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.
I’m amongst a string of twentysomethings attracted by St Bart’s charms (and excellent wine cellar). A Times write-up described attending millennials shunning modern liturgy for bells and smells “with not a tambourine in sight”. Walker is more charitable, suggesting his church is just one way to provide credible and intelligent example of Anglicanism that can appeal to thoughtful young people.
If I had to put St Bart’s appeal simply – wine aside – I would suggest it acts on a fundamentally Tory level. One can’t be sure where one’s politics ultimately come from. But it speaks to my instinctive nexus of traditionalism, esotericism, and patriotism: a love of beauty, loyalty to tradition, and a sense of God as an Englishman. Attending a service, I instinctively know this is what I believe, and yearn to defend.
Of course, that puts me in the minority. Less than half of the population of England and Wales told the last census that they were Christian, down 13.1 per cent in a decade. The British Social Attitudes Survey suggests just 3 per cent of 18–24-year-olds are Anglican. 71 per cent said they belong to no religion at all. 5 per cent claim to be Catholic, a quiet Counter-Reformation.
Multiculturalism, liberalism, repaganisation: the Church faces headwinds that cannot be avoided. Rage against the long retreat, but don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. ‘Church Going’ was published 70 years ago, ‘Dover Beach’ 157. St Bart’s success shows at least one way the C of E can mobilise natural sympathisers: sticking to the same ‘Greatest Hits’ package of cask strength theology and glorious worship that has worked for the last 500 years.
Yet this lesson is one the C of E appears unwilling to learn. The closure of almost 300 parishes over the last five years, in the face of Walker’s noble ‘Save the Parish’ campaign, shows not only the long consequence of Canterbury’s usurpation of local funds, but a fundamental embarrassment about traditional approaches that puts the average Tory moderniser to shame.
For David Cameron’s A-List, take encouraging ‘mega-parishes’ or conjoring up 10,000 ‘lay-led communities’ from nowhere. The Church Commissioners have also “warmly welcomed” a recommendation asking it to not only apologise for slavery, but for “seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems”. How can one have confidence in a Church that is embarrassed to have converted non-believers?
A C of E that some worry would rather spend £1 billion to “address past wrongs of slavery” than helping, as John Milbank has suggested, struggling parishes strikes me as one with its priorities skewed by the banalities of contemporary progressivism. If the Church is looking towards the Guardian for coverts, it will be waiting a long time. Self-flagellating is unlikely to win over a generation already turned off from religion.
As Ed West has written, the C of E shows Conquest’s Second Law in action. Once the Tory Party at prayer, it now provides Britain with the world’s first left-wing theocracy. Anglicans voted strongly for Brexit and the Conservatives. Yet only one bishop, out of 113, voted to Leave. The Bishops seem to take every opportunity available to complain about Rwanda or take a knee before the Lionesses rather than supporting Sunday services.
A Church that has become so alienated from its most natural supporters that it leaves some feeling uncomfortable admitting their politics is one complicit in its own decline. British conservatism emerged as a defence of the established Church. But today’s Tories now flirt with Church disestablishment, militant secularism, and handing Canterbury’s assets back to Rome, so irritated are they to the left-liberal posturing of its leadership.
Conservatives did not have to acquiesce in Gordon Brown’s reforms to Church appointments. We could spent fourteen years appointing every sympathetic vicar they could find. But #FourteenYears has left us where we are. Secular Tories can see the value in a national Church, especially when the burgeoning New Theist movement points towards Christianity as a balm to our neurotic and atomised age,
I have often joked that, as an aspiring young right-wing journalist, I would one day have to go and be Deputy Editor of the Catholic Herald. Through my experiences at St Bart’s, my cynicism has been cured, and my affection for the C of E renewed. Going to Rome for career purposes is now off the cards. I suspect that baptism is only a matter of time. Will this be my last Good Friday as an agnostic? I leave that to the Almighty.
Even as I stick two fingers up at demographic decline, I am wary that our post-Brexit anti-establishment tendency has allowed our national Church to become something too many Conservatives treat, at best, with indifference, and, at worse, as an enemy. Every Tory, of any faith and none, surely needs some sense of what our party is at its most fundamental level. A rapprochement is long overdue.
In the meantime, a very happy Easter to all our readers.