Tuesday 18 February 2014

Attitudes Have Changed

 
So says the Very Reverend Vivienne Faull, Dean of York, and hot tip to become the Church of England's first woman bishop.
 
Yes, gentle reader, you read aright. Deaconesses, who were not "ordained" as The Guardian seems to think, did not take funerals, and in any case Ms Faull became one of those only in 1982. Therefore, not more than 20 years ago, in the England of the middle 1990s, people believed that if a person's funeral were taken by a woman, then that person was not "properly" dead.

Specifically, this view was held among those who availed themselves of the services, so to speak, of one or more of Gloucester, Coventry and Leicester Cathedrals. Not that the proposition would have been any less ludicrous if advanced in relation to the inhabitants of Emmerdale, Ambridge, Puddingdale, Dibley or Lanchester. Or of any other parish. But beyond the technicality of parochial incumbency as one of the last Cathedral Provosts, Ms Faull has never had a parish.

What is any of this to me?

In November, while the General Synod was debating women bishops, David Cameron promised Sir Tony Baldry, on the floor of the House of Commons, that the rules would be changed so as to fast-track them into the House of Lords. Was that because either the Prime Minister of his questioner looked forward to the robustly orthodox critique of everything from same-sex marriage to the Bedroom Tax?

Or was it because they both looked forward to a reversion to the well-meaning but ineffective liberal outrage of the 1980s, only half-diagnosing the symptoms of economic, social, cultural and political evils, while entirely unable to diagnose their causes, and while barely even thinking about what the treatments for either might be?
 
Whatever the reason, this person, who asserts in all seriousness that the people of the West Country, the West Midlands and the East Midlands not very long ago suspected, and quite possibly still do suspect, that their ostensibly deceased neighbours had in reality been buried alive if their funerals had been taken by women, will almost certainly join, in the very near future, the ranks of the legislators of this Realm.

I am not one to soil the nest. I owe an incalculable debt to the Church of England. Blessed John Henry Newman called it, "a bulwark against errors more fundamental than its own." For all its many faults, it is now doctrinally more orthodox than at any other time in living memory, and far more so than in the 1950s.

Precisely therefore, it has never been more critical of capitalism and of its wars. The old order was decadent, and, like the then Tory party with which it was so bound up, only had a mass appeal because people needed to rebuild their social lives after one or both of the World Wars.
 
You could not now be ordained in the Church of England, whereas you certainly could have been in 1994 or in 1954, if you did not believe in, say, the Virgin Birth. It never used to ask, really. But it does now. And it has become more and more critical of what the political Right has become, as it has become more and more insistently orthodox doctrinally. Well, of course.

Of course, it could all go away again. Only the Petrine Office guarantees orthodoxy perennially, permanently, and in its pristine plenitude. "Conservative" or "traditionalist" critics of Pope Francis are thinking, speaking and acting like Protestants. Perhaps especially, like Anglicans.

Some provinces of the Anglican Communion, plus a few American and Australian dioceses, were founded by Evangelicals. In various ways, it still shows. Some provinces of the Anglican Communion, plus a few American and Australian dioceses, were founded by Anglo-Catholics.

In various ways, it still shows, although such heritages do not prevent the liturgical blessing of polygamous unions in what are supposedly the leading African provinces, nor a strongly homosexual culture in the American and Australian, as in the English, citadels of Anglo-Catholicism.

But the American Episcopalians were founded as an expression of the same eighteenth-century Rationalism that produced the American Republic. In various ways, it still shows. And the Church of England was founded by Henry VIII. In various ways, it still shows. It will never show more clearly than when women become bishops.

Christianity is the basis of this state and the foundation of all three of its political traditions. But independent research has found very large proportions of the women among the Church of England's clergy to be doubters of or disbelievers in key points of doctrine.

Two thirds deny "that Jesus Christ was born of a Virgin". One quarter denies the existence "of God the Father Who created the world". Assuming a woman on the episcopal "team" in each diocese, of those with privileged access to the media and other organs of national life as the voice of the Christianity still professed by 59 per cent of Britons, at least one eighth would have been agnostics or atheists.
 
