D J Webb

The claimed “consecration” of a female bishop by the Church of England recently marks the end of the Anglican Church as any meaningful heir to the church founded in England in the Dark Ages. The buildings exist, and the ecclesiastical funds are there to be purloined by those who now staff the church hierarchy, but the Church itself has parted company with its Christian heritage. A parallel could be drawn with the Conservative Party, which is organizationally coterminous with England’s centuries-old Tory Party, but which now stands for radically altered political values.

You could ask, with some merit, “what does this issue have to do with libertarians, most of whom are atheists anyway?” Indeed, one reason why this step has been taken by the Church is because the vast majority of English people no longer actively adhere to traditional Christian culture, and are largely indifferent to the matter of women “priests” and “bishops”, or, in the case of feminists, while not believing in Christian theology as such, see the issue as yet another opportunity for the introduction of a revolutionary egalitarian reinterpretation, regardless of its impact on the dwindling bands of the (real) faithful.

Yet John Stuart Mill argued in Chapter XVI of his Considerations on Representative Government:

A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others—which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves, or a portion of themselves, exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language and community of religion greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.

…

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government can not exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another.

This is interesting in that a cultural heritage is stated as being a key precondition for the establishment of a free polity. A multicultural society is not a logical one in which to attempt to incubate liberty. A free society might accept a secular interpretation of its cultural past—allowing that culture to sink back into half-remembered history as “heritage” only—but, still, unbeknown possibly to many members of society, that society’s cultural values, even in a secular present, would still reflect many features of the heritage that underlies them. Democracy and human rights both have some connection with our religious heritage, and in particular with the emergence of the dissenting tradition that dissented from the Church of England, but which came to influence and be influenced by the Church of England as part of the broader development of the wider English church, defined more broadly than the Church of England as such. Unfortunately, self-righteousness, sanctimoniousness and the drive to political correctness also reflect in various ways the influence of our religious heritage, where the insincere claiming of the moral high ground takes an overt political form.

Nevertheless, it remains a fact that liberty in the present depends on England’s being English, which in turn requires the consciousness of a common cultural heritage, including a religious heritage. It seems the destructive changes in the Church of England since the 1970s amount to an attempt to kick over the traces of that heritage in a way that no longer allows it to unite people. The demos is disaggregated; we become a collection of people, who might as well be Arabs and blacks as Englishmen, given our lack of real cultural connections with one another; multiculturalism and immigration are facilitated; and the state steps in in a more intimate way than ever before to resolve intercultural and interpersonal conflicts.

Now I have to confess that, unlike in my younger years, I no longer believe in God. But I do believe in cultural Christianity, and in particular its role in our national identity as a heritage. For this reason, arguments about the Greek meanings of words, or about primitive Christianity in the 1st century after Christ, will leave me cold. We are not Greeks, and neither are we Greek-speaking Christians in the Ancient World. I will be interested in the mediaeval church, when our Church was in Communion with the see of Rome, and, in particular, in the worship and doctrine of the Church of England following the Reformation, when the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer played a strong role in our English-speaking culture. Our architectural heritage, our hymns (particular those in Hymns Ancient and Modern), the singing of the non-metrical psalms (as, for instance, in the Parish Psalter) and the teachings of classical Anglicanism are all relevant to me.

We notice, however, that even the Lord’s Prayer has been altered. First of all, Our Father, Which Art in Heaven was replaced by the Roman Catholic Church’s preferred Our Father Who Art in Heaven, and now a fully vernacularized version is read out in Anglican churches, one not known by heart by any Englishman, who has to read it from the page owing to the unfamiliarity of the text. This shows on a fundamental level how little of the Anglican heritage remains as our living culture: not even the Lord’s Prayer remains. Attempts to get rid of the pre-formed 1662 liturgy, a book of services that had to be read out verbatim, so that every church had the same liturgy (unlike in the freer Dissenting churches) were rejected, twice, by Parliament in 1927 and 1928. In the 1960s the Church simply proceeded in an unauthorized fashion with alterations in the liturgy, which were tentative in nature at first, and then the awful Alternative Service Book was introduced in 1980, followed by a similar Common Worship in 2000. These books no longer sought to amend the Book of Common Prayer, which would require an Act of Parliament, but offered an alternative that is now almost exclusively used in the Church of England. Where the Book of Common Prayer is used, it is nearly always used in a bowdlerized fashion (e.g. “dearly beloved brethren” becomes “dearly beloved”, reflecting the cultural Marxist politics of the Church of England today).

