will absolutely deny this, of course, but the current travails of the Church of England, and the source of its internal acrimony, is that bishops – now recast as leaders — who have often only spent five minutes as parish priests, think that they know far better how to do the job. They are using the whole apparatus of the administrative church to find ways round the historic and legal protections that exist to defend the central model of a priest in their parish. In effect, they have decided to let the old model wither on the vine — by amalgamating parishes, cutting clergy posts when they become vacant — and redirecting funds to a whole new structure based on modern and secular lines of responsibility. The old church is too well protected legally, so they want to build a para church beside it, much better funded, but without the old legal protections. And one that is far more responsive to the “leadership”.

The cover for this transformation is the “let many flowers bloom” line. New ways can flourish alongside the old, they say. It’s a mixed economy. In some Dioceses — mine, in fact — this is how it is being played out. I’m lucky. But in others, the bishop has come to be seen as the enemy of traditional church structures i.e. the parish. That is what happened recently in Winchester, for example, where the bishop was forced to quit after an unprecedented rebellion by the parish clergy against his authoritarian manner and hostility to the old ways of doing church. And as bishops seek to use different channels to express their authority, parish clergy are joining unions — generally Unite — as never before. The old pastoral relationship between clergy and their bishop is being transformed into a business model, with more than a whiff of the acrimony that can exist between the boss class and the workers. “Save the Parish” is the fastest growing organisation in the church, and the mood is becoming more and more that of the awkward squad.

This is the context into which the Church of England now announces that it is considering a cabinet of senior bishops, with responsibility built around roles – Brexit bishop, Covid bishop and so on. The more Right-wing press thinks this is a foray into politics and that, as they are constantly saying, the church should stay out of it. But the church is intrinsically political because the Bible is. And there is no way a good Christian can stay out politics any more than they can stay out of pastoral care or worship. But the way the church approaches the political must be distinctive and grow out of its core convictions. Neither Right nor Left, the church isn’t party political. What is so utterly ridiculous about the idea of a Brexit bishop is that it gives the impression that the church tracks the secular way of politics, following it issue by issue. It is of a piece with the whole secularisation of the church that is now in full swing.

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Only chaos can redeem the Church

By Giles Fraser

Yes, the secularisation of the church. It’s almost as if our bishops have been to a half-day management seminar at McKinsey and have suddenly seen the light as to how the church should be more efficiently run. Every day there is a new flowchart, a new initiative from head office. Most of the clergy I know inwardly grown and — because of their legal protections — just get on doing the stuff they have been called to do. We tend to ignore many of the smiley management-clergy who sit behind their Macs and offer structural and paper-based solutions to the tide going out on the sea of faith.

It is understandable that organisations that are under pressure – not least financially – can turn in on themselves, and think reorganisation is the answer to wider cultural changes. But for the Church of England to abandon its traditional shape, thinking that some corporate model will serve the preaching of the good news better, is for the church to commit a kind of suicide. The legal checks and balances within the CofE have been build up for a good reason: to hold us together, to make sure no one part of the Anglican compromise can hold sway over another. The cynic in me now contends that we are increasing becoming a church held together by a pension fund — that’s why so many bishops go to Rome as soon as they retire.

The fear is that this new non-parish-based para-church structure will grow rapidly, but will not be able to survive the forces that have always threatened to tear us apart, and that bishops (not leaders) have long kept together. The para church will be like the wheat thrown on stony ground, that rises up rapidly because the soil is shallow — which will look impressive on all those spreadsheets — but that ultimately cannot survive the heat of the midday sun because it has no roots.

Bishops root the church in history and in place. They hold it together as the focus of unity. When their job description starts getting played about with, the end feels close for the church that I dearly love.

But I wasn’t there to gossip, plot and gripe with my mates; I was on a mission. Would I be able to work out what the Prime Minister really thought about religion? I have long found this a puzzle, not knowing what to make of the multitude of signals that he gives out. Earlier this year he described himself as a “very, very bad Christian”. Asked by Robert Peston whether he was now a Roman Catholic, after his marriage in a Roman Catholic cathedral, he declined to answer. “I don’t discuss these deep issues,” he blustered. Then, spotting an opportunity to have a swipe at the openly atheist Keir Starmer, he added a quote from Psalm 14: “the foolish man has said in his heart there is no God.” Peston played along and simply chuckled.

There was lots of chuckling going on at No.10. Introduced by fellow Etonian, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Boris stood up and threw out some amusing anecdotes. He and Justin Welby go running together round Lambeth Palace gardens. Sometimes they run in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. It was a metaphor for the relationship between church and state. He then thanked the Church for its Covid response, which delivered on “the clear teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ to ‘be a good neighbour’”. Oh, I thought. Now there is a phrase: “our Lord Jesus Christ”. “Our” is such a strong word of belonging. The evangelicals smiled. It is an “I am one of you” word. Or maybe it was just something he said — something people say.

The problem I have with Boris is that all that Etonian bluster and bullshit is so wall-to-wall you never get the feeling you are seeing the real thing, whatever that is. I long for a flicker of sincerity — something Mrs May did in spades at her Christmas parties — some sense of what he really thinks about things. Yes, what he really believes. But there is a kind of dandyish public-school raconteur for whom the admission of sincerity is some sort of failure, a sign that the great game has broken down, a depressing admission that charm can only go so far. So everything is deflection and misdirection, smiling and ducking, making other people laugh as a strategy of tactical evasion. And as with Peston, it works. Our laughter gives him time to make for the exit. Only then do you feel just a little short-changed.

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Now this sort of dandyish bullshitter has to be very careful with religion. Because at some point religion demands precisely the kind of moral seriousness — sincerity of heart — that Boris despises, or is at a loss to know what to do with. Yes, I too avoid the man who will come up to me on Oxford Street, look me straight in the eye and ask me if I believe in Jesus. Everything inside me screams “none of your bloody business”. But this sort of evangelical directness has no time for the social conventions which we often hide behind, and which allow Boris Johnson to be the master of illusion.

