Counter-revolution is not conservative

The recent article 'A priest’s lament for the Church of England he loved' caused a mild stir on Anglican Twitter.  Despite being presented as a conservative lament for the Church of England it is striking how the article's arguments are deeply unconservative and untraditional.  It is demonstrably lacking what Scruton identified as a key aspect of conservatism: "an awareness of the complexity of human beings".  Instead of discerning this complexity, it offers an ideological account of the Church of England and in doing so does that which all ideology tends to do: it flattens complexity and makes life monochrome in pursuit of political ends.

Let us begin at the article's end, its conclusion regarding the Church of England: "But God speed the end of this blasphemous shambles".  In what sense can it be deemed conservative to wish for the death of the Church of England?  To again quote Scruton, conservatism begins with "the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created".  It is not conservative to desire the destruction of Choral Evensong in cathedrals, Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings, the parson christening, marrying, and burying in the parish.  This is the stuff of radicalism - indeed, the stuff of the very radicalism that the author supposedly abhors.  

Against such radicalism we can invoke the conservatism of Hooker, speaking against those sharing a not dissimilar conviction that the Church of England was hopelessly compromised.  "God being the author of peace and not of confusion in the Church" is the "author of ... peaceable resolutions", not of the "zeal and fervour" which gives expression to "contumelious malediction".  

Part of the reason for the desire to tear down the Church of England is that it is 'woke':

So this once great institution has espoused diversity, equality, the bogus doctrine of institutional racism and the insane dogma of unconscious racism along with the whole perverse ragbag of the LGBT+ agenda. 

Can aspects of such projects be subject to theological critique?  Of course they can.  Too often, the theological basis within contemporary Anglicanism for challenging racism or promoting human dignity is noticeably thin gruel.  That said, the idea that diversity and equality are not embedded in orthodox, creedal Christianity is, to say the least, heterodox.  Similarly, the implication that race relations or attitudes towards gay people have not been disordered by original sin - "whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness" - is a less than thoroughly Augustinian theology.  The focus on what is perceived to be "the LGBT+ agenda" is itself an ideological stance, overlooking the conservative, prosaic reality of gay couples being good neighbours and attending the parish church.

There is also a snide reference to "Rowan Williams, complete with beard and anti-Covid mask".  Perhaps real men don't have beards and don't wear anti-Covid masks.  We probably should not then be surprised that global warming is dismissed as "pagan myth".  The irony here is that while the central structures of the Church of England can rightly be criticised for tediously and predictably supporting every passing fashionable progressive cause, a supposedly conservative case which rails against beards (are beards inherently woke?), mask-wearing, and environmental concerns is the mirror image of this, tediously and predictably supporting the stances taken by the paranoid wing of the political Right.  

What, however, of liturgical matters?

In the mid-1960s, the Bishops and the General Synod decided to ditch the King James Bible (1611) and the Book of Common Prayer (1662) – those treasure-houses of rare devotion which had nurtured the souls of the English people and provided their Rites of Passage for 400 years. Their replacements – first the Alternative Service Book and currently Common Worship – are tin-eared collections of the most stultifying banality, illiterate and theologically vacuous. I could provide a hundred examples of their infelicities and desecrations, but you haven’t time; and anyway I don’t want to sicken you.

That the ASB and Common Worship are lesser liturgies than the BCP laudable Practice, of course, accepts.  This, however, does not mean that we cannot recognise prayerful and meaningful worship and sacraments offered in and through CW.  There is something deeply unconservative in the failure to recognise that christenings, marriages, and burials according to the CW rites can gather up and express meaning and purpose in these rites of passage. (We might also want to mention in passing that the 1928 Marriage rite is superior to that of 1662.)  The article here reflects one of the worst convictions of the liturgical revisers: an exaggerated belief in the power of the liturgy as written text, forgetting that the parish church (that font, those chancel steps, this burial plot), folk religion, and the presence of the parson express a much greater continuity than any discontinuity in the texts.

