The fourteenth of July is a fateful day in our civilisation.
In France this is Fête nationale, Bastille Day in English. On that day most of the French celebrate (and my French friends mourn) the death of Christendom, first in France and then in the rest of the West.
To remind the French of the glorious liberty and brotherhood (underpinned by equality) they gained on that day, an enraged Muslim mob yesterday besieged a Paris synagogue, trapping hundreds of Jews inside.
By way of expressing solidarity with Hamas terrorists, the Muslims hurled bricks and other ballistically suitable objects at the building, screaming “like it was in an intifada!”
A lively confrontation with police ensued. The equality champions attacked the CRS with assorted projectiles, the latter responded with tear gas, and a great time was had by all.
But why should the French have all the fun? Our own Synod decided to steal from our EU partners the thunder of their military salutes, fireworks and tear gas shells going off.
In one fell swoop the Synod turned the Church of England into a theological and ecclesiastical irrelevance by approving the consecration of women bishops.
Thereby the Church forfeited its already tenuous claim to being an apostolic confession. It effectively became one of many Protestant sects, an anteroom to the edifice of atheism the French unveiled in their country 225 years ago.
It would be tiresome to repeat all the same arguments I’ve made so many times before, for example in these pieces:
http://alexanderboot.com/content/respectful-answer-tom-utley
http://alexanderboot.com/content/anglicanism-now-fashion-and-vice-versa
http://alexanderboot.com/content/there-there-loves-you%E2%80%99ll-get-it-next-time
The third of those came out in November 2012, after the same motion was narrowly defeated.
Amid the weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth in the leftie press, some of it coming from the Archdruid Rowan Williams, I predicted that next time they’d get their way. It pains me that I’ve been proved right.
The other time the trendy subversives didn’t succeed because the Anglo-Catholics and the somewhat tautological conservative evangelicals joined forces in stern opposition. This time they chose to go along for the sake of ‘Church unity’.
Unity has indeed been assured, but not within the Church. It’s a unity with the nonentities who form our ruling elites. Their allegiance belongs not to God, and not even to the country, but to every pernicious secular fad modernity can use as a battering ram against tradition.
Sure enough, the nonentities rejoice. For Dave Cameron it’s “a great day for the Church and for equality”. For Ed Miliband it’s “wonderful news”. For Nick Clegg it’s a “long overdue step”.
The first is a nominal Anglican, who self-admittedly struggles with everything that makes the Church Christian. The second is an atheist Jew. The third is an atheist tout court. All three are indifferent, not to say hostile, to everything the Synod destroyed on 14 July.
Apparently, the trio and their ilk had a hand in the vote, for political pressure had been applied to the Synod. Political nonentities had threatened ecclesiastical ones that, should they fail to vote the right way, the government would use equality laws to make sure secularism reigned.
Christianity has faced graver threats before and resisted them heroically. But today’s lot are dubious Christians, and they certainly aren’t heroes. Neither are they bright enough to grasp the implications of their weak-kneed surrender.
The Church could survive, just about, the first triumph of secular equality 20 years ago, when women priests were ordained.
Orthodox Christians who are disgusted by this profanation of the scriptural and ecclesiastical tradition, can simply walk out of a church the moment they espy a woman sporting a dog collar.
Espying a woman wearing episcopal vestments makes such a retreat impossible. One can’t escape from a church any longer. One has to escape from the Church.
Thousands already have. Many more thousands will. Some will stay, because they love the Anglican liturgy, the language of the traditional scriptural texts, the music, the hymns.
These things ought to be loved because they are lovely. But they are cosmetic ornaments on the body and soul of the Church: its theology and its 2,000 years of tradition. When these have been killed, the ornaments won’t revive the corpse. They’ll just make it look nicer.
The shock waves of this latest outrage will spread farther than the Church itself.
The vagaries of English history have been such that the Anglican Church is an essential element of the country’s constitutional dispensation. Yet a state embracing a church too tightly can maul it, and it was for a good reason that Christ insisted that God’s and Caesar’s realms be kept apart.
A state church always runs the risk of becoming merely an extension of the state, not its moral authority. By submitting to a purely secular diktat, the Anglican Church has proved it’s no longer the bride of Christ. It’s the concubine of the state.
This has far-reaching constitutional ramifications. For example, a female Archbishop of Canterbury (a distinct possibility) won’t be taken seriously when administering a coronation oath to a future monarch.
Those who already giggle scabrously when a woman priest says “This is my body” will laugh openly at a woman crowned with the mitre of a Christian bishop walking the aisle of Westminster Abbey. The Church can survive bloody persecution, but not contemptuous mockery.
There will be international consequences as well. Pope Benedict XVI’s generous offer of the ordinariate did more than just give a refuge to those who despair of finding Catholicism within Anglicanism. It was a strong indication that the Vatican sought a rapprochement with the Church of England.
This has become impossible. Rather than narrowing, the tragic rift within the Western Church has deepened and widened. The world’s 1.5 billion Catholics can now no more accept an alliance with this Church of England than with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Christianity will remain for ever a house divided against itself – this at a time when it faces a deadly threat from both internal and external subversion. But that doesn’t matter to the Synod any more than it does to our governing spivs.
They have every reason to gloat: their idol of pernicious secularism has destroyed a great part of what made England England. The rest of us can only weep as we bid farewell to the Church of England. Sorry it couldn’t stay.