But there is a story about Boris being put on the spot like this. And it is quite extraordinary.

Back in 2019, at the time of the September Equinox, a group of new-age religious pilgrims — Extinction Rebellion supporters — were walking the Ridgeway, part of an ancient trail from Salisbury Plain to East Anglia, a route well-known for its springs and holy places. Their plan was to travel barefoot and sing to the Great Spirit Mother as they went. They wanted their prayers to “open the hearts and minds of those in power”.

As they passed Chequers, the weekend retreat of the Prime Minister, they stopped off to visit a nearby farm shop. And — how extraordinary — there he was: Boris Johnson getting his groceries. Just Boris and the cashier in this tiny, enclosed space. And not knowing what to say, this group of women decided to stand around and just sing: “Listen to your heart, listen to your heart. Let love guide you.”

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Now I find what happened next really hard to square with what I know of the Prime Minister. The way Tori Lewis, one of the women, describes the scene, Boris Johnson was strangely moved by the experience. “His mouth is just open, he has his hand on his heart, he has tears in his eyes.” Of course, Boris had no idea how to react to this cringey intrusion into his personal space. “I, err, don’t know what…” he apparently blurted out.

Tori goes on: “Annabel intuitively — she’s a beautiful mother — puts her hand on his shoulder and sees him like a little boy that he is and we keep singing.” Regaining his composure, Boris asks the group where they are from, makes polite conversation, and looks for the exit. “We are healing the world one heart at a time” they sing as he leaves.

If this wasn’t strange enough, one of the group then overheard him talking to his then-girlfriend, Carrie, who was waiting outside: “Where have they come from, it’s like they have emerged from the Earth?” he asked. “Yes” she replied, “and they have a message for you.” And he said, “listen to your heart”.

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This, by the way, is the reason evangelical Christians used to get such good results in posh public schools. Here is a group of emotionally damaged children, who have suffered a kind of privileged abandonment, who have learnt to manage the absence of necessary motherly love — though this management is inevitably unstable and difficult to maintain. Suddenly, they are offered a kind of love — a “hand on the shoulder” — that is as emotionally direct and all-embracing as they might imagine motherly love to be. It is a religion of the heart, so to speak, for those whose hearts are a source of pain. Some retreat from this offer, appalled. Others embrace it with huge transformative joy, and it marks them for the rest of their lives. “Why do you need a God if you have a good mother?” my friend, the psychotherapist Adam Phillips, asked me the other day. It’s a very challenging question.

Justin Welby didn’t get converted at Eton. His conversion was at Cambridge, on the evening of 12 October 1975. There is often a single date, for evangelicals, because what happens is a kind of immediate breakthrough. A friend invited Welby to his rooms at Trinity College. Nearing midnight, Nicky Hills pressed Welby, “Jesus died on the cross for you, Justin”. At that moment, Welby says that the penny dropped and, as he later put it, “I asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life”. Were Welby on Adam Phillips’ couch, this experience would no doubt be brought into some sort of conversation about his highly dysfunctional parents — both alcoholics, his father turning out not to have been his father after all.

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Boris had a dysfunctional home life, too. His mother and father divorced when he was 15. There are stories that his father was abusive towards her. But where Welby embraced the emotional hyper-sincerity of evangelical Christianity, Boris rejects it with every fibre of his being, terrified that it is the one thing that can bring down the “pyramid of piffle” on which the whole Boris act is founded.

In effect, Boris is a polytheist: he worships a great many gods. That’s what allows him to be all things to all people. Yes, he refers to “our Lord Jesus Christ” in front of the Christians, but he’d flirt in the same way with other gods too — as promiscuous with divinity as he is elsewhere in his life.

Boris has a lot in common with his schoolmate, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I can see why they got on. They have similar demons. But they react to them in totally opposite ways, running in different directions.

“The current trajectory of our church is a huge mistake and the leadership is out of touch with ordinary churchgoers,” George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote yesterday. “It is time to rally the troops.”

He was writing in support of the newly formed Save the Parish movement — a group I have been plotting with from its creation. And yes, that is a staggering thing for a former Archbishop to say about the current leadership.

However, it is not former Archbishops that are at the core of this new movement, but ordinary parishioners and parish priests who believe that the church itself has turned against them. They have witnessed how the centre of gravity in church affairs — as well as the funding — has shifted from the local parish towards an increasingly bureaucratic and centralised church structure.

It is ordinary churchgoers and faithful church wardens who have looked after their churches for years, as well as clergy padding about in their parish, visiting the sick, burying the dead and administering the sacraments, who are most angry about this betrayal. It feels like we are in the middle of an aggressive corporate takeover.

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The Church is abandoning its flock

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If you flick through the jobs section of the Church Times, you can see this effect almost straight away. It used to be full of jobs for the Rector of This and the Vicar of That. But such vacancies have increasingly been replaced by people with unrecognisable and convoluted job descriptions. Now they advertise areas of responsibility that have little to do with parish ministry, answerable directly to a line manager somewhere in Church House.

Jobs that began as a way of supporting the mission of the parish are now being regarded as its cheaper replacement. The parish clergy are “limiting factors” and the people in the pews merely “passengers”, as one senior Anglican clergyman put it last month.

No need for priests, or expensive theological education and the like. 10,000 new churches are imagined, led by lay people, not clergy. Many will not have a building, just a website. Many will meet on Zoom. It’s not really what most of us would call a church. But if “the church is the people not the building”, as goes the oft-heard mantra, then why not? There is certainly no need to worry about a leaky roof when you’re only online.

Of course, there have been times when I have fantasised about my job not involving the maintenance of a crumbing church tower. Even ten years ago, at St Paul’s, when the Occupy movement gathered around the Cathedral, I felt the building had become more important to some than the message it was built to proclaim.

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St Paul was a tentmaker, after all. And few parish clergy who have done the job as long as I have can be unfamiliar with the frustration that comes with looking after a large building. But the idea that we would be more entrepreneurial and light of foot if we were to hand the keys over to the National Trust is an absolute fantasy.

