Anglican Mainstream

Earlier this week, I was listening to a bishop speaking about the sheer incomprehension of many Global South colleagues as they see the Church of England carrying on as if it were pretty much business as usual while Britain’s Christian culture collapses and the wider Anglican Communion is in the throes of a fundamental realignment. Now that the Dublin Primates’ meeting has demonstrated that the Archbishop of Canterbury has lost the essential requirement of his office – the ability to gather the Communion – that perplexity can only increase. So why should this be?

I want to suggest that the answer to that question lies at least in part with a certain capacity for self-deception which allows the appearance of normality to be sustained while all the time the profoundly abnormal is gaining ground.

Let me demonstrate by a sharp historical contrast; while our present may be fairly dismal, we British have a certain talent for the past. The King's Speech, a film about King George VI’s battle with his speech impediment in the years leading up to the Second World War, has just won a clutch of Bafta awards, including best film and best actor for Colin Firth. On the surface it is an uplifting story of courage, perseverance and duty, heartwarming even, but it also evoked in me a profound sadness for what we have lost.

Despite the ravages of the First World War, economic depression and a Church of England in which evangelical witness was weak and marginalized, there was a sufficiently strong sense of Christian values within Church and nation to force Edward VIII to choose between the throne and having a divorcee, Mrs Simpson, as his wife. His abdication in 1937 made George IV a reluctant monarch, but this ensured that Britain then entered the great struggle of another world war with a king who made up in character whatever he might have lacked in charisma.

Now consider this: if the Coalition Government gets its way, in November this year, or perhaps next, that King’s daughter, our present Queen Elizabeth, who has faithfully embodied her fathers sense of duty for so many years, will have to give a Queen’s Speech at the State Opening of Parliament which will include the effective abandonment of Christian marriage in her government’s legislative programme. As columnist Melanie Philips has so clearly argued, the proposal currently being aired to call same sex unions ‘marriage’ ‘implicitly endorses the idea that there is nothing wrong with overturning centuries of Biblical understanding of the sacrament of marriage as the union of a man and a woman’.

Astoundingly, inn order that a tiny minority of same sex couples, who already have all the legal privileges of marriage under the 2005 Civil Partnership Act, can describe themselves as ‘married’, a Conservative led government can cheerfully contemplate the irrevocably overthrow the Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage as a lifelong union between one man and one woman.

How did we get from ‘The Kings Speech’ to the probability of this ‘Queen’s Speech’ in little more than the two generations? The reasons are complex, but two phases seem clear. The sexual and social revolution of the 1960’s which broke the generational transmission of Christian values was a ‘from below’ (Callum Brown’s ‘The Death of Christian Britain’ provides a very well researched study), whereas since 1997 we have seen a revolution driven more ‘from above’ as the incoming Labour Government used legislation to promote ‘progressive’ attitudes and the gay lesbian agenda through legislation while at the same time narrowing the scope of Christian freedom of conscience and expression. In this respect, the new Coalition Government is simply continuing where Labour left off and the death of Christian Britain proceeds apace.

While some groups, notably the Christian Institute and Christian Concern, have been willing to challenge the ‘institutional revolution’ as it has developed in society as a whole, there has been no comparable degree of organization and mobilization to deal with the effects of this revolution within the Church of England itself, despite the chronic failure of the House of Bishops to resist the pressures of secularization and indeed sometimes their collusion with it as when, for example, they supported the Civil Partnerships legislation of 2005 which gave to same sex unions much of the substance of marriage, if not the name.

So what is the problem? Wouldn’t it be expected that Anglican Evangelicals with their history of activism and commitment to Scriptural authority would be challenging failing church leadership and developing new structures? Why, despite the fact that their churches grow, is there so little impact on society and an apparent lack of urgency to engage with the global Anglican realignment and the GAFCON movement?

Sadly, a whole section of the evangelical movement has simply lost the plot by being content to be just one ‘flavour’ amongst others, but that is another story. My concern here is with those who have not lost their passion for the gospel, but are operating with a false model from history which screens out the key institutional and ecclesiological pressure points.

Essentially, this view is that we should get some perspective and realise that while things may be bad, they were even worse in the England of the eighteenth century. So the fact that Britain now has one of the highest drinking rates in the world and gambling is fast becoming mainstream is just what happens when people are not converted. The answer to our problems today is just what it was in the eighteenth century – we preach the gospel and pray for another great Evangelical Revival. And if we see things this way, we do not get distracted by church ‘politics’ and we really do not need help from outside!

This is of course a generalization to which there are happy exceptions, such as the formation of the FCA UK in 2009 with the strong support of Reform, but there is also a general sense that since then, the FCA in this country has not developed as strongly or as quickly as many had hoped and I suggest that this ‘Revival’ mentality has quite a lot to do with it.

Without question, we need to be profligate in our evangelism, preach the gospel and pray for a revival of the same depth and power which was so transformative on both sides of the North Atlantic through the ministries of Whitfield, Wesley and many other outstanding leaders. Yet if the monarch who is also head of the Church of England and, according to our coinage, ‘fidei defensor’ (defender of the faith), is shortly to announce the effective abolition of Christian marriage, we are not simply in a replay of the eighteenth century.

The dominant beliefs of our culture about human identity and sexuality now are profoundly different from then. There may have been much hypocrisy, but at least the hypocrite’s pretence pays tribute to morality. Now we are in a situation where the power of the state is not used to protect the Church, as it was under the Hanoverian monarchs of the eighteenth century, but to coerce it with parliamentarians threatening to impose new ideologies on the Church. So for instance Frank Field MP, representing a cross-party group of MP’s and former ministers has called on the government to force the Church of England to allow the consecration of women as bishops if General Synod does not do so.

When the GAFCON Primates absented themselves from Dublin, they did so on the basis that, to quote their Oxford statement of October 2010, ‘we can no longer maintain the illusion of normalcy’, but unfortunately many in the Church of England continue to do that very thing. The temptation to tell ourselves that things are still normal is very powerful and the ‘Revival’ model can be a subtle rationalisation – it combines the maximum of spirituality (a vision of revival) with the minimum of discomfort (nothing has essentially changed) and we are excused from the uncomfortable business – what some dismiss as church politics – of tough minded hard work to preserve our long term integrity, within existing structures or without, as part of a global confessing fellowship.

As the spiritual darkness of England deepens, the words used by King George VI in his Christmas Day broadcast of 1939 are as relevant to our spiritual warfare now as they were to the armed conflict then. As the time of the known and the normal recedes into history, we are summoned to a new walk of faith: 'I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown’ and he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand in the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.'

Charles Raven

18th February 2011