A positive decision to retain declared "Fathers in God" would have set the tone for the introduction of a legal presumption of equal parenting. For the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit was being paid to mothers.
 
For the restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child's need for a father. For repeal of the ludicrous provision for two women to be listed as a child's parents on a birth certificate, although even that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed. And for paternity leave to be made available at any time until the child was 18 or left school.
 
That last, in particular, would reassert paternal authority, and thus require paternal responsibility, at key points in childhood and adolescence. That authority and responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver: high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment.
 
All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need. Not least, the energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing that secure economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. Nuclear power. Coal, not dole.
 
And it includes foreign policy, in no small part because those sent to war tend to come from working-class backgrounds, where starting to have children often still happens earlier than has lately become the norm. Think of those very young men whom we see going off or coming home, hugging and kissing their tiny children.
 
Yet our society urgently needs to re-emphasise the importance of fatherhood. That authority cannot be affirmed while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in wars. You can believe in fatherhood, or you can support wars under certainly most and possibly all circumstances, the latter especially in practice today even if not necessarily in the past or in principle. You cannot do both.
 
To argue for this by word and by sheer presence is a role for living icons of God the Father, addressed as "Fathers in God". That is as important as, and it is at least ideally integral to, the moral leadership that they have undeniably provided against assisted suicide, against usury, against this Government's wicked persecution of the poor, in support of community organising, and so on.

Not, contrary to what is usually assumed, that moral leadership is anything more than a by-product of their membership of the Upper House. It is not specifically why they are there. The presence in the House of Lords of bishops (and historically also of abbots and others) has nothing to do with Establishment. It predates the Reformation by several centuries, and until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Lords Spiritual formed the majority of the members.

They were there because of their enormous landholdings, and that is why a certain number of bishops of the Church of England, this country's largest landholder after the Crown, are still there to this day. Being moral bastions, or spiritual advisors, or whatever, has never in principle had anything to do with it. Still, the idea seems to have taken hold that it has, and of late they have been doing that quite well.

The whinges against them are their "lefty"concern for the poor, their "reactionary" concern for the sanctity of life and for the institution of marriage, the fact that they have to be men, and the fact that they are drawn from only one part of the United Kingdom.

There are 26 Lords Spiritual, drawn from a body which has not constituted more than half of churchgoers in England since anyone started counting, in the early nineteenth century, even before the effects of large-scale migration from Ireland.

In fact, all four parts of the United Kingdom now have the same largest religious affiliation, and have had for several decades. That body is also the largest in at least six of the English regions, and quite possibly in seven by now, leaving only the South West and the East of England as, relatively speaking, Anglican strongholds.

None of which would matter, if the likes of Vivienne Faull were not about to be created Lords Spiritual.

In order to preserve the useful function that such seats have lately come to serve, some way of balancing these impending appointments needs to be devised, such as allowing the largest religious body other than the Church of England in each of the 12 regions to name a Lord Spiritual; very conveniently, that is the same one in all 12 cases, the world leader in upholding and promoting traditional family values, social justice, and the indivisible doctrinal basis of both.

People who say that that will be overtaken by the Muslims soon enough are hysterical buffoons, whose view of the North and the Midlands is as well-informed as Ms Faull's theories about eschatological beliefs and the attendant funerary practices among the lower orders in the sticks.

But even so, why not also someone from each of the country's 12 largest without representation? Any imam who thus found his way to Westminster from Bradford, Oldham or Birmingham would be most unlikely to imagine those communities to be full of the kind of cretinous hicks whom Ms Faull associates with Gloucester, Coventry and Leicester.

That would give 24 from beyond the Church of England, to 26 within it. There would be no point in the Church of England's complaining. If it had carried on doing what it had been doing, then no one would have minded.

But it is determined to fill its seats with people who lack the doctrinal basis necessary to that task. Beginning with a person who claims to have encountered ghastly provincial plebs of the view that if a woman led a funeral service, then they could not know that the deceased was "properly dead".

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