“Pioneers” is what the Church’s Head of Evangelism, Canon Dave Male, wants more of. Pioneers must be “freed up”, he says. But the problem here is that the weight of parish commitments, even the building, is what keeps us from floating off into some abstract theological space. The parish is grounded, rooted in place and time.

Yes, the pandemic has left the church feeling the pinch financially — and there is much need for belt-tightening. But we have far too many Bishops for the number of churchgoers that we now have. Probably far too many Dioceses as well, each with its own set of managers and advisors. Save the Parish believes that in times when finances are hard, it is the front-line parishes that should be supported as a priority rather than directing funds away towards another new top-down initiative.

It used to be the case that the parish owned its own vicarages and paid its own clergy. It was almost the very definition of an anti-fragile, localised organisational structure. But those who proclaim subsidiarity as a principle — and it was originally a theological idea — are often the first to betray it.

In 1976, the central Church decided that the parish was an inefficient way of running things and brought the ownership of parish assets under the control of the Diocese, introducing a whole new layer of management to look after the parish’s assets. From here on in, the Diocese began to have its own ideas about how best to spend a parish’s assets. Vicarages were sold off. The clergy were paid from a central pot. And power shifted from the parishes to the Diocesan structures.

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Last week, we gathered as Save the Parish for the first time in the ancient St Bartholomew’s church in Smithfield. Alison Millbank, Canon Theologian from Southwell Cathedral, put the matter plainly: “the Church of England has totally capitulated to market values and managerialism… There has been a tendency to view the parish like some inherited embarrassing knick-knack from a great-aunt that you wish were in the attic.”

The fightback, it’s safe to say, has started. At the end of the event, Fr Marcus Walker, the Rector of St Bartholomew’s, described Save the Parish as “the last chance to save the system that has defined Christianity in this country for 1000 years”. He may not have been exaggerating.

These days, our senior clergy do MBAs and spend their lives in committees, devising desk-generated grand plans for the revitalisation of the Church. On the receiving end of these continual initiatives are the poor bloody infantry, the clergy and people of the parishes, slagged off as an impediment to growth and rubbished as some antique hangover from a bygone age.

The senior clergy say they value the parish. And some do. But many on the ground are just not feeling the love.

There are some forms of Christianity that exist only in order to reproduce. Christians are here to make new Christians who, in turn, are called to go out there and make even more new ones. The purpose of church life is to beget more church life. Randy for converts, these good shepherds admire the sheep in the pews principally for their reproductive qualities. And you can tell it’s these sorts of Christians that are now running the show in the Church of England, because those of us who are deemed to be infertile or firing evangelistic blanks are being slated for the knacker’s yard. The latest group to be targeted for a cull are the clergy themselves. In more senses than one, we are being directed to Genesis chapter nine, verse seven: “Go forth and multiply!”

The new growth strategy from head office is code named Myriad, Greek for ten thousand. The idea is to have 10,000 new churches by 2030, creating a million new disciples. Don’t worry about the figures too much, they are nothing more than fantasy numbers plucked from the sky. As a general rule, church growth is inversely proportional to the big talk coming from head office. Of course, we are all supposed to nod along, as if this is some fabulous, exciting initiative. As Martyn Percy, the Dean of the Cathedral in Oxford, explained, it’s becoming a bit like one of those Stalinist 10-year plans, something we are all obliged to cheer, yet one that is totally disconnected to reality.

The latest Great Leap Forward for the C of E looks like this. Get rid of all those crumbling churches. Get rid of the clergy. Do away with all that expensive theological education. These are all “limiting factors”. Instead, focus relentlessly on young people. Growth, Young People, Forwards. Purge the church of all those clapped-out clergy pottering about in their parishes. Forget the Eucharist, or at least, put those who administer it on some sort of zero hours contract. Sell their vicarages. This is what our new shepherds want in their prize sheep: to be young, dumb, and full of evangelistic… zeal.

You think I am over-stating the matter? This is how Canon John McGinley recently explained the thinking behind Myriad:

“Lay-led churches release the church from key limiting factors. When you don’t need a building and a stipend and long, costly college-based training for every leader of the church … then we can release new people to lead and new churches to form. It also releases the discipleship of people. In church planting, there are no passengers.”

Project Myriad, or something like it, has been in the wings for several decades. When I was first a priest it was called The Decade of Evangelism. It was an embarrassing disaster. And throughout my time, there is always another tiresomely new initiative on the go with some enthusiastic sounding name like Springboard. Most of my clergy friends inwardly groan when they hear of yet another exciting new strategy.

But Covid has finally given its proponents the opportunity they need. When the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to celebrate and broadcast the Eucharist on Easter Day 2020 from his kitchen, rather than popping down a few stairs to Lambeth Palace’s fine 13^th-century chapel, he was clearly making a point: all those old stones are holding us back, they are unnecessary. It’s called “a new way of being church”. Our new churches will meet in people’s homes, not in churches. Around 20-30 will gather in the living rooms of the wealthiest people in the parish — who else has a living room that can sit this many people?

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Of course, the shepherds know that many of the sheep don’t like the direction in which they are being led. The recent revolt of the Diocese of Winchester against their Bishop is a case in point. They threatened a vote of no confidence and he has stepped back from ministry. As Jeremy Clarkson has recently discovered, sheep can be remarkably bolshy creatures with a mind of their own. So, inevitably, the shepherds are trying to calm their flock with soothing words. We want a mixed economy church, they say. We are not seeking to send unreproductive clergy to the knacker’s yard. We are not wanting to sell off your medieval church to be converted into yuppie flats. This isn’t about replacing the organ with the overhead projector or clearing out the books from the Vicar’s Study and replacing them with office equipment. Let many flowers bloom, they say.

