What’s The Future Of The Church Of England?

 

With the way it’s been going recently, with their continued descent into wokeness, moral relativism and leftish identarian politics, I honestly wonder whether the Church of England will survive its current identity crisis; whether there’ll be a big split, or whether it will disintegrate as it continues to dilute or abandon many of its sacred doctrines.

I’m reminded of Alice’s Red Queen, where it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place, and if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. Many factions of the Church of England are running twice as fast to remain chameleons that blend into transient values and misguided cultural whims, while gradually losing their voice, and with that, much of the power of the gospel it was founded to proclaim.

Ordinarily, assuming this trend continues, I would have predicted that during the next century the Church of England will fracture: some factions will attempt to remain a force for, while others will accelerate further into misjudged conformity and compromise, leaving it divided and diminished beyond repair. But I have an element of doubt, because the Church of England is enormous, and deeply intertwined with British society, law, and governance - so a split would be complex and messy.

The Church of England is the established church in the UK; the monarch is its Supreme Governor, and bishops sit in the House of Lords. Splitting would involve complex legal and possibly parliamentary processes. Churches, cathedrals, schools, and endowments are legally held by the institution. Dividing assets would be chaotic, costly, and litigious. And we all know that bishops, priests, and dioceses are tied to the formal structures of the church, and millions of people identify as members - so convincing them to follow a new, separate body could be slow and uneven, especially at there would be inevitable disagreements over what the split would even look like.

Maybe these trends won’t last, and the church will wake up and see sense. Or maybe it won’t see sense by itself, but the trends themselves will die, as many hopeless things do, and the church will no longer be able to court popularity and relevance through these diluted vogues. Or maybe it can’t split, but will become more and more divided, leaving it to be a continued but ever more fractious mix of institutional dysfunction, cultural irrelevance, and spiritual compromise, with a regrettable loss of clear identity. As someone who always felt that I could vibrate to a slightly conservative Anglicanism, I’d hate to think that the church would become an even more hollowed-out institution, struggling to speak with authority, losing members, and drifting further from its founding mission.

It’s my faith in Christ as Lord that keeps me believing that the Church of England is worth saving. For all its current confusion, the Church of England still carries immense beauty and weight. Its liturgy remains one of the most profound expressions of Christian worship ever written; its cathedrals and parish churches still anchor countless communities in prayer and continuity; and its historic rootedness gives it a unique moral and cultural authority. If only it could recover the courage to speak timeless truth with grace and conviction, it might yet become again a steady moral compass in a disoriented nation. If it cannot recover its soul, the Church of England may eventually endure only in name, but not in spirit.

Woke Hurts The Brightest The Most

 

I recall George Bernard Shaw once remarked that when it comes to changing the world for the better, it’s unreasonable people who influence most, because reasonable people tend to just go along with the flow. I’ve said before that the woke, cancel culture, assault on our society is one of the worst assaults in modern times. It’s bad for all sorts of reasons I outline here, here, and here, but from an economist perspective, it’s worse because while it hurts everyone in a thinly spread array of personal costs (both directly and indirectly) it also hurts a select subsection of society in a more concentrated way, because the biggest influencers are more likely to be the ones who are censored or penalised by woke.

Just as rent controls, tariffs and minimum wage laws most negatively affect the people those policies purport to help, woke most negatively affects those who are likely to be the most positive influencers in society – the unreasonable people who can change the world for the better. 

Moreover, from the many cases I’ve seen of people being fired, threatened with dismissal or socially ostracised for a particular view, I find I’ve usually agreed with the person expressing the view under scrutiny rather than those who want them cancelled. To that end, it’s probable that cancel culture tends to disproportionately target those who speak the truth and who have the most important insights – especially given that those who wish to censor speech are almost always doing so to protect their own ideological agendas from challenge.

See What's Happening

 

What I’m going to say is expressed in very simple prose, but I suspect only a minority of people who are like me - smart, good looking, socially urbane 😃 - will fully get this. Until, that is, a time when virtually everyone has no choice but to get this.

