The closing of the Episcopal mind
by Capel Lofft, The Critic:
The Church of England’s leaders don’t reflect its political diversity.
[…] As E.R. Norman pointed out many decades ago, the Church of England’s leaders have, again and again since at least the eighteenth century, “readily adopted the progressive idealism common to liberal opinion within the intelligentsia, of which they were a part”. They have “always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond to the values of their class and generation”, a process intimately connected to the fact that bishops are nearly always tied (by personal links, economic interests and a desire to conform) to their secular peers who set the broader cultural and political agenda.
It should be no surprise that Justin Welby — a boomer left-liberal with eleven years of working in the oil industry on his conscience — contorts Christianity into a set of slogans that correspond oddly closely to the most modish political stances of post-material identitarian leftism. One has to give him credit for sheer industry and determination: he has sought out and endorsed just about every single progressive cause he can think of in recent years, which is no mean feat given the proliferation of such campaigns. Translate such ideas — be they Critical Race Theory, open-borders ideology, sexual and gender radicalism or whatever — into Welbyism, that unique blend of the language of the management consultant and the banal uplifting jargon of contemporary liberal Evangelicalism, and hey presto, there’s material for weeks of Archiepiscopal tweeting, Lambeth Palace press releases and outraged headlines in the Daily Mail.
This would feel oddly familiar to many previous generations of confused, moderately conservative Anglican laymen and women. Senior Bishops have been preaching whatever the current progressive orthodoxy is, with a thin veneer of theological legitimation, for a long time. The different and dangerous factor nowadays is the unanimity of the Church leadership.
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