But that is not how it works in practice. Follow the money. Parish churches are being stripped of their clergy. The Diocese of Chelmsford is culling 61 posts by 2021 with a further 49 under threat by 2026. Others are following suit. But as these “limiting factor” clergy are being culled, central funds are being directed towards new evangelistic initiatives through what is called Strategic Development Funding from the £9 billion piggy bank held by the fabulously wealthy Church Commissioners. Dioceses can now apply for money from a £45-million pot set aside to support this new look C of E. And many of the new jobs that are being funded are not for parish-based clergy, but for a whole new level of managers with new-fangled titles like assistant archdeacon and mission enablers. This is the mechanism by which the church is being transformed. Even those Bishops that want to resist this dismantling of traditional structures are being out manoeuvred.

Perhaps the most sinister phrase in Canon McGinley’s lecture is the disparagement of “passengers”. If you go to church to sit at the back, say your prayers, listen to the sermon and receive the Eucharist, or if you are bruised and just looking for a place of healing, that means you. If you are not a part of the great push forward, you are just so much baggage. Little wonder there is now a white-hot anger within the rank and file of the priesthood. Consider this from the former Dear of Exeter Cathedral, Jonathan Draper.

“It is ironic, of course, that these proposals are being pushed by those who have both presided over the church’s decline and had the long and expensive theological education which they would jettison. There is nothing from the leadership of the church that reflects on their own part in decline, their own ineptitude, bullying, sense of entitlement, and in the failure to connect with the very people they would like to see fill the houses of the sufficiently wealthy in this brave new ecclesial world.”

I have never seen this level of fury from within the church during my 25 years as a priest.

So, what is the answer? After all, the proponents of evangelism first do have a point – the Church of England is dying fast. First, I would say that all efforts to put evangelism first are self-defeating. The Church feels like a gauche teenage boy going out to the pub deliberately to find a girlfriend, covering himself with cheap aftershave and rehearsing his unconvincing chat-up lines. It’s all so cringeworthy and needy. The way you make yourself attractive to others is by being fully yourself, and having confidence in what you are – even if that is a little strange and different. It’s when you stop obsessing about attracting others that you become more attractive to them.

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But also, the church is not called to be successful. It is called to be faithful. I would prefer for us to die with dignity, being faithful to our calling, rather than to turn ourselves inside out trying to be superficially attractive, thus abandoning the faith as we have understood it. Indeed, the Bible is full of stores of the faithful remnant. In Biblical theology, the remnant are those faithful people that survive some catastrophe. Today, these are the people who come to church, faithfully to say their prayers — people of devotion and not necessarily of evangelistic vim and vigour. They are the beating heart of the parish. Eleanor Rigby, Father McKenzie: these are my heroes. And long term, these are our most effective evangelists. I am deeply offended that they are now called passengers.

Secularisation is indeed a catastrophe for the churches. But we won’t outlast this period of history by being more business-like or by adopting slicker models of evangelistic marketing. We won’t be saved by panicky spread-sheet evangelists, Indeed, we must be more of what we have been called to be – more thoughtful, more prayerful, less fearful, more obedient to God’s call. We are resurrection people after all. Institutional death should hold out no terror for the faithful. And it will only be this lack of fear that can make us attractive once again.

The Archbishop’s distress was echoed on Panorama this week, as real experiences of racism were aired by members of the clergy, some of whom wept as they told their stories. But as the Anti-racism Taskforce prepares to publish its first report into these assertions of bigotry and prejudice, and set the parameters for a new Racial Justice Commission, cool heads must prevail. The existence of racism in the Church of England does not validate every diagnosis of its cause, and thus, even more so, every prescription for its eradication.

Amid the heightened emotion of our current moment, however, this very important distinction is in danger of being overlooked. The task force has made its diagnoses and is offering prescriptions based upon them. And the most troubling part of the report’s diagnosis, which was leaked a few weeks ago, comes in its section on “theology”. Theology is the heart of the church its body of belief. It provides the reference point for all doctrine and action. On this, the report is bold: the objective must be “transforming the theological landscape”.

It is a damning analysis.

According to the report that I saw, the church’s “existing foundations and principle theological frameworks entrench racial prejudice and white normativity across the church’s traditions and its doctrinal teachings”. Its “systemic and structural racism … derives its legitimation from certain theological foundations” which must be “redressed”. These foundations are “Eurocentrism, Christendom (sic) and White normativity”. They form “underlying theological assumptions” and “a prejudicial theological value system” that shapes “racial prejudice” in the “official teachings of the church”, perpetuated by “predominantly white male theological perspectives and forms of knowledge”. Its theology must be “decolonized”.

The shocking set of accusations provokes two questions: where have these ideas come from? And where, more ominously, will they lead?

In fact, they all reflect the key concepts that are part of a little-known branch of teaching called Black theology, or more accurately, Black liberation theology — a radical, revolutionary doctrine which analyses power structures in the church in order to liberate black people — and its better known (though equally little understood) secular cousin, Critical Race Theory. Unnoticed by many, the two have been making substantial inroads in the Anglican Church and their proponents already dominate the church’s conversation on race.

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A number of events track that course. Last June, Justin Welby honoured Oxford Professor Anthony G. Reddie, with a Lambeth award for his “exceptional and sustained contribution to Black Theology”. It was an endorsement at the very highest level of the Anglican Church. Announced just a few weeks after George Floyd’s death, amid the Black Lives Matter marches, and as plans for the CofE’s response to its institutional racism were being formulated, its significance shouldn’t be overlooked.

Then, last December, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York appointed Dr Sanjee Perera as their new Adviser on “Minority Ethnic Anglican Concerns” – i.e. on race and racism. Their press release linked her appointment with the Taskforce and Race Commission, in which she will no doubt play a major part. For her part, Perera has written of how the church has “long been steeped in a racialised agenda”, and how its “patriarchal, heteronormative, ableist and racialised theology” has “justified slavery and Empire”. Earlier this month she helped organise a conference with Reddie entitled “Dismantling Whiteness; Critical White Theology”.

Both these key figures are steeped in the subversive (Reddie’s own description) ideology which seems to have been welcomed right into the heart of Anglican Church. Reddie, literally wrote the textbook on Black liberation theology (BLT), which seeks to “reinterpret the very meaning of the Christian faith for the sole and explicit purposes of fighting for Black liberation in this world”. This is problematic because in the process, it so abandons every core tenet of orthodox Christianity that it hardly qualifies to be called Christian.

