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WHY THE C oF E CRIES OUT FOR DIRECT DEMOCRACY
By Andrew Cadman
THE CONSERVATIVE WOMAN
May 12, 2024
IT ISN'T just in politics that more Direct Democracy is needed. Anyone who has not been living on Mars for the past few years will know that Wokery has overtaken almost all our institutions. One such is of course the Church of England, which has all but given up on Christianity in its upper echelons. Many will say that in our irreligious age this does not matter, but they are very wrong. The current malign ideologies that are destroying the West moved into the gap that Christianity has vacated, particularly amongst the elites which adopted these new 'High Status Faiths'.
All is not lost, however. Christianity is undergoing an intellectual and moral revival, with a series of high-profile conversions from atheism and agnosticism. Astonishingly, scientific objections to faith are being seriously rethought, as this fascinating interview between Piers Morgan and Dr. Stephen Meyer shows. Those who yearn to see the end of the malignant ideologies which oppress us often fail to understand that like it or not society must have a faith of some kind, and it seems Christianity, for whatever faults you may think it has, is clearly the one that underpinned Western values and seems the best to preserve and reinvigorate those values going forward.
But is the Church up to task? Well, not really. Although the C of E does have an internal democracy of a kind, the decisions on appointments of senior positions such as bishops are reserved for technocrats rather than the laity and the clergy. The result, unsurprisingly, is that the vested interests of the State and the elites within the Church tend to lead to appointments in their own image. Bishops from the Archbishop of Canterbury downwards seem obsessed with and endlessly pontificate on secular political issues and seem little interested in evangelism -- the exact opposite of what is needed and has been proven by research for several decades to work in terms of sustaining and growing the Church. The sterling work of vicars and laity at parish level is completely undone by those who have 'failed upwards' into higher positions and are simply not properly accountable to those at grass roots level.
What is needed for the Church to thrive is to complete the work of the Protestant Reformation and make the Anglican Church a much more bottom-up organisation through elections (and if necessary removal) of senior clergy rather than the undemocratic, top-down model it inherited from Roman Catholicism. We would then be spared the tiresome, alienating noise from senior clerics on issues which are outside their domain of competence and the Church would be better equipped to seize the best opportunity it has had for revival, perhaps in centuries.
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