THERE are some words that are dangerous to a vulnerable minority. On most people, they act only as only a mild sedative, but on the right-wing press they work like too much catnip. They produce a frantic excitement on the news desk: the wild staring eyes of leader-writers grow wilder and yet more staring; the columnists yowl deep into the night. So, out of consideration for this minority, no bishop should ever refer to anything as “problematic”.
Poor Archbishop Cottrell. He, too, was trying only to be kind when he delivered the presidential address at the meeting of the General Synod in York. As a statement of fact, it is perfectly true, as he said, that, for some people, it is distressing to call God “Father”, because this brings up memories of unhappy earthly fathers.
It is also entirely irrelevant to anything that the Synod might need to decide or to think about. Indeed, looking at the full quote, he started by saying: “The God to whom we pray is ‘Father’”, with no suggestion that this was wrong, or should be changed. He went on to say: “I know the word ‘Father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive, and for all of us who have laboured rather too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life.” The last clause is a confusing mess — how much “labouring against an oppressive patriarchy” is too much? — but no one noticed that.
It was not just The Times, the Telegraph, and the Mail that ran the story: The Guardian did, too. You could tell in some of the copy that the reporters knew the story was a piece of nonsense: Harriet Sherwood, in The Guardian, described the quote as “a brief aside in a speech that focused on the need for unity”; but she went on to write that it “would divide members of the C of E, a body whose differences on issues of sexuality, identity and equality have been highly visible for years”. Cue quotes from the Revd Christina Rees, the Revd Dr Ian Paul, and Canon Chris Sugden, none of them disagreeing with what the hapless Archbishop actually said, but all welcoming a chance to trot their own hobby horses round the ring once more.
It all keeps the circus going. What makes synodical politics special is that it combines the vicious fervour that characterises real power-struggles with an almost complete absence of power to struggle over.
But it’s also a distraction from possibly more important things. The remaining stories are divided into those that are incomprehensible outside the Synod — the 30 years’ war over homosexuality — and those that are incomprehensible even within it. In this last category falls the disbanding of the Independent Safeguarding Board (News, 23 June) and the procedural shenanigans about a debate on the subject. Since the relationship between the survivors and the Church is almost entirely adversarial now, something like this was probably inevitable.
The underlying problem is that no one knows what “independent” ought to mean. For the survivors’ groups, it means a board that will agree to everything that they want. No one calls for a Truth and Justice Commission who is not certain that Truth and Justice are on their side. For the Bishops, independence must mean something rather different.
WE LIVE in strange times. The Left is almost entirely reactionary, hearkening back to a lost paradise of social democracy, while the Right increasingly pins its faith on some kind of cleansing apocalypse, after which civilisation can be rebuilt on the proper lines.
Rod Dreher’s 2017 book The Benedict Option is only one expression of these dreams. In such confusion, Christianity loses a lot of its earlier stigma. After all, everything else has been tried. Jon Day’s review in the London Review of Books of Immanuel, Matthew McNaught’s book about Pentecostal Christianity, is unillusioned, but remarkably sympathetic.
Read the whole thing, but here is the end: “McNaught writes well about the social pressures of collective worship and the way these have intensified in the age of the internet. He and his friends had a term for feeling compelled to appear slain in the spirit: the ‘courtesy drop’, which is ‘the evangelical equivalent of faking an orgasm . . . it hurried the encounter to its conclusion, sparing both of you the embarrassment of an anticlimax.’ Once you’re in this deep, it becomes almost impossible to extricate yourself — the shame is too much to bear.
“But despite all the fakery, despite the abuse and the charlatanism . . . charismatic churches appeal to values that lie beyond the reach of capitalism and contemporary politics. At the end of the book McNaught is still motivated by the same question: whether the church, or certain kinds of church, can really be ‘self-sustaining communities, truly co-operative rather than just capitalist’. The closest he comes to finding that sense of purpose again is in becoming a parent. Fatherhood ‘demanded neither originality nor excellence. You only had to turn up to be a servant of the superorganism.’”
Only when I read the small print did I notice that the LRB still clings to its traditional values: the book was published a year before the review appeared.