It rejects, for example the central belief of Christianity that the death of Jesus was divinely ordained for the forgiveness of the sins of humanity: the atonement. Reddie’s Core Text states that “Jesus died because of our sins and not for them” as a “subversive agitator”, a victim of “imperial greed and colonial corruption”. His life was a “struggle for liberation of all oppressed peoples”. BLT frames its theology and revisionist history entirely within this context.

Christians who counter this with reference to the Bible are dismissed out of hand. The Bible, according to Reddie, is a word “about” God, not the authoritative word “of” God, alongside which non-religious texts are equally valid. His declaration that even hostile atheists can be Black liberation theologians reveals that BLT is as much a political doctrine as a religious one.

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Any challenges to the doctrine are deemed invalid, especially if they come from white Eurocentric male theologians, because white perceptions of truth are corrupted by their hold on power. By contrast, black experience is always accounted true because, having no power, the oppressed alone can see clearly. In BLT my truth is truer than your truth becomes a theological principle.

Black liberation theology isn’t new. It grew out of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. But it is, today, coming of age following the rise of an increasingly prominent philosophical discipline called Critical Theory, many of whose precepts it had absorbed.

Critical Theory has been steadily growing in influence within academia, and over the course of the 2010s, its influence began to be increasingly felt outside the academy, as previously unfamiliar terms such as white privilege, intersectionality, postcolonialism, and heteronormativity spilled over into more common currency. These all feature throughout the racism report.

Critical Theory offered ways of analysing the power structures in society and uncovering their injustices in order to liberate oppressed groups. One branch of it, Critical Race Theory (CRT), particularly concentrated on power structures and oppression with regard to race but, as a materialist discipline, it disregarded the church. Black liberation theology, had much in common with secular CRT, and was in many ways its theological cousin. It stepped into that gap. It is the Trojan Horse for Critical Theory.

Critical Theory views humanity through cynical, reductive eyes. It analyses society and human relationships through the lens of power, classifying society into oppressors and oppressed. Unlike Marxism, it does so not by class alone but also by race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and so on. The goal of Critical theory is to work for the liberation of the oppressed by unmasking and thus disempowering the forces which create and impose dominant ideology upon those same oppressed groups. Critical Race Theory develops these ideas within the context of race.

In Critical Race Theory, Race is a “social construct”, developed solely to subjugate black people. Racism is far more than acts of discrimination or violence: it is embedded, permanently, in all aspects of society and is thus “structural”. Black liberation theology and Critical Race Theory derive their validity from the notion of racism’s all-pervasive permanence — hence the vehement attacks upon the recent report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, and why its data-driven conclusions (that racism exists but other factors also account for racial disadvantage in Britain) were dismissed. They contradict core CRT/BLT doctrine.

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CRT holds that the oppression of black people by white people is made possible because white people hold hegemonic power – cultural and ideological dominion – which grants them White privilege. White power and White privilege equate to White supremacy. ‘Whiteness’ (as in the ‘Dismantling Whiteness’ conference) encapsulates all the negative qualities of White supremacy.

The goal of CRT is the deconstruction of racism, and the dismantling of the systems of hegemonic power that normalise it. The tool it uses is Social Justice activism. Liberal values such as the equality of treatment for all are rejected: equality of opportunity is replaced by “equity”, the engineered equality of outcome. It is considered valid to discriminate in college entry, exams or employment selection in favour of minorities to achieve equity. This principle was there in the Taskforce recommendations that I saw.

CRT forms the backbone of all anti-racism training, which is now — according to the recommendations of the Anti-Racism Taskforce report that I saw — to be mandatory for church staff and members of recruitment panels. It will only be voluntary for congregations but if CRT insists that there are no non-racists, only racists and antiracists, how soon will the social pressure force church members to sign up? Books and talks by leading BLT and CRT figures are already on a number of well-known churches’ “racial justice” resource lists.

According to the leaked report, there are also demands that the Theology curriculum be “decolonised”. Black liberation theologians, including Reddie and Perera, already form the majority of the Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group of the Common Awards Scheme which validates almost all theological degrees in the Anglican Church. “Black theology” is to be made compulsory for priests in training. Standards are to be set for anti-racism training of theological college staff. Ordination candidates will have to prove their anti-racism credentials. New racial justice and anti-racism training materials are to be produced for CofE schools, youth groups and for a new Racial Justice Sunday. All these will be overseen by proponents of Black liberation theology.

When people panic, they lose their discernment. They pay attention to the wrong things and lose sight of what’s important. The genuine existence of racism does not validate every diagnosis of its cause or prescription for its eradication. Quotas, maybe, but an entirely new theology? The Church’s rich heritage of teaching, built up over hundreds of years, is in danger of being plundered. It must take care.

Instead, the Church of England’s interventions over Brexit have been characterised by the kind of mild hysteria and hand-wringing that have, nowadays, become the stock in trade of that institution and its bishops. It seems to me that the Church, within its upper echelons at least, is now less the Tory party at prayer, and more a bunch of Guardian columnists at therapy.

Given that support for Brexit was always a fringe position among senior Anglican clergy, and that those bishops who have pronounced on it have usually done so only to bewail the spread of ‘hate’ and lecture us on how we must protect the poor from the consequences of their own votes, it is perhaps little wonder that those who voted Leave might be suspicious about the Church’s real motives. Thus, Justin Welby’s sermons calling for a rapprochement may resonate favourably in Remain-supporting Hampstead, less so in Leave-supporting Hartlepool.

All of this does, however, throw up the question of what constructive role, if any, our faith institutions might play in drawing together disparate and competing forces at a time of political instability.

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By Paul Embery

Anyone searching for a blueprint could do worse than examine the momentous London dock strike of 1889, and in particular the part played by Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, then the 81-year-old Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. This month marks the 130^th anniversary of the conclusion of this most pivotal of industrial struggles – one whose roots lay in the grinding poverty and exploitation that were common features of the Victorian workplace.