The result is that church services today contain no iconic language that is redolent of our heritage. There are no half-forgotten phrases from our childhood. The language of the services has been drawn up by people with poor English in such a way that it cannot become a new unifying factor in our culture. For example, the Prayerbook wording in the Prayer for the Church Militant (in the Communion service) that the Queen’s ministers should “indifferently minister justice” has now become “impartially minister justice” in the Common Worship service book: ignorant people see no difference in meaning; yet judges and other authorities ought not to be “impartial” between justice and injustice, but rather partial advocates of justice, albeit justice implemented indifferently as to the persons involved. Ignorant and unnecessary changes of this sort apparently render the liturgy “more accessible” to the man in the street. Similarly, church services have drifted towards “parish communion” once a week, ignoring the provision of canon law that requires every church in the country to hold matins and evensong (either said or sung prayer services, with lengthy readings from the Bible) every day. If you wish to anger your vicar, ask him what time matins is said on a Tuesday morning! The lectionary of the Church of England used to require a reading out of virtually the entire Bible during matins and evensong every year. Properly performed according the Prayer Book, matins and evensong also require full recitation of the Psalms, which were at one point very well known to all Englishmen, every month.

The interpretation of Christianity has now shifted to such an extent that large parts of the Bible cannot be read out in church. Parts of the Bible condemning homosexuality or enjoining the subjection of women are simply never read nowadays. Numerous passages in the Psalms cannot be be read either. Take this, from Psalm 144 (to be read in matins on the 30th and 31st of every month):

1 Blessed be the Lord my strength: who teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight;

2 My hope and my fortress; my castle and deliverer; my defender in whom I trust: who subdueth my people that is under me.

You will note in passing that this text is not from the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible, prepared in 1611; although the differences in translation are often slight, the Prayer Book uses the Myles Coverdale Psalter of 1535, and thus the Psalms are the only part of the Bible better known in the Coverdale edition than in the Authorized Version. Such passages as Psalm 144 were not incomprehensible to our empire-builders. Christianity at one time was associated in England with a rather martial and warlike national identity, as exemplified by the cult of St. George. Subduing the heathen was not incompatible with our understanding of Christianity. How about this, from Psalm 137 (appointed for the 28th of each month):

7 Remember the children of Edom, O Lord, in the day of Jerusalem: how they said, Down with it, down with it, even to the ground.

8 O daughter of Babylon, wasted with misery; yea, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee, as thou hast served us.

9 Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children: and throweth them against the stones.

I have heard this passage sung, according to the Parish Psalter, but once in church: in St. Giles in the Fields in London, where many members of the congregation were members of the Prayer Book Society and insisted on it, causing the rector (the archdeacon, in fact) to constantly struggle with his flock. This passage expresses a belief in a God who will avenge injustice, once again not a theme alien to traditional churchmen.

How about the pro-imperialist tone of Isaiah 60?

1 Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.

2 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.

3 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

4 Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side.

5 Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.

6 The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord.

7 All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee: they shall come up with acceptance on mine altar, and I will glorify the house of my glory.

8 Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?

9 Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, unto the name of the Lord thy God, and to the Holy One of Israel, because he hath glorified thee.

10 And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee.

11 Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee the forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.

12 For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.

13 The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious.

14 The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee; The city of the Lord, The Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

15 Whereas thou has been forsaken and hated, so that no man went through thee, I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations.

16 Thou shalt also suck the milk of the Gentiles, and shalt suck the breast of kings: and thou shalt know that I the Lord am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.

17 For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, and for stones iron: I will also make thy officers peace, and thine exactors righteousness.

18 Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise.

19 The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.

20 Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.

