Douglas Murray chronicles the latest spasm in what may be the death throes of the Church of England. Now the bishops and the church bureaucrats are grunting about — what else? — antiracism. Excerpts:

And the church’s theology too must change. The curriculum for ordinands must include participation in ‘an introductory Black Theology module’. They must ‘diversify the curriculum’, ‘produce a workable plan for increasing racial diversity’ and ‘formally adopt Racial Justice Sunday in February of each year’. All this will be overseen by the creation of a ‘Racial Justice Unit’, to be funded in these cash-strapped times ‘for a five-year fixed-term basis in the first instance’.

As though there is a vast ‘pipeline’ of people wishing to enter the C of E, those who make it through must be forced to examine ‘the underlying theological assumptions that shapes racial justice such as Eurocentrism, Christendom and White normativity’. The report stresses the need to ‘decolonise Theology, Ecclesiology and possibly examine official teachings of the Church that follows prejudicial theological value system’.

More:

After this year of absence from our national life, the C of E proposal for going forward is to go backwards once again to the issue of slavery. It must again ‘acknowledge, repent and take decisive action to address the shameful history and legacy of the Church of England’s involvement in the historic transatlantic slave trade’. The reason is that all now stands in a different perspective. ‘The BLM movement and in particular the dumping of the Colston statue in Bristol docks shed new light and brought needed urgency to the C of E’s consideration of its own contested heritage.’ The report makes it clear that the church is going to have to bring down monuments and statues that disturb the modern mind, for ‘Our churches should be welcoming spaces for all and we must deal with any part of the church building that may cause pain or offence’. I would give the crucifixes two years, max.

In conclusion, the church itself must change. One ‘barrier to inclusion’ for people from ‘UKME backgrounds’ has been the challenge of ‘cultural assimilation’ into the church, ‘where there is perceived to be little or no room for cultural expression outside of a normative culture which is predominantly white, middle class’. Apparently there is an ‘expectation upon UKME communities to abandon their own cultural heritage and current expression in favour of traditional host approaches’. And so, the Archbishops’ report concludes, it would seem to be easier all round if the host chose to abandon its own heritage, working alongside ‘BLM and other interest groups’ to facilitate change.

While reading this intellectually and morally degraded pap, I think over all the congregations I have seen in my life, in this country and around the world: from Nigeria to Iraq, America to Australia. And I reflect, not for the first time, that the institution being described is not remotely the institution that I know. And that the tragedy for those of us who were fond of the old religion is that its leadership is intent on nothing but making it a simulacrum of the new one.

Read the whole thing. Douglas Murray is a treasure.

So that’s one Anglican way of facing the crisis — moaning and breast-beating and waiting to die. Here’s a very, very different one: the Cranmer Option, the orthodox Anglican vicar Daniel French’s take on Anglicizing the Benedict Option. It’s a long, rich reflection. Excerpts:

By the early 1990s what became obvious was that the majority of British churches lacked the manpower and the spiritual clout to take mission to the next stage, irrespective of their denomination. This particularly affected the thinly spread Anglican presence which aimed to have a viable parish in every town and village. Statistically, the Church of England is slowly bleeding to death. Statistician Peter Brierly’s The Tide is Running Out (2000) and also Callum Brown’s seminal The Death of Christian Britain (2000) established in me the possibility of retiring in 2040 to a denominational husk, a Church of England with lots of chiefs but devoid of membership. As it stands today fewer than 1% of Millennials identify as cultural Anglicans, let alone believers, and it is likely that the 2021 census will further highlight this gulf.

Predictably the liberal Anglican establishment tried to dig the national Church out of its hole by restructuring and reorganizing. There is something in the culture of all Boomer revolutionaries that by the 1990s seemed to reduce all revolutions to an increase in paperwork and an army of supernumerary experts. The bishops on the whole fell for this in the same way as did the administration of Tony Blair or Bill Clinton.  Conservative congregations by contrast invested in new evangelistic initiatives such as the popular Alpha Course, and were also comfortable planting what became known as Fresh Expressions. Other tools such as Cursillo never got traction, while the alternative worship scene (“rave in the nave”)  became a historical footnote in George Carey’s time when the colossally popular Nine O’clock Service was exposed as a safeguarding cesspit of abuse and cultism.

Personally, these initiatives continue to appeal to different bits of me: the ecumenical, the artistic, and the evangelistic. I can see how courses in the Alpha mold can be used to fire up any local church while also reaching out to newcomers. However, it pains me to say that the shared weak link is that they are inherently consumeristic, seeking to bend and morph Christianity around the seeker, rather than vice-versa. They abandon the idea of a learned communal “cult” in the traditional sense of the word and seem embarrassed that anything distinctively Anglican should be at the core of developing churches. Instead, Anglicanism is portrayed as getting in the way of reaching new converts or even strengthening the church. Comparably it is as if French government, after paying out an advertising agency in some mad brainstorming session, decided that tourism could only be improved by excising anything particularly French about France and encouraging a diversity of languages.

