Is the Church of England still ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’? If not, why not?

Mar 29, 2024 by Jill

by William Atkinson, Conservative Home:

Over the last year or so, I have taken to occasionally attending services at St Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest church, in the heart of the City. I had bumped into the Rev Marcus Walker – the rector and Critic columnist – at party conference. He invited me to his church’s monthly ‘Evensong in the City’ services, skewed towards such sympathetic but busy young professionals like myself.

As a self-described agnostic Anglican, I have never been a regular churchgoer. The Atkinsons have not really done God for about three generations. Nonetheless, I have always been adjacent to the Church of England. Even if my parents didn’t pursue having me baptised, I attended C of E schools and was pooled to Christ Church at Oxford – the only Tory public schoolboy to ever get there by accident.

In the Churchillian spirit, I see myself as a “flying buttress” to our national Church, a sympathetic fellow traveller. Like Winston, I also have enough of an ego to have a sense of a Providential God who takes a particular interest in my fate. I might not believe in Him, but I hope He believes in me. Yet Gibbon and Darwin cast long shadows. My leap of faith has taken a very long run-up.

Even if St Bart’s hasn’t cured my egotism, it has shown me how wonderful churchgoing can be. Firmly Anglo-Catholic, I find the combination of incense, choral music, sixteenth-century prose, and intelligent sermonising in 900-year-old surroundings intoxicating. My young fogey instinct has always been strong, but this is something more – a brush with the transcendental.

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