21 Thy people also shall be all righteous: they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified.

22 A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation: I the Lord will hasten it in his time.

The original meaning of this text applied to ancient Israel. However, England’s invention of itself as a “Protestant Israel” and a great empire allowed Englishmen to see in such texts a validation of national glory and imperialism. We certainly did “suck the milk of the Gentiles” at one point, and we regarded this as the gift of providence.

Turning from liturgical matters to the role of women in the church, we see a similar constant reinterpretation of the Bible. The Bible makes clear that men and women are not equal. One may quibble with the Creation story, but it is in the Bible, and Jesus Christ referred to the Genesis account on occasion, and there we read (in Genesis 3), following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the lot of women henceforth:

16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Equality in marriage is not a Bible principle. Furthermore, the priests and high priests of ancient Israel were all male, as were Jesus’ disciples when he came among men. Why this is may reflect ancient beliefs that menstruation made women “ritually unclean”. Leviticus 15 gives a lengthy explanation of how an “issue of blood” made a woman unclean and stated how she had to be kept apart for seven days, before a cleansing ritual in the tabernacle once the issue of blood was over. Menstruating women (and men suffering from genital discharges) were not allowed in the sanctuary:

31 Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they defile my tabernacle that is among them.

This verse claims that for women to visit the tabernacle during their monthly period would “defile” it. Clearly, from an atheist point of view, while menstruation might be a cleanliness/health issue in the medical sense, to regard women as “unclean” in a “ritual” sense for one week of the month is nonsense. But when it comes to a religious heritage we are not talking about the views of atheists. The Church of England has not publicly stated whether the female “bishops” will be permitted to conduct services during their menstrual periods—in any case, the Old Testament stipulations are all “nonsense” to the modern Church.

Isaiah (in Isaiah 3) expressed the following view on government by women:

12 As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.

Now, it has been suggested the reference is purely metaphorical, condemning weak or effete government. But even if that is the correct interpretation, the metaphorical reference only works if government by women be held to be unthinkable and inappropriate. Later in the chapter, Isaiah continues:

16 Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet:

17 Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts.

18 In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tyres like the moon,

19 The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers,

20 The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings,

21 The rings, and nose jewels,

22 The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins,

23 The glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils.

24 And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.

25 Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war.

26 And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground.

None of this is particularly acceptable to modern feminists. What difference should that make to the Church, however? Their ideology is meant to be Christianity, not cultural Marxism. A word needs to be said about the status of the Old Testament in Christianity. The church has always taught that the entire Bible was inspired by God and unerring. That is the consensus fidelium, in other words, the agreed-upon teaching of the united church before the split with the east in AD 1054. It is also what all churches taught up until very recently. Jesus came, not to abolish the Mosaic Law, but to fulfil it, or so he said, and he kept the stipulations of the Old Testament. On the 8th day after his birth, he was circumcised, as required by the Law. (I’m not a fan of such barbarism, but this is really a subject for another article.) Luke 2 also tells us that, 40 days after Jesus’ birth, in line with the commandment in Leviticus 12, Mary and Jesus came to the Temple for Mary’s ritual purification, sacrificing two turtledoves for this purpose. The Virgin Mary clearly did not think the Old Testament discussion of how childbirth made women “ritually unclean” wrong—or sexist. (Part of the wonder of the Incarnation is the belief that God the Son submitted himself to a process, childbirth, believed to be ritually unclean—in the words of the hymn, “lo! he abhorred not the virgin’s womb”.) The purification ceremony forms part of the background to the Book of Common Prayer’s Churching of Women service, a service to be performed following childbirth, but one that I believe is largely obsolete in the Church today.

The replacement of the Old Jewish Law by Christianity was made clear by the Holy Ghost’s instruction to St. Peter in Acts 10 that he could eat the meat of animals described as unclean in the Old Testament. The detailed ritual laws of ancient Israel were swept away, but this is not to say that the principles that underlay the Mosaic Law were changed. If God inspired both Testaments, then the New Testament embodies the same beliefs, but with a less harsh structure of rituals and punishments. Consequently, if men in the Old Testament had primacy over women, it would be surprising to read anything different in the New Testament, and, sure enough, St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 11:

3 But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.

4 Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head.