So, Trump won in America, and in the UK, it is predicted that Reform UK will be the largest political party by membership this summer. The woke left hasn’t woken up (no pun intended) to the fact they are largely to blame for this. Biden was beyond awful; years of the woke, left wing Tories were a disaster; and now the UK faces even gloomier years under Keir Starmer’s Labour - a party even more dreadful in its woke policies and censorious mentality. It is difficult to find many who welcome this prospect. Most people clearly don’t like woke nonsense, and those who think they do are either absurd people who think they are its main beneficiaries, or people who are oblivious to the societal harms it inflicts.

Of course, the headline-grabbing woke stuff is an easy target – but woke’s main harms are more widely and more thinly dispersed in the form of bureaucratic overreach, cultural self-censorship, divisive identity politics, institutional groupthink, and mass resentment in its true victims across the nation. I’ve talked about the last four before in blog posts, so here I want to address bureaucratic overreach, because that is the silent, most insidious force that quietly infiltrates every level of society and undermines real progress and freedoms. And while I’m not a fan of all the purported solutions being offered as a reaction to this plight, you’re not paying enough attention if you don’t realise that many of the most hated figures (Trump, Farage, Musk, etc) are a direct result of millions of people being utterly fed up with woke, with bureaucratic overreach, and with left wing politicians’ attempts to nannify, infantilise, control every aspect of individual and societal autonomy, and, of course, extract ever more money from the public through taxes and regulations to pay for things that most people don’t want and would never vote for if they had the chance.

Up until recently, you could think of the political situation a little like bacteria and human bodies. The bacteria in human bodies have a short life span compared with their hosts, and are driven by evolutionary forces to cooperate for their shared benefit. Because numerous generations of these microorganisms rely on human survival, a disease that kills its host would not be selected for in a long percentage game, because the evolutionary optimisation is for bacteria to sustain themselves by feeding on humans while inflicting minimal harm. Analogically, you could say politicians behave in a similar way regarding what they can get away with to serve their own ends (dictators even more so). Too much duress on the population and they face a civil resistance, or even a Hobbesian collapse of society – so they aim to act with as much self-interest as possible without killing the host organism (the electorate), so to speak.

What’s happening now is that the balance in this relationship has been so heavily disturbed that large swathes of the population have simply had enough. Enough of being lied to, patronised and extorted. Just as an overgrowth of harmful bacteria can overwhelm the body's defences, the political class in the UK appears to be pushing the limits of what the public will tolerate, extracting ever more from the system while offering less in return. Decades of short-termism, self-preservation, and opportunism have weakened trust, not just in mainstream parties, but in the nature of political governance itself, much like an immune system worn down by repeated infections.

I don’t know whether there will be enough momentum to radically change the way governance is manifested, or whether this period will just turn out to be a slightly extreme iteration of the cycles of political pendulum swings we’ve seen time and time again. But I feel fairly certain that the widespread discontent is real, and that something will eventually give way to a new political paradigm. Whether by reform or rupture remains to be seen – but pay close attention to what is going on, and I predict it will become more and more evident.

Oscars: Going Woke, Going Broke

I’m a big fan of movies, but it’s been quite a few years since I’ve given two hoots about who won which Oscar. I believe this feeling has gradually crept up on me, as the Oscars has lost more and more of its credibility with every passing year and decade. I largely attribute it to one thing; the ever-increasing wokeness that infests every Oscars ceremony. Because the sure fire way to deplete the credibility of the academy, and of art in general, is to stop caring as much about excellence in cinematic achievements, and instead use the ceremony as a platform to dole out awards based as much on diversity, inclusivity, virtue signalling and political posturing as on quality of moviemaking.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that the world of film, television, writing, art and music has such a diverse array of cultures, ethnicities, talent, perspectives and expressions. But once you start to award and commend based on secondary factors outside of merit and artistic achievement, as the Oscars clearly has for quite a few years now, the whole edifice is undermined, and credibility erodes away, leaving only a confluence of woke attention-seeking and unattractive self-righteousness, glitzed up to the hilt. 

