The C of E: the state it's in
Monica Furlong Hodder & Stoughton, 418pp, £18.99
ISBN 0340693991
Monica Furlong has been writing about church matters for almost as long as I can remember. In the mid-1950s we both wrote for the same weekly (not the New Statesman), where her contributions were a good deal more serious and less flippant than mine. In recent years, however, there has tended to be a certain pursing of Anglican lips whenever her name crops up. The reason is easy enough to explain. Like Peter Kilfoyle, she has come to see her role as being that of "a candid friend" - and such figures, as the Labour MP for Liverpool Walton is discovering, are rarely favourites with those to whom they presume to offer advice.
There is plenty of advice for the Church of England in this book, and most of it is sound and good. No doubt the book's subtitle - a shameless rip-off from Will Hutton's pre-election philippic - will alert the more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Anglican enthusiasts that this is not quite the volume for them. Yet given that most of them lack a sense of what went on before they themselves "came to Christ", they would certainly benefit from reading it.
The first third consists of a vividly told story of how the poor old beleaguered C of E, the increasingly nominal state religion, reached the vulnerable point at which it stands today. Furlong's account contains some surprises - for instance, her assertion that "the Church reached the all-time zenith of popular allegiance in the first half of the 18th century". On reflection, however, that probably makes sense. It was essentially a small-scale world in those pre-industrial revolution days, and a rural climate in which villagers could cheerfully sing "God bless the Squire and his relations/And keep us in our proper stations". This provided the ideal setting for an Erastian religion that helped to supply the cement for a then highly stratified social order.
Furlong advances the view that Edwardian England was "more religious than the Victorian era that preceded it". Allowing for the nostalgia with which that imperial sunset period has come to be regarded, there may well be some truth in this, too, if only in terms of the numbers who actually went to church. Since then, it has been downhill all the way. The first world war, during which the bench of bishops virtually acted as recruiting sergeants for the slaughter, catalysed the disillusionment of an entire generation. Prelates such as William Temple of York and Canterbury and George Bell of Chichester behaved much better over issues such as saturation bombing and the chaining up of German PoWs during the second world war; but the C of E still emerged at the end of it greatly weakened from the position it had occupied even in 1939.
If it was disguised at the time, it was thanks largely to one man - the ex-headmaster of Repton, Geoffrey Fisher - who for 16 years ran the C of E as if it were a huge public school with the added advantage of having its governing body in the sky. Although now regarded with something of a shudder (according to the publisher Victor Gollancz, who briefly taught at Repton, Fisher had been a great flogger of boys), the 99th Archbishop of Canterbury was a remarkable phenomenon. A pillar of the old-style establishment (with his bell-like voice, he crowned the Queen in 1953), he miraculously maintained the C of E in most of its Trollopian glory until his retirement in 1961.
This meant that, when changes came, they came thick and fast. Furlong is very good on the C of E in the later years of the 20th century. Her narrative makes for a chilling story - as synodical government, business efficiency, central Church House bureaucracy, even an executive Archbishops' Council, emerge to take the place of diocesan and parochial leadership. It is an illuminating, although dispiriting, tale.
The author is particularly hard on the C of E's recent failures of nerve, reflected both in its flip-flop over women priests (having proclaimed the principle, in practice it was fatally compromised by the 1993 Act of Synod) and in its failure to form a coherent attitude towards gay clergy (its current guiding maxim seems to be the same as the US Pentagon's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy). It is a formidable bill of indictment that Furlong builds up, but it is, for the most part, done in a remarkably fair-minded way.
Perhaps Furlong's greatest gift is her sense of fun. It will be a long time before I forget her summary of her experiences at the hand of the evangelicals, the one prospering wing of an otherwise sadly reduced ecclesia anglicana: "To spend much time around evangelicals is to feel oneself caught up into a mood of cheerfulness, vigour, enterprise, hope - it is a bit like going out with a likeable puppy, which not only jumps all over you and licks your face, but travels five times the distance you are travelling out of sheer joie de vivre and exuberance."
With liberal dissidents who can write so shrewdly and entertainingly within the C of E's ranks, its state is perhaps not quite as bleak as papers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail consistently try to make out - or as bleak as its egregious new spin-doctors desperately seek to deny.
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