The slow but lethal self-immolation of the Church of England
I wish to write several posts about what I see bad happening in the Church of England (CofE), the part of the broader Anglican Communion church-coalition that’s special to England itself. There are inherent problems in my doing so; I’m an outsider, and I’ve gotten things wrong before in the past about the CofE. Fifteen to twenty years back, I was loudly convinced that the New Atheists posed a big danger to the CofE. Fifteen years later, and the New Atheists, despite their having permutated themselves into the Gnu Atheists to indicate their total unwillingness to ever ‘accommodate’ religous believers, to indicate their absolute rejection of religion, and to show their belief that religion could be eradicated from the world, well, fifteen years later the New/Gnu Atheists are no longer present. They’re gone. Finished. Hollowed out by the same forces that are partly those hollowing out the Church of England. The New Atheists are so 2006, and they’re not coming back. That’s a clear example of how I got things wrong, back say from 2006 to 2015. The CofE outlasted the New Atheists; not all that well, and not owing to its own efforts, but more by virtue of sheer size and inertia.
Yet some of the same forces that destroyed the New Atheists are still hollowing out the CofE right now. The replacement god that the New Atheists pushed was initially “science”, most especially evolution. That god changed into “American science”, with ever less focus on evolution, since atheists found themselves dumbfounded in the face of the universal-acid that evolutionary theory is when simplistically applied. Then the world of American science comprehensively betrayed everyone in two different ways; one way being a slow, ongoing way from around 2012 onwards, a way that culminated in an abject defeat in 2024, but which is still ongoing. The other way was shorter, but had grievous consequences: June~July-2020, with resulting loss of public faith in “science”, a failure of course immediately taken advantage of by the anti-science loons. Lastly, the Gnu Atheists themselves betrayed everyone as well as themselves, by adhering to new nonsensical cults, and by caping for Islamism.
I believe it was Karen Armstrong, commentator on religion, who once remarked that societies go through phases where accusations of atheism are flung around, but that what actually happens isn’t atheism, instead it’s part of a social change from old gods to new gods. Madeline Grant has written in the Telegraph that Christianity’s decline has unleashed terrible new gods; perhaps, or perhaps it was deficiencies in implementation, not what is a concurrent decline. Like Grant, I see new gods rising, and they remind me of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, … vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last”. I can and will describe the new gods as I do my posts here, but describing the central differences between the new gods and the old gods, including Christianity and science, is more difficult than I thought.
So, I’m an outsider, and I can get things wrong. I also have no wish to be as shallow and thoroughly dishonest as when, for example, Boris Johnson blamed the Church of England for the rise in obesity in Britain. I’m also not at all sure I grasp what the central, lasting differences are between Christianity and “paganism”, despite reading “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac” by Steven D. Smith. That’s why I asked, both on Twitter and also on BlueSky, and now here, for CofE members, fans and sympathizers to tell me what points would you like an outsider like me to *also* address, when talking about the CofE? In other words, what do you feel outsiders most often ignore or get wrong about the Church of England? I would like to hear from you. I will be writing several posts on the Church of England soon, but I see little value in my own efforts unless I’m actually also addressing what people care about.
This was my introduction to what will be a series of mine. The next post in this series is:
“The slow but lethal self-immolation of the Church of England”.