Preface
I despair of the Church of England. To love it and to remain within it, as I do, is like watching a dear and ancient parent slowly dying of some self-inflicted condition. These days its leadership seems to get everything wrong. At the time of writing, the twin disasters which are overwhelming it are, first, its war on its own parish system and, secondly, its obsession with making lavish reparations for slavery notwithstanding the fact that the Church is the institution which contributed more than any other to the abolition of the trade in slaves. The very fact that I was called upon to take a Mattins service, as are other local friends who are also entirely unqualified, suggests that something is wrong. This never used to happen. We only have two services a month at Pentridge, and were formerly never in want of a priest – our priest – to preside over them.
The three themes which are combined in this address are the shockingly bad performance of the Church during the pandemic, a further attempt to formulate the tentative faith espoused in my prior essay The Devour Sceptic, and a critique of evangelical Christianity. People of my religious persuasion have to confront the fact that the only successful sector of the C of E is that promulgated through the Alpha course. Does this success mean that they are right? One answer is that they are as right (or wrong) as their Muslim brethren, who insist that the worship of Allah is the one true way. The response in both cases is Yes and No, but fundamentalism is not good at accommodating paradox.