| I WILL always remember this year for Ruth Gledhill’s scoop announcement of secret plans to unite the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches.
It was not the worst story of the year; but it was the only time I can remember the Vatican, the Archbishop of Canterbury (in Tanzania), and Lambeth Palace denouncing something more or less simultaneously. There’s not much that any journalist can do to shock me any more, but now I know I am a bit more shockable than I thought.
Outside the narrow and rather nerdy circle of those who watch Anglican stories in the British press, however, there were a number of wider trends. Most of them were under way last year at this time, too.
The most obvious of these is the rising prominence of Dr Sentamu, whose gift for the theatrical gesture is made more eyecatching by the obscurity in which the Archbishop of Canterbury prefers to think and sometimes speak.
One need only compare the two men’s most recent gesture: Dr Sentamu’s cutting up his clerical collar on live television to express his disapprobation of Dr Mugabe, versus Dr Williams’s attendance at a secret eucharist in order to fail to express his approbation of the love that dare not speak its name.
Only a cynic would suggest that the eucharist is more likely to have had an effect in the world outside.
The Anglican schism has now reached the stage where newsdesks are bored of it. I don’t think that will last: there is bound to be a little drama at the Lambeth Conference, if only because so many British clergy are taking sides in the wars overseas.
It may be, of course, that the only drama will be the cancellation of the conference, but even that will be a story.
The one thing that looks completely certain is that no significant players will arrive in the mood for honest and constructive engagement with each other.
THE BACKLASH against Richard Dawkins and his chums, already detectable last Christmas, is coming along more strongly in this country now, even though the New Atheist movement seems to be doing very well in the United States, and will, I predict, continue to do so. Dawkins-type atheism has a distinct social role over there. It is fundamentalism for the college-educated, offering the same kind of certainties, and a similar range of enemies, in a world that has grown threatening, impersonal, and insecure for everyone.
IN THE NEWSROOMS, the most significant change has been The Guardian’s decision to replace Stephen Bates with Riazat Butt, marking a general shift towards the coverage of Islam as a religion at least as important as Christianity.
The continuing, and accelerating, change has been the shift of religious coverage on to the web. This year, it seems to me, has been the first in which the web coverage of religion on the newspapers’ own sites has been notably more comprehensive than the coverage that made it into print.
More comprehensive need not mean better, and in this instance it often has not been. Damian Thompson’s weblog, which proudly and accurately boasts that this paper once compared him to a blood-crazed ferret, has been adopting a bitchy tone about the RC Bishops’ Conference and The Tablet.
And it has also been nearly as demented about Muslims as Melanie Phillips. I find it astonishing that someone with an earned doctorate in the sociology of religion should write such shallow nonsense as Damian does about Islam.
The explanation may simply be that the more vicious the authorship, the more comments he gets. On the other hand, the effort to provoke comments by being outrageous may be otiose.
The example of the Guardian website suggests that even perfectly sane, thoughtful, and informative pieces about religion can attract hundreds of idiotic comments from readers.
BUT ANYONE who wished to find out from the religious correspondents of any paper what was going on in the Christian world this year would have been better informed by reading the papers on the web than by sticking to the printed version.
I don’t see any sign that the trend will reverse. One less obvious effect of this has been the internationalisation of a lot of talk about religion. A majority of the commentators on Ruth Gledhill’s site seem to be foreigners. When the Anglican schism spreads to this country, it will be in large part because it is a fight that anyone who speaks English can join in.
THE ONE THING that really needs to happen is a proper examination of the part that God will play in the forthcoming American election. The degree to which politics there is understood as theology — by everyone involved, from atheists to Mormons — is going to be one of the most important stories around. Please, Santa, if you won’t let me write it, make sure that someone else does.
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