I say the Office according to 1662.  I prefer administering the Holy Sacrament according to 1662.  I delight in leading Prayer Book Mattins.  But I was married according to a contemporary rite.  I was ordained according to contemporary rites. My children were christened according to a contemporary rite.  I serve in a parish in which the main act of worship is according to the contemporary rite. This has now been the experience of a generation of Anglicans.  To reject this as 'desecration' is to belong to the ecclesiastical equivalent of Momentum, pursuing sectarian purity, rejecting flesh-and-blood Anglicans in order to promote a utopian notion of Anglicanism.  It is the stuff of the wild-eyed counter-revolutionary, no less radical and destructive than the revolutionary.  An authentically conservative approach, by contrast, identifies continuities in these rites, and recognises how a quiet, popular piety continues to shape them, despite their weaknesses.

It also ignores the fact that it is a thoroughly traditional Anglican liturgy - Choral Evensong - which has a growing popularity (a 35% increase in attendances since 2007) and resonance.  This is not mentioned in the article, of course, because it refutes the suggestion that "The National Church - that ancient and diligent repository of practical faith where prayer had been valid - has been utterly destroyed".  Thus we have the odd situation in which a supposedly conservative account ignores the continued growth and attraction of traditional liturgy.

When it comes to matters theological and doctrinal, a similar desire to downplay the traditional and magnify the progressive can be seen;

The enlightened and thoroughly modernised authorities of the late 20th century decided that the Christian faith as practised for 2,000 years is no longer believable. So the Virgin Birth is a myth, composed to tell us that Jesus was ‘a very special person’. He did not rise from the dead. The Resurrection is another myth to tell us that after the Crucifixion his disciples ‘experienced new life’.

The irony is that episcopal commitment in the Church of England to creedal orthodoxy is much greater now than it was in past decades.  The idea of a CofE bishop in 2020 suggesting that either the Virgin Birth or Resurrection are myths is rather improbable.  The centre of theological gravity has changed from the 1970s and 1980s.  While Alpha and Pilgrim are not without their faults, they cannot be faulted on the grounds of creedal orthodoxy.  Whatever criticisms there may be of Justin Welby, his creedal orthodoxy is not seriously doubted.  And as Rowan Williams put it, "I say the Nicene Creed every Sunday without my fingers crossed".  Mindful of this context, there is nothing conservative or traditionalist about undermining confidence in the persistence and renewal of orthodox, creedal Faith. 

The whole article is animated by that most unAnglican and unconservative of characteristics: it is ideological.  And blinded by ideological fervour, it cannot see what is good, true, and beautiful in the ordinary life of the parishes and cathedrals of the Church of England, away from the initiatives, the press releases, and the episcopal pronouncements.  The latter are a distraction, of little enduring value.  It is the former which sustains and nourishes people in the Faith, which ministers to places and communities.  To focus on initiatives, the press releases, and the episcopal pronouncements is, once again, to mimic the very dynamics the article says it opposes: the activism, the centralisation, the political.

Entirely missing from the article is another traditional Anglican virtue: comprehension.  The parish church is meant to embrace the Telegraph-reading traditional conservative and the Guardian-reading liberal progressive, ministering to both, challenging both, sanctifying both.  The ubiquitous left-leaning episcopal pronouncements do not, of course, aid this comprehension.  Neither, however, does a foaming-at-the-mouth ecclesiastical Trumpism which mocks mask-wearing and environmental concerns, and belittles the experiences of the parishioner who is gay or black.  An authentic conservatism would seek to revive the traditional commitment to comprehension, knowing that this promotes the peace of both Church and commonwealth.  In the absence of comprehension, as Elizabeth I warned, there are "discords amongst the people, and thereupon slanderous words and railings, whereby charity, the knot of all Christian society, is loosed".

One final point.  It might, perhaps, be a good idea for those praising 1662 and declaring that contemporary Anglicanism has "kill[ed] the liturgy, then murder[ed] the theology" not to promote the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception, doctrines contrary to Prayer Book and Articles.