Dockers of the age were treated as cattle, and subjected to the humiliating daily ritual of arriving at the dockside and being crammed into holding pens, compelled to jostle their way to the front in the hope of being hired for work. Often they were turned away, and would face the shame of tramping home to face their hungry families, before heading to the docks the next morning to try all over again.

It was an economic system at its most inhuman and degrading, filled with the type of indignity and personal anguish that was captured in that beautiful but heartrending 1948 Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves, in which the protagonist, a poor father, enlists the help of his young son in desperately searching around Rome – a city still ravaged by the effects of war and mass unemployment – for his stolen bicycle, a vital tool of his trade without which he cannot work nor feed his family. Returning desolate at the end of the day, he is unable to summon the courage to enter their home and face his wife, who is inside with their baby.

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The London dock dispute, born out of a similar deprivation, centred on a demand for the “dockers’ tanner” – a rate of sixpence an hour – and a guaranteed minimum number of working hours. The strikes that were called in pursuit of these goals closed the entire Port of London, as around 100,000 men joined the protest. Solidarity flooded in. The Salvation Army fed the strikers and their families, and Australian waterfront workers sent donations. Jewish tailors in London’s East End, engaged in their own strike against sweatshop conditions, pledged their support to the dockers, and the dockers reciprocated.

For his part, Cardinal Manning, driven by his Catholic faith (he was a convert from Anglicanism), showed himself willing to incur the wrath of his fellow prelates by unashamedly taking up the dockers’ cause and becoming their advocate in negotiations with employers. He saw in the dockers a group of men who were downtrodden and oppressed. Their treatment conflicted with everything he stood for, principally the belief, central to his faith, that all humans were equal in the eyes of the Almighty and deserving of justice and compassion. Nothing about the dockers’ subjugation was pre-ordained as far as Manning was concerned.

He had form. In 1872, he had pledged support to the fledgling Agricultural Labourers’ Union, which landowners and farmers had tried to strangle at birth. And two years prior to the dock strike, he had intervened to prevent a papal condemnation of an early American union, the Knights of Labor.

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But in spite of his overt support for the underdog, Manning commanded the respect of both sides in the dock strike and became a trusted mediator. He proved himself adept at reconciling opposing interests without ever sacrificing the support and trust of those with whom his heart really lay.

The dockers won their battle decisively. They got their tanner, and conditions improved. Manning’s portrait was carried by workers alongside that of Karl Marx at subsequent May Day celebrations. The dispute also gave a boost to the New Unionism of the time – a burgeoning of the trade union movement which saw the establishment of a number of unions representing thousands of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who until then had gone unorganised.

Manning’s efforts did not go unnoticed at the Vatican. Less than two years later, a ground-breaking encyclical – Rerum Novarum (Of the New Things) – was issued by Pope Leo XIII. The text, which was said to be influenced in no small part by the London dock strike, addressed the plight of the working-classes, stressing the need for justice in the workplace and warning of the deleterious effects of a predatory and unfettered capitalism.

As a means to countering vast wealth inequality – which he described as the “enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses” – Pope Leo gave an explicit endorsement of the virtue of collective bargaining and supported the right to form trade unions. The message was that human beings were not commodities to be exploited by the rich: economic systems should be subordinated to the needs of man, not the other way round, and if they weren’t, then workers were justified in organising to defend their interests.

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With its emphasis on reciprocity, relationships, the common good and the dignity of labour, Rerum Novarum can be seen as one of the foundation stones of modern Catholic social thought. It provided a crucial moral and economic framework for ensuring the representation of the voiceless in the face of a powerful, dehumanising market on the one hand, and an impersonal, over-mighty State on the other. Needless to say, Manning approved. Interpreting it later, he wrote: “A strike is like war. If for just cause a strike is right and inevitable, it is a healthful constraint imposed upon the despotism of capital. It is the only power in the hands of the working men.”

These questions remain as relevant today as they were in Victorian Britain, perhaps more so. In these times of rapacious globalisation, of transient and precarious employment, of the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, of the deracination of entire communities as a consequence of vast and rapid movements of capital and labour, of a widening gap between rich and poor, how might we return to first principles? How might we revisit the belief that respect for the dignity of humanity and labour are integral to the building of a common good, and that economic systems should be configured around the needs of man and – something that those who preach the gospel of liberal markets and liberal cosmopolitanism just don’t understand – his affinity for place and desire for belonging? Crucially, who will speak up for today’s working-class against an establishment that continues to ignore it and treat it with contempt?

In this age of aggressive secularism, do our faith institutions have any role to play at all in this debate? Are they even brave enough to enter into it? Experience tells us that the Roman Catholic church, with its tradition of fighting for social justice and its healthy disdain for fashionable opinion, stands as well-placed as any to do so.

Is it time for Rerum Novarum 2.0?

And if the evidence is like that given at other similar IICSA hearings into the Ampleforth and Downside Schools, the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham and the case of the former Anglican bishop of Gloucester, Peter Ball, it will reveal how people in positions of authority did little to stop the abuse, and often put the reputation of the ecclesiastical institution before the welfare of children.

The lasting impact of these IICSA hearings and coverage of court cases where priests have been put on trial has been profound. Many people seem to suspect any man of the cloth as a child abuser. One priest once recalled to me that an air stewardness on a flight from Rome accused him of being “one of those paedophiles”. Another remembered how, as a young cleric, he would visit families in his parish and would let the young children clamber all over him. Now, he would always avoid such a situation and knew other priests would similarly be careful in case their actions could be misconstrued.

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The last few years have also seen a marked decline in church going. Parishes which had been run by convicted priests find their pews are emptying. People have voted with their feet – and their money. Collections are down. Only 722,000 people attended Sunday services last year in the Church of England – a decline of 16,000 on the previous year and a continuing a trend over the past decade. Hatching, matching and dispatching is no longer an Anglican province: people are turning elsewhere for funerals, marriages and thanksgiving for babies.

