Peter Mullen's View

Peter Mullen's view of the crisis in the C of E and what has led up to it [here]

National Apostasy 

I know what will happen following the Synod’s voting down of the appointment of women as bishops. Indeed it has begun to happen already. Immediately after the result was declared the Archbishop of Canterbury, expressing his “deep personal sadness,” said “This issue must be resolved in the shortest possible time.” But, Archbishop, that is what the vote was for. If it had gone in favour of the motion, you can be sure there would have been no call for further discussion. We know what will happen because it happened in the Synod all through the 1980s votes which rejected women priests: the innovators adopted the time-honoured technique of Trotskyists, Entryists and EU politicians and kept on calling for further votes until they had achieved the result they desired. And there is nothing democratic about that.

What we are now hearing is the death rattle of the English Church, and it is dying of a malady far more serious than women in the episcopate. Last Monday’s vote was only the culmination of a political process which goes back at least as far as the 1840s when, while still an Anglican, John Henry Newman warned that the choice facing the nation is between Christianity and liberalism. By liberalism, he meant secularisation by government edict. And that precisely has been the historical record ever since Newman’s day.

The control of national life, and the determination of the character of this life, has been increasingly dictated by the secular state in accordance with values which have nothing to do with the Christian faith. Back in the 19^th century this was exemplified by the government’s abolition of ten bishoprics in Ireland. In 1928 the state again intervened to block the modest and appropriate revision of the Book of Common Prayer. But these suppressions were nothing compared with the state takeover we have experienced in our times.

This is not some paranoid fantasy on my part, the grumbles and sulks of a disaffected traditionalist. Listen instead to the dire warning issued to the Church of England by Frank Field MP.

Last year Frank Field used a parliamentary device to deny justice to traditional Anglicans who oppose the plan to consecrate women as bishops. He put down an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons which would overrule the Synod vote against women bishops. Field said:

“I expect the Women Bishops Measure will be overwhelmingly supported by the dioceses and two thirds of each of the three Houses of Synod. If this measure is then held back from Parliament by some ‘clever’ procedural wrangle in Synod by a disgruntled minority, then some MPs will lobby the government to lift the dispensation that parliament has given to the Church of England to discriminate against women, as the majority of Anglicans will have made known their wish that such discrimination should cease.”

Dire penalties were hinted at, such as Disestablishment by which bishops would no longer sit in the House of Lords and the church would lose all its historic privileges. Now that the Synod vote has been cast against the ambition of the modernisers to appoint women bishops, we can expect these threats to be carried out imminently. And henceforth religious and theological issues will be settled by the secular state according to so called secular values. The scandal, the apostasy, lies in the fact that this is being achieved with the connivance of the church’s hierarchy.

The word “secular” is a euphemism for “atheistic.” The nostrums and shibboleths by which we are now governed owe nothing to our thousand years old Christian history and tradition, but to the Enlightenment  rhetoric whose political and practical results became apparent in the French Revolution: principally the cry for Liberty and Equality. There was never much Fraternity – not when Madame Guillotine began to roam the land

All this goes far beyond a piddling little issue of ecclesiastical niceties about which ordinary people care nothing, a bit of churchy crinoline and old lace. For these last two hundred years and more we have been living through a period of revolutionary historical and social upheaval. Our banners now are not led by the cross of Christ - which is the cross of St George – but they are emblazoned by slogans which owe their origin not to the counsels of God but to an increasingly overbearing and dictatorial atheistic state. These slogans have replaced the Ten Commandments as the rules by which we are now expected to live.

What are they? Thou shalt not be racist, or sexist, or judgemental. At all times thou shalt obey the new laws of diversity, inclusivity and non-discrimination. For be ye well-assured that, if thou obeyest not these new commandments, thou shalt be reprimanded by the commissar for political correctness, which is the thought police. And behold, the thought police shall deliver thee unto the real police and thou shalt be taken to the court. And thy punishment shall be great in the land.

The revolutionary change from a Christian society to an overbearing secular authority is profound and it will not be reversed – and certainly not by some supposed natural process such as “the swing of the pendulum.” When we look to discover how this catastrophe has come about, we should turn to the philosopher and poet T.E. Hulme. At the beginning of the 20^th century, Hulme wrote:

“We have been beaten because our enemies’ theories have conquered us. We have played with those to our own undoing. Not until we are hardened again by conviction are we likely to do any good. In accepting the theories of the other side, we are merely repeating a well-known historical phenomenon. The Revolution in France came about not so much because the forces which should have resisted were half-hearted in their resistance. They themselves had been conquered intellectually by the theories of the revolutionary side. An institution or a civilisation is beaten only when it has lost faith in itself, when it has been penetrated by the ideas that are working against it.”

Our English Christian nation and society has been penetrated to the heart. It is not a flesh wound, but fatal.