Sad sad sad

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/baef8314-6d24-11da-90c2-0000779e2340.html

Those poor British.

The former Episcopalian Primate of Scotland and Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, took the service. He smiled broadly as he described it - “Here was I, an agnostic Anglican, taking the service in a Presbyterian church, for a dead atheist politician. And I thought that was just marvellous.” He added: “Of course, he was a Presbyterian atheist, which means he distrusted authority - even that of atheism” (one could add of Cook, as of many Presbyterians, that he distrusted an authority that was not his own).

He is in a line of doubting prelates: infamous in the 1960s was another Anglican bishop, John Robinson, whose book, Honest to God, sought the same “Out There” space as Holloway. Since this was at a time when it was still thought important that bishops believe in God, it provoked a storm of controversy because of its insistence that God had (perhaps) become unnecessary.

Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote of it in an essay three years ago that it posited a world in which “the question of what distinguishes a believer from an unbeliever is quite hard to answer except in terms of intensity: the believer has no different conception of the good, but does have a more profoundly engaged relation to it”. That is what the British have come to expect of the Christians among them: that they are probably decent and probably show it a bit more, but are, and have no fundamental claim to be, no more decent ex officio than anyone else.

As Christmas approaches and the most insistent messages are not what joy may be kindled by the celebration of the birth of Jesus but what pleasure may be had from extra consumption, the skeletal nature of Britain’s faith stands exposed once more: a faith that still marks the seasons but, even with such a consummate priest as Williams at its head, falters at giving them meaning.