It’s quite possible the fall-off might have happened anyway, given the trend of the past decade. But when an organisation that is supposed to have moral authority is continually in the news for sexual misbehaviour then it’s no wonder people turn away.

Even more disturbing, though also predictable, has been the instinct of the Church to revive its image by taking supposedly firm action – something that can be seen in the Church of England’s treatment of the late Bishop George Bell of Chichester.

No doubt the Church hopes to prove that it has learnt its lessons on dealing with abuse. It wants to be seen to be on the side of victims after years of failing to take them seriously. But the primary concern remains the standing of the institution.

Bell was one of the towering moral figures of the Church of England in the 20^th century, and is remembered today for being a staunch critic during the Second World War of the Allies’ area bombing of the civilian population of Germany, calling the bombing of unarmed women and children barbarian.

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But in more recent times, Bell’s name has also become synonymous with abuse due to accusations made against him regarding assaults by him of children. The first was made in 1995, 37 years after his death, to the then Bishop of Chichester, but was not passed to the police until a second complaint against Bell was made to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in 2013.

By 2015 the diocese of Chichester had paid compensation to the first complainant, known only as Carol – in effect confirming to the public that it considered Bell guilty of the alleged assaults. The furore it unleashed, with supporters of Bell outraged by what they perceived as an injustice, led the Church of England to commission an independent review from QC Lord (Alex) Carlile but not into the truth of the allegations, only into the Church’s procedures. Carlile concluded in 2017 that there had been a rush to judgement and that the Church had felt it should be “supportive of the complainant”.

In other words, the Church of England had failed to be fair to George Bell, who was of course unable to defend himself. Although the Church of England did issue a statement apologising to Bishop Bell’s relatives, Archbishop Welby rejected calls to say that Bell’s name had been cleared. At the time, Welby said a “significant cloud” remained over Bell’s name.

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Then, last week, another official church report, by ecclesiastical lawyer Tim Briden, ruled that an allegation, made in the aftermath of the Carlile report, which the Church of England passed to police, was unfounded. The police did not take action. Although Archbishop Welby has apologised for mistakes “in the process surrounding the original allegation against George Bell”, he has not retracted the suggestion there is a cloud hanging over his name.

What is evident now is that Bishop Bell fell victim to the Church responding to public opprobrium. Compensation was paid to an alleged victim at a time when there was intense public interest in child abuse. The Church responded to moral outrage with moral panic, and Bell was its fall guy.

There have been other innocent priests who have suffered indignities following accusations. One priest I know was found not guilty of the abuse charges against him by a jury after a crown court trial, but he has been banished from his parish and not allowed to minister there again. Those accused, even if they are later found innocent, become pariahs.

This is a pattern of institutional behaviour seen elsewhere. Think of the way in which the police rushed to prove they now act swiftly when they announced that they were investigating accusations against former Prime Minister Edward Heath. Consider the decision of the BBC – its reputation traduced over the way it stalled on reporting the sexual abuse of its former star Jimmy Savile – which so enthusiastically reported on the police investigating Sir Cliff Richard that it used its news budget to hire a helicopter to film police entering the singer’s home. All notions of his innocence until proved guilty went out the window; viewers were given the impression this was a man under such deep suspicion that he was most likely guilty.

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The rush to take action, whether by the police, a broadcaster or a religious body, in the face of what is veering on public hysteria about abuse, gives the impression of organisations and institutions who want to be seen to be doing something about these terrible crimes. It also suggests the chief focus of attention remains the institution’s standing, rather than the well-being of individual victims. But just as hiding scandal eventually unravels, so do gestures that make victims of the innocent.

Nor does it help the real victims of abuse. If institutions spend time trying to enhance their sullied reputations through panicked attempts to be seen to be taking action, it leaves far less time for tackling real problems of abuse – and less time to consider the justice that victims deserve.

The IICSA hearings into the St Benedict’s School, and its associated church of Ealing Abbey, in West London, which is run by Benedictine monks, will be another opportunity to listen to the survivors of abuse.

There will be claims that some of the abuse took place 30 years before any action was taken against the perpetrators, yet when victims finally sued for compensation, it became evident that the abuse had been known to people in authority long before. For the victims, trying to repair the damage done by sexual assaults in their youth can take decades. Traducing the reputations of the innocent by the institutions who first turned a blind eye to crimes being committed does not help them. But painstaking efforts by those same institutions to improve their safeguarding of the vulnerable does offer some sort of consolation.

Justin Welby, the current incumbent of the See, needn’t worry about a similar fate. He has, however, come in for a degree of criticism for his speech to the Trades Union Congress conference, in which he condemned zero-hours contracts and the gig economy as “the return of an ancient evil”, apologised for the Church of England’s historical opposition to the trade union movement, lambasted payday loan companies and Amazon, criticised the tax system, and said that he dreamed of government putting charities such as food banks, night shelters and debt advice clinics out of business.

Some of the criticism was that a religious figure should take any political stance. A more reasonable objection, in my view, was that Welby’s speech was excessively party political – a distinction he himself made during it, though while denying that his position was party political. The third criticism, which came soon after the speech, was that it was hypocritical, since it turned out that the Church of England itself not only employs people on zero-hours contracts, but that the Archbishops’ Council (which Welby chairs) expressly advised that they do so, and that the Church Commissioners, who handle the Church’s finances, own quite a lot of shares in Amazon.

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The first objection is a non-starter. Anyone who thinks that the clergy should stay out of politics, or that religiously-motivated politicians “shouldn’t do God” (as Alastair Campbell advised Tony Blair, arguing that it was a recipe for trouble) is on a hiding to nothing. Religion and politics are both ways in which people attempt to make sense of the world, ensure justice and attempt to correct iniquities. On any reading of the Bible, it is impossible for any Christian, let alone any clergyman, not to scream from any available pulpit for a radical rethinking of the world in which we live.

What is not obvious is a solution provided by the material world, let alone the policies of Jeremy Corbyn in 2018. The direct teachings of Jesus provided by the Gospels are non-existent when it comes to specific instructions on issues that seem to be of high priority to many people who call themselves Christians (homosexuality, birth-control, race, class, redistribution of wealth). They are, however, painfully direct about things which often seem impossible aspirations: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbour as yourself.