It is my view that if the Cranmer Option is to have any success, then orthodox believers must find the courage and imagination to grasp the nettle of historic Anglican culture and see it as part of the solution and not the problem. This has to be one of the footstools of forming the kind of thick communities that Dreher envisages. That familiarity with our liturgy and customs is the springboard to teaching the Christian faith to the next generation because the necessary truths of the Gospel are nested inside our key texts. Banal criticism of this often makes the schoolboy category error of confusing dusty traditionalism with living tradition, the former being the work of the devil while the latter is of the Holy Spirit.

A good instance of this is the 1662 vision of holy matrimony compared to Common Worship (2000). Comparing the two prefaces we can see that the modern liturgy encapsulates marriage as a romantic enterprise with some spin-offs for society, therefore inverting BCP theology. Whereas Cranmer places marriage as primarily a foreshadowing of the mystical union between Christ and his Church, Common Worship’s preface alludes that this is merely incidental. It also completely glosses over Cranmer’s psychological key insight into the potential of human monstrousness. Men and women contain the raw possibility of being “brute beasts that have no understanding.” It would seem that in an attempt to modernize the vows (which may be marginally justifiable) the Church threw the baby out with the bathwater. The “Little Mermaid” fairytale supplants the Gospel because this is what the consumer wants, and what the consumer wants the consumer gets. It tells us what we want to hear, not what we need to know.

Whereas medievals like Cranmer understood freedom as a freedom from desire, modernity envisages freedom as a freedom to possess anything we desire and to enjoy limitless choice. Hierarchy and authority in this new cosmology are therefore to be shunned and dismantled, decolonized, because these conspire to impose restriction. In The Benedict Option, Dreher quotes the sociologist Philip Rieff, the great interpreter of Freud: “Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased.” A reasonable person will understand that this rubbishing of order and tradition, a hermeneutic of discontinuity, is infantile and a societal cul-de-sac. Even old-fashioned liberals on the Left now recognize that this pathway undergirds a collective madness and encourages a sort of illiberal liberalism. Historic Anglicanism in its Prayer Book, formularies, five centuries of intellectual tradition, aesthetics, and post-Reformation saints, has the means to be a robust counterculture to this.

Preach it, Father Daniel! More:

[T]he weak links in an Anglican version of the Benedict Option are to be found in application and theory. A vicar trying to set up something like this will certainly come up against the rampant individualism that runs right through British Christianity and, in particular, the Anglican churches. The myriad of liturgies on offer barely unites us, and it is rare to find parishioners who do not think that they are their own pope. It does not help that recent liturgical reform and theological liberalism endemic to Anglicanism has pushed a therapeutic religion whose vernacular is social justice, not the supernatural vision of the New Jerusalem.

A deep-rooted practical quandary is that Anglicanism for the past four hundred years has systematically ejected the sort of believers who were good at community building, preaching, and resisting the world around them. For all its claims to liberalism, Anglicanism, and in particular English Anglicanism, has an Erastian streak which does not tolerate dissent and particularly religious fervor. The consequence is the tragic loss of experts in ghetto living. Our clubbiness and standoffishness caused pilgrims to cross the Atlantic and found non-conformist communities, which subsequently became the basis of the world’s major superpower.

Over the centuries, those dissenting communities that remained in Britain also fell afoul of the established religion and largely broke away or did their own thing. They adapted to the Industrial Revolution far better than the Established Church and formed groundbreaking communities in the process. A good instance of this must be the Quakers, whose cooperatives and non-conformist villages became the basis of much of the chocolate and confectionary industries in this country. The problem is that your average Anglican church does not have this collective memory of dissent and exclusion from the world, aside from Cromwell’s Commonwealth. It was therefore no surprise that when the Anglican-Methodist Mission-Shaped Church (2004) report came out, the writers dismissed as alarmist any talk of a Benedict Option-styled strategic retreat. So in their view, contrary to Alasdair MacIntyre’s vision in After Virtue (1981), the West did not need a “new and doubtless very different St. Benedict,” but rather better negotiating skills with the barbarians governing us. This officially sponsored acquiescence to secularity has been nothing but heartbreaking to watch, like a slow-motion car crash.

But he has some ideas for how to overcome that. Read the whole thing. It’s an exciting attempt to understand the Benedict Option in a particularist sense, and to make it work. I love this, and am eager to see more things like it from Christians in other denominations. One thing that I find especially interesting in Father French’s essay is his speculation that a Cranmer Option Anglicanism might be possible if rural life becomes a viable way of living for English Christians. He explains why something like it might be necessary, in fact; it seems to me that one good thing the Covid crisis has done is revealed how much of our work can be done without coming to the office. I don’t know a thing about broadband in Britain, but in the US, if we could have a national campaign to bring broadband service to rural areas, we might be able to revive rural life, and make Benedict Option communities there more possible.

Anyway, I’m eager to read what you Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic have to say about Father French’s proposals, and what you have to add to them. To this outsider, the Church of England’s au courant antiracism initiative is a deep sigh of despair, decline, and doom. Daniel French is trying to think a way forward for those in the church who actually want Anglican Christianity to survive.