 

On Cancel Culture

Here are a few thoughts on cancel culture. By ‘cancel culture’ I mean the hostile and belligerent desire to see some people silenced, have their work censored or removed, lose their jobs, and in some cases, have their whole character publicly assassinated.  A lot of people, especially young people, seem to have bought into the notion of cancel culture. Personally, I’ve never wanted to cancel anyone, even those who I think are utterly wrong. If I have no desire to cancel people, I assume many other people share that lack of desire. 

Cancel culture of this kind is fairly new. It’s a minority exercise, and it’s almost exclusively undertaken by people with a predictable personality profile; that is, entitled, not very bright, imbalanced, reactive, tempestuous, left-leaning and attracted to identity politics. The fact that people who have bought into the notion of cancel culture fit a fairly predictable profile of individuals tells us a lot about what we are looking for as common properties - of which I think there are five primary ones:

The first property is dishonesty. That is, it’s obvious that in the vast majority of cases when proclamations of moral outrage are uttered, it’s as plain as day that the person under accusation is not actually being sexist or racist or >something<phobic – they are, at worst, being clumsy and slightly provocative, and, at best, merely spouting an opinion that the cancel culture folk wish to aggressively disavow. By and large, then, to be complicit in cancel culture, you have to be willing to accuse people of things of which you don’t really believe they are guilty.

The second property is spite. People have a lot of spite inside them, especially people who are still insecure about who they are, how smart they are, and what they will amount to later. Cancelling others gives them an opportunity to behave spitefully in a controlled way, and it has the added bonus of making them feel self-righteous while doing so.

The third property is attention-seeking. Claiming to be hurt, damaged or traumatised by other people’s words and opinions is a classic attention-seeking method. It helps them be listened to, not on the merit of what they have to contribute, but on the feelings they claim to have. Coveting offense and victim-status gets you attention, and even support and encouragement from like-minded people.

The fourth property is belonging. Find like-minded people and fight these causes together, and it soon taps into the tribalistic desire to be part of an established group, with all the tribal perks offered within the group, and all the benefits of taking the fight outside of the group to engender a sense of purpose and solidarity. 

The fifth property is power. The above four properties give people perceived power, and this power may even be used to intimidate professionals, politicians, media outlets and some of the general public.

I’m not decrying every case, and I believe there are likely instances in which brave voices need to speak up for their cause. But they are in a tiny minority, and generally speaking, most individuals complicit in cancel culture are, I would say, acting dishonestly, with perverse incentives and ignoble motives.

I Hate Titiana McGrath!!!

I hate Titiana McGrath! I hate her because she’s so good, so on the money, and is doing exactly what I wished I’d have done years ago by getting in first (she’s a he, of course, a fictional creation of comedian Andrew Doyle). From Wiki:

“She is a social justice warrior who promotes identity politics and political correctness on her Twitter account. McGrath characterizes herself as a "radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest," while her creator describes her as "a militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare."

Troll Titiana McGrath brilliantly sends up the left, the feminists, the snowflakes, the social justice warriors, and everyone too easily offended by matters relating to gender, identity politics and political correctness. She takes absurd claims by many of society’s silliest, hysterical and most reactionary people, extends the logic to a biting, declamatory claim, and then lobs in a sardonic hand grenade and watches it go off:

“If there’s really a problem with gender inequality in predominantly Muslim countries, how do you explain that there has never been a single successful conviction in a Sharia court for misogynistic hate crime?”

"If it's true that men are superior at sports, why is it that transgender athletes tend to win more medals after they transition to female?"

“Women have never been more oppressed than they are today. It’s the *illusion* of freedom that makes our oppression all the more devastating. The fact that so many women think they are enjoying their lives only proves my point.”

What’s so great about Titiana McGrath is that she entertains those who, like her, can see the nonsense of the woke culture, offends all the people that deserve to be offended for their utter inability to achieve a balanced, reasoned worldview, and yet does so in a way that confuses the offended individuals by leaving them slightly unsure about whether she is one of them or one of the opposition.

By eliciting the bewildered reaction she does, she compounds the absurdity of the very reason she exists. Perhaps the best case in point was when she got banned from Twitter – a ridiculous act that proved exactly the cultural point she was making. It’s a shame we live in a world that needs a Titiana McGrath – but thank God we have one – she came along at just the right time.