5 But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven.

6 For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.

7 For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.

8 For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man.

9 Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.

We note, of course, that the reason why women in some Christian sects cover their heads in church is given here. It is clear here that the headship of men over women is not some reluctant acceptance of inequality in transient social arrangements (as might be inferred in Biblical commands to slaves to obey their masters cheerfully), but rather this is seen as the naturally correct relationship between the sexes, the God-given order.

In 1 Corinthians 14, women are commanded not to speak in churches, a command flouted by the Church of England:

34 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.

35 And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.

Traditionally, therefore, priests and bishops were male. It is not at all clear that the Bible instituted separate orders of priests and bishops. Many passages appear to use the words presbyteros and episkopos interchangeably, a fact that gave rise to the dispute with the Presbyterians in the 17th century. However, working with the principle that as Englishmen we ought to cleave to our traditions, and not necessarily those of 1st-century Palestine, and bearing in mind the fact that the undivided church before AD 1054 was hierarchical, the orders of priests and bishops can be accepted. Things are a little more unclear with the diaconate. This is partly because St. Paul referred to a female deacon in Romans 16:

I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea:

2 That ye receive her in the Lord, as becometh saints, and that ye assist her in whatsoever business she hath need of you: for she hath been a succourer of many, and of myself also.

The word “servant” here is diakonos or something like it, in the Greek. However, over the centuries it has been argued she may have been a general servant, and not a member of an ordained ministry. In the early church women were ordained as deaconesses for many centuries, although their duties were not equivalent to those of male deacons. One interpretation is that an order of deaconess would be something like the Roman Catholic nuns, or possibly an order that permitted a female to minister to other females, and thus not violate the headship principle. Deaconesses have been known in the Church of England for some time—one woman was licensed as a deaconess in the 1860s—but as far as I understand it such deaconesses were not members of an ordained clerical order. Female deacons were “ordained” in 1987, with female priests following in 1994, and then the “consecration” of a female bishop in 2015.

Proponents of a female ministry point to these words of St. Paul in Galatians 3:

28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

29 And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

However, given St. Paul’s other writings, which assert in very clear terms that men have headship over women, it is not clear that this phrase in his Epistle to the church in Galatia means that women should become priests. The verse above also says “there is neither bond nor free”, although the Ancient World did have a distinction between slaves and free men. St. Paul seems here to be saying that people of all nationalities, social classes and sexes may be saved; this does not at all have the meaning supporters of women “priests” are trying to give it.

What does this matter, you may ask? Why was it logical in the first place to restrict the ministry to men? This is discussed in C. S. Lewis’ essay Priestesses in the Church in his essay collection God in the Dock. He first quotes a comment on balls by Caroline Bingley, a figure in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

‘I should like balls infinitely better’, said Caroline Bingley, ‘if they were carried on in a different manner. . . It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day’. ‘Much more rational, I dare say’, replied her brother, ‘but it would not be near so much like a Ball’.

…

I have every respect for those who wish women to be priestesses. I think they are sincere and pious and sensible people. Indeed, in a way they are too sensible. That is where my dissent from them resembles Bingley’s dissent from his sister. I am tempted to say that the proposed arrangement would make us much more rational ‘but not near so much like a Church’.

If everything in a religious heritage is revised along supposed rational principles, then we have to question the attempt to maintain that religion at all. The “rationalism” of egalitarianism in the Church of England logically suggests we should be atheists, not adherents to a traditional religious view of the world.

Unlike C. S. Lewis, I have no respect for those who wish women to be priestesses. They are seeking to unpick our heritage and to encourage women who do not believe in our religious heritage to advance themselves in a way that is, quite deliberately, intended to give offence to traditional worshippers. You could say that the claimed consecration of female “bishops” is a Clause 4 moment in the Church, similar to the Labour Party’s dropping of Clause 4 in its constitution committing itself to nationalization, and designed to show the world that the Church is an utterly changed organization, one that claims no timeless authority, but draws its claims to authority from its slavish adherence to the egalitarian political dogma promoted by politicians and the media.

