Dear Sir,
Every January something pops through my letterbox to bring a shaft of light into these dark days. The CofE authorities send me a little advertising puff about the annual Lent Course provided by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. For years this has given me a laugh, although, to use a phrase of my mother’s, it’s too daft to laugh at. All the usual politically-correct nostrums cast in the Noddy language with which the church patronises and torments us to death. But suddenly this booklet isn’t funny anymore.
As we all know, Lent commemorates the 40 days and 40 nights which Jesus spent alone in the wilderness before He began his ministry. It always used to be customary for Christians to fast from luxuries by giving up our favourite foods and drinks. We did this to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, to practice self-denial if only for a while, to repent of our misdoings and turn to God in prayer. Not these days. The church authorities have changed the meaning of Lent, abandoned its religious basis and now this course asks us instead: ‘Could you give up something this Lent that would save electricity, plastic, waste or water?’
In other words, the penitential season of Lent has been secularised and paganised. God is no longer the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Lord and Father whom the angels worship everlastingly. He is the Baal, the pagan god of the environment. He judges us not for our lack of faith and charity, but because we haven’t worried sufficiently about global warming. As if Jesus had emerged from the wilderness after those 40 days and 40 nights and commanded the disciples: ‘Repent, and start saving the planet.’ Jesus, cast in the image of today’s archiepiscopal pagans, would probably also advise St Peter and the other fishermen to give up fish and turn vegan, as St Greta has decreed. This Jesus, in the words of the secularised Lent Course, tells us also to ‘broaden your view of view of Christ’s redeeming mission’ – which means observe the new commandment about ‘diversity’.
To this paganism and secularism we must add the socialist ideology as the Lent Course tells us ‘to work for a fairer world’ because ‘Christians are called to pray and work for it.’ No, we’re not so called: instead we’re commanded by the gospel to act charitably. Besides, the injunction is entirely empty-headed and therefore worthless, since the Course doesn’t tell us how to pray and work for a fairer world. We know very well from their countless exhortations in the past that they don’t mean that we should strive for improvements in the material lives of the world’s poor by employing the methods of free trade and the market economy – the only method that has ever worked anywhere.
In conclusion we’re taken back to the vacuous obsessions of ecological fantasy and told we should be taking care to protect the life of the whole earth, including its animals and plants. Does this involve vegan idealism? That wouldn’t help protect the lives of animals: there wouldn’t be any cows or pigs or sheep if we stopped eating them. And if we preserve plants by refusing to cut down trees where it is wise to do so, then we shall help cause apocalyptic wild-fires such as those that are devastating Australia. For 10,000 years the Aborigine people chopped down trees galore to produce firebreaks. This is an example of practical wisdom. But practical wisdom cuts no ice with the ecclesiastical sentimentalists who devised the Lent Course.
You will say I’m exaggerating my case for rhetorical or even satirical effect. Let me prove that I am not by providing a living example of a man who has progressed even further into idiocy and apostasy than those who gave us the Lent Course.
Stephen Cottrell has just been appointed Archbishop of York to succeed John Sentamu. A fortnight before Christmas, Cottrell said: ‘It is wrong to ignore the damage being done by western society’s current view of human sexuality. I am not sure that the church has ever before had to face the challenge of being seen as immoral by the culture in which it is set. And taking a biblical view on same-sex relationships can legitimise homophobia in others.’
If you think that is a pretty severe criticism of the morality prescribed in the Bible, Cottrell went on to make his apostate views absolutely clear: ‘The biblical passages which so describe these things are merely part of our story and our inheritance. What we can do is recognise what we know now about human development and human sexuality. This requires us to look again at those texts to see what they are actually saying to our situation. For what we know now is not what was known then.’
Cottrell says that biblical teaching is ‘part of our story and our inheritance.’ Are we admonished then to treasure this inheritance and cling to our story for dear life as the most precious gift we possess? No – we are urged to abandon it.
In other words, accept the depraved agenda of LGBT+ lock, stock and barrel, for our clergy are now telling us this is a better guide to Christian living than the Bible. And this not from some obscure, publicity-seeking clergyman on the way up and out to make a name for himself, but from the Archbishop-designate of York, the second highest ranking Anglican in the world! Cottrell is of course merely parroting the message delivered by Archbishop Rowan Williams in the last sermon he preached before his retirement: ‘The church has a lot of catching-up to do with secular mores.’
With such ignorant and faithless people running the show, the C. of E. will soon be dead and gone. There will – thank God – still be a few sane and faithful Anglo-Catholic priests and their congregations. There will remain Evangelical churches where the Bible is preached with understanding. Here and there – though already you can count them on the fingers of one hand – there will even be some places where they still use The Book of Common Prayer. But all these remnants will be mere islands in the ocean of paganism, secularism, and the sheer nonsense which sets up roundabouts and helter-skelters in the naves of our cathedrals.
This parody of our national Church does not deserve our support and affection – because its leaders and shepherds have betrayed the sheep they were called, ordained and consecrated to feed and to care for.
Yours faithfully,