One of the most remarkable things about Jesus –and an indication of the powerfulness of his teachings – is that he was totally obscure for most of his life, and active as a preacher for no more than a year or 18 months. He was sufficiently popular to acquire a following, but sufficently unpopular to be crucified.

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Yet within a hundred years, Roman writers describe his followers as “dangerous”, and a serious political threat. Not much more than two centuries later, their ideas conquer the known world, and create civilization as the West knows it. A third of the world’s population is nominally Christian, and even secular, liberal, post-religious societies – in other words, most developed countries – have been largely shaped by Christianity.

In historical terms, then, religious power has often been political. Much of European history is the story of clashes between the Church (which usually meant the Roman Catholic Church or the Pope of the day) and national monarchs and governments. The episcopal seat of Canterbury has been a hugely important political power for at least the last thousand years. The Archbishop is not a sort of Anglican Pope, but he is primus inter pares for millions of Christians, and also sits in the House of Lords as a legislator (Welby sat, for example, on the Parliamentary Committee for Banking Standards).

There are plenty of arguments for disestablishing the Church of England, but none for saying that clergy should not take political positions on speak out on political matters. The Archbishop’s position, however, requires a more balanced approach than Welby seems able to take. The criticism of his speech as party political is much more well-founded.

In it, he conflated the teachings of the church with what are more or less the current policies of the Labour Party. This fits in with his previously expressed opposition to, for example, the Government’s Universal Credit policy, caps on benefit and his scepticism about Brexit.

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The speech expressly referred to capital as something that “reduced human dignity and treated labour as mere resource” and cited John McDonnell, the Labour Shadow Chancellor. In this, he probably resembles the vast majority of Anglican clergy who (unlike the majority of Anglican laity) express a clear preference for the policy solutions of the Left.

Yet, when the conflict between church and state is prompted directly by the teachings of Jesus, it is quite unlike the conflicts between competing political powers. The power of Christianity’s message is that it is a challenge to the material world, and to material power. Much of Christ’s teaching, notably the Sermon on the Mount, demands a literal inversion of norms: the elevation of the poor, the meek, the downtrodden. The Gospels are clear, however, that Jesus actively resisted attempts to characterise his message as political: it transcends politics.

Injunctions against the exploitation of the poor, and that “justice should flow down like waters, and righteousness like an everlasting stream”, are Biblical, political, and very much part of the Archbishop’s business.

What isn’t a similar imperative is the assumption that the ends of the Kingdom of God are identical to the exhortations of the Labour Party, the Guardian’s leader column and the lazy assumption that a caring and just society always requires government intervention, public spending and greater power for the trades unions.

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It’s hard to see, to take a fairly obvious example, why taking a portion of people’s earning by compulsion, and then redistributing it to the poor through a wasteful and inefficient bureaucracy should be more virtuous than people freely giving their money to the poor. Yet that’s what many now assume – as Welby did in his call for government to put church-run voluntary food banks out of business.

Even those who defend aspects of the tax system and the welfare state ought to recognise that both can become not only a trap for the poor, but a danger to the morals of those who are enjoined by the Church to care for the less-fortunate, by absolving them from their own duties. There are those on the Left, and in the Church, who seem to think that some charitable provision is in itself a disgrace, because it is doing work that ought to be handled by the State. There’s no Christian mandate for a particular political system.

It’s perhaps unlucky, or if you think that way, poetic justice, that Welby should have chosen to start his speech to the TUC with a quotation from the Book of Amos. Because the whole passage which he cited is directed at religious hypocrites. It comes from a section in which the Lord tells the people of Israel that their prayers and sacrifices are in vain if they persist in their “treading upon the poor” and other sins. The almost immediate revelation that the Church employs zero-hours contracts and invests in Amazon, who had been condemned by the Archbishop, were held up as evidence of hypocrisy (which the modern world sees as one of the greatest of all sins).

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It’s certainly inconsistent of the Archbishop, but it’s evidence of the limited nature of his alignment of virtuous political behaviour with the priorities of socialism. The economic evidence certainly doesn’t automatically condemn low taxes, flexible working, or reduced government as evils, or leading to oppression. Quite the reverse.

If the Archbishop’s priority is the welfare of low-paid workers, he should perhaps have noted that only 12% of those of zero-hours contracts object to them, and the vast majority actually welcome the chance to work flexibly. He might have spotted that unemployment is at an all-time low.

He could also note that increased globalisation and freedom in markets have led to huge improvements in wealth and well-being and lifted billions out of poverty. In 1820, 95% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty; today, the numbers are almost reversed, with well over 90% not in extreme poverty.

In the past century, free markets have increased the world’s GDP ten-fold, led to global increases in life-expectancy, a reduction in child mortality from more than 50% in the vast majority of countries to less than 5% in all but a few, and all while the population and their standards of living have grown at a phenomenal rate which the Left once insisted was unsustainable.

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The Bible condemns the misapplied love of wealth, and its elevation above the love of God, but it also actively encourages its creation and spread, and the evidence suggests that the best way of overcoming the evils of poverty is not socialism. There are certainly notable remaining inequalities of wealth globally; but they are between countries which have embraced free markets and those which persist in socialist or crony capitalist systems.

The Archbishop’s background is, rather unusually for a clergyman, in business, since he worked as an oil executive until the late 1980s. So it is unlikely that he is altogether unaware of these straightforward economic truths. Unfortunately, he has failed to grasp that inequality and poverty are reduced by markets, and that the real examples of exploitation and injustice that he notes are largely the products of attempts to subvert them, either by corporate distortions, government interventions, or discredited socialist economic plans.

He might take a lesson from the remaining Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered, and whom I missed out from the earlier list. In 1381, Simon Sudbury was dragged out of the Tower of London and on nearby Tower Hill had his head hacked off by a mob. His offence was that he had approved of the introduction of more taxes.