I argued above that our heritage is relevant to libertarians in the general sense that national identity, based on a cultural heritage, is required for free institutions. To see those institutions degraded is to stand by while the cultural bonds of the demos are deleted. Yet it is also possible to see equality of the sexes as an unnatural development and one that is intended to weaken the family arrangement, individuating the population and leaving the state as the family-substitute of those individuals.

While slavery is a social institution that outlived its time, as the modern technological economy requires, not brute labour, but an educated workforce, the difference in the social role of men and women is based on biology and nature; it is not a transient social division (the assignment of arbitrary “gender” roles) that will be overcome in a future communist and classless society.

First of all, the role of women as childbearers and caregivers is a natural one. In the animal kingdom, we see how maternal instinct is universal among the species. As children require many years of care before adulthood, it is natural that a woman look after her children while her husband, stronger, braver and more purposeful than she, serve as the breadwinner for the family unit. At the very least, libertarians would have to agree that the creation of a society where most children do not have fathers in the home has only been possible because we live in an unfree society, where the state is able to compel us to pay taxes to fund the lifestyle of such women. In a free society, a few wealthy women would be able to live free of a relationship with a man, but most women would not have the financial resources to do so. The relationship between the sexes must therefore be accepted as natural. Equality is only possible where freedom has been abolished and unnatural social structures put in place in a costly fashion to facilitate novel lifestyles.

Secondly, most of the natural leaders in any society will be men. It is not for libertarians to try to change the biological facts of life, and IQ studies show that women have a flatter “bell curve”: most women are around the IQ average; very intelligent and very dense men are distributed along a wider range. It is part of the historical cultural record that most cultural creation, include scientific inventions, have been by men. It is not exclusively so, but it is overwhelmingly so. It seems unlikely that a society dominated by females will be using its resources in the form of human talents to the full. Attempts to ensure women are equally represented at the managerial level in the economy are politically-inspired: there is no business case for this.

In anthropological terms, men strive for peer recognition in terms of their achievements and seek recognition for strength and honour. (I would recommend Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men for a detailed discussion of this.) Once again, it is not for libertarians to try to unpick the natural order. It seems that females seek advancement by means of office politics, underhand briefings, backstabbing and other spiteful machinations. They are unable, in the main, to strive for recognition in terms of their intellects, their strengths or their achievements. It is a generalization, as we are describing billions of people, but women are not like men and shouldn’t seek to be men. It is demeaning for men to have female managers, who will often play sexual politics against them in a spiteful way. It is as if, just like black people furiously use “racism” to gain advantage for themselves in the workplace, women exploit the concept of “sexism” and seek to victimize men they have control over.

Finally, owing to the female “emotional intelligence” (which means women are good at office politics and manipulating others) and their preference for personal attacks rather than seeking advancements through their merits alone, women are the ideal tools for the advancement of political correctness in society, spitefully wielding these weapons against men who challenge them. I do not at all agree that female equality can be achieved without political correctness, and in an atmosphere of political correctness there can be no libertarian society. The sanctimoniousness and self-righteousness that is the key cultural flaw of Anglo-Saxon societies is sharper and shriller among women in a way that suggest that the feminization of society plays a key role in the new managerial politics.

For these reasons, female “bishops” are just part of the rise of the new politics that will defeat libertarian attempts to create a free society. They are not the most important part in this process, given the overall marginalization of the church, but they are part of the wider phenomenon of feminization. Feminization means the loss of national identity and is directly contrary to the consciousness of the demos required for free institutions. I would argue strongly that the women being consecrated in the Church of England today are not “bishops”; any priests they ordain will not be real priests; any services they conduct will be blasphemous, and religious believers should shun them; and finally that the Church of England is no longer part of Christ’s church. It is time to close it down, defrock the faithless clergymen and the blasphemous wannabe clergywomen and find a way of celebrating our heritage as a historical part of our national identity, but not a part of our living culture. In the words of the Apocalypse (Revelation 18), in reference to Babylon the Great, but applying equally to the Church of England:

4 And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

5 For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.