What’s so dangerous about this book about the Church of England?
By Damian Thompson, Spectator:
The decline of the Church of England has been one of the most astonishing trends in modern Britain. The pews of churches in this country are emptying at the rate of about 10,000 parishioners a week. Next week, a book was to be published about this collapse entitled That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People. But suddenly the publishers, Bloomsbury, decided to pull it. The book, it seemed, was a little too incendiary.
Those reviewing the book received a panicky message:
‘Following the receipt of a legal complaint, Bloomsbury are recalling all review copies of this book and ask you to immediately return the copy received…’. Apparently there has been a legal action because of ‘a disputed passage about a Christian leader’. It sounded intriguing. But which leader? I have a finished copy of the book in front of me, and it’s hard to guess.
Is it the bishop who, we’re informed, ‘turned out to have had a conviction for cottaging hushed up’? Or the bishop who was the subject of an ‘entirely false’ rumour that he ‘attended gay orgies’? Or the bishop accused of faking his academic qualifications, also described as an ‘entirely false’ claim? It may be none of the above. We learn something extraordinary (and, perhaps, defamatory) about a member of the Church of England hierarchy on virtually every page. Ostensibly an account of the Church of England’s decline over the past 30 years, the book reads more like a compendium of its most malicious gossip.
I speak with some experience. In the early 1990s, as religious affairs correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, I wrote some awfully spiteful stuff. I wince when I read it today. But even I could not reach the sadistic heights of That Was The Church That Was. The authors are Linda Woodhead, a socio-logist of religion, and Andrew Brown, who writes about religion for the Guardian. He lived in Sweden for some years, and parts of this book are as nasty as any Scandinavian thriller.
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