Don't tell priests what they can't say

An academic is entirely wrong to try to do so, writes George Pitcher

There’s a type of commentator or politician, usually as right-wing as they are self-righteous, who periodically tells us that the Church of England should stick to what it’s supposed to be good at, preaching the gospel, and leave public affairs to those who are meant to do them. Namely, themselves.

The latest is Joanna Williams, an academic and author of How Woke Won and Women Vs. Feminism, the very titles of which tell us where she’s coming from, without any need actually to open the books.

Writing in The Times this week she intones that the Anglican church is plummeting to “irrelevance”, against a revival in Roman Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, because of our “failure… to stick to [the church’s] core purpose – to put God and Christianity front and centre of all it does” with “bishops… more comfortable discussing opposition to immigration controls, Brexit and welfare reform than scriptural matters”.

Joanna Williams: Could she possibly be looking down her nose at us?

There was a flurry of approving, Evangelical letters to that newspaper over subsequent editions, affirming her view that clergy should stick to proclaiming the physical resurrection of the Christ – they want us to celebrate the resurrection, without asking why he was executed – and butt out of worldly matters that, presumably, only people like Ms Williams are qualified to address in their tedious books.

She went to Canterbury cathedral with her family on Christmas Eve, you see, hoping to hear about “the baby Jesus” and instead got “a sermon on the evils of child abuse”. Sounds like she wanted to escape the real world with a cutesy Nativity scene, rather than confront the reality of a God who joins the world in all its darkness.

In some way in a separate category

I really don’t get this. She may very well have heard a poor sermon – God knows there’s enough of those around – but that isn’t her point, which is that the gospel is in some way in a separate category to what goes on in the social and political spheres.

The kind of sermon she wants, I imagine, starts with that soporific phrase “Words from our gospel reading…”, proceeds to tell us what happened in that reading (which we already know because we just heard it), enthuses that it’s lovely that it happened (safely some 2,000 years ago) and concludes that we should all try to behave a bit like that. Oh, and God is love, I expect.

A wilful misreading of scripture

The problems with these twee desires are manifold. Not only are they escapist, when the Christian creed is anything but that, they are also a wilful misreading of the very scripture that Williams says she wants us to stick to.

What bit of an insurgent Nazarene movement riding into the belly of the beast of Roman imperial power and Jewish legal authority in Jerusalem, offering a radical alternative to both, has she missed? To follow her flawed logic, the Christ should have stuck to his “pulpit” in Galilee, preaching goodness and maybe throwing in a bit of healing, and left Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas to the serious, grown-up business of governing the province.

Instead, he took them on, in the workhorse phrase for disciples under these circumstances, speaking truth to power. This is our inheritance down the ages for contextual theology. We don’t see our faith from the world we’re in, we see the world through the prism of our faith. And try to make it into the kingdom of which our founder spoke.

Applied gospel makes news agenda

Williams is, in any case, entirely wrong that we clergy ditch the gospel in favour of what she doubtless despises as liberal causes. We preach the gospel every Sunday and many other days of the week besides. I was once with archbishop Rowan Williams (I’m wildly guessing no relation) in the Houses of Parliament when a roomful of MPs made, like her, the stick-to-the-gospel point. He replied that he did, all the time, but it was only when he applied it to the vulnerable and marginalised that it made the news agenda.

And there’s the point. The world and the divine will are made inseparable by the gospel; it’s what God incarnate is about. For legions of people like Ms Williams, though, it’s far easier to take comfortable and fashionable positions in gender wars and anti-woke campaigns than face commandments to love God and our neighbours as ourselves.

We make their positions uncomfortable

Strange, too, that MPs and people like her always want the church out of those issues where the Christian faith might make their positions uncomfortable or even, heaven forfend, untenable. Mind you, while they’ll howl for turbulent priests to leave social and economic issues alone, when there’s what they see as a moral imperative – over abortion law, say, or parental control – they’re found shouting for episcopal leadership.

They want it kept simple. But the gospel is very, very complex and demanding. It can’t be approached with partisanship, which is a problem for Ms Williams. Far easier to approach a sanitised crib and sing O Little Town of Bethlehem than to shine a light on the darkest horrors of child abuse.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest