There was a progressive of Riga

who went for a ride on a tiger ...

On twitter I like to argue in the style of Gus McCrea in a San Antonio bar. This is fun but it’s not persuasive. So here’s a longer reflection on the progressive campaign against Justin Welby. This is purely about the politics of the campaign: I’m ignoring the policies because I think they’re irrelevant in these struggles.

Robert Thompson was one of the earliest and loudest voices to demand Justin Welby’s resignation. Along with Marcus Walker and Ian Paul he is one of the three men who started a Change.org petition to force Welby out in the wake of the publication of the Makin report.

That petition represented a coalition between the progressives, the hard line evangelicals, and the Save the Parish movement; all are under normal circumstances irreconcilable enemies but all wanted to be rid of Justin Welby.

Marcus Walker and Ian Paul make unlikely bedfellows, but they both want to smash up the institutional church as it presently exists and replace it with something smaller. I don’t think that’s what Robert Thompson wants. His dream appears to be something like the episcopal church in the USA, where there is still a top heavy structure but it is run by the progressive party in church politics and financed by the legacies of previous generations.

It’s never going to happen. Right at the moment, the Ian Paul faction has everything but right on its side. It has the money, the votes, the organisation and the plan. Save the Parish has votes, organisation, and a constituency in the press. The progressives have only the support of the press or, as they see it, all right thinking people.

The first rule of politics is to learn to count. If once the evangelicals take power, the liberals are out. Not just out of power, but out of the church so far as that is possible. The whole strategy of the evangelical movement, ever since Lambeth 1.10, has been to commit the Church to principles that no liberal can in good conscience accept and then to use these as a purity test and statement of policy so as to grind the gays out of the system. This seems to everyone else (and me) a violation of the spirit of the game, like bodyline bowling. But bodyline bowling won the Ashes series.

The progressives take for granted that the Church of England must by its nature be tolerant and broad — even if their tolerance has limits, and can’t, obviously, include people who are wrong. But the breadth of the Church of England is contingent. No one planned it and there is nothing to guarantee its survival.

The Church of England is not broad or tolerant because Queen Elizabeth, Archbishop Laud, or the non-jurors were liberally minded. They were not. The fact, and subsequent myth, of Anglican tolerance derives from the fact of private patronage. So long as parish appointments were in the gift of the richer laity, and episcopal appointments were in the gift of the government of the day, all shades of theological opinion among the laity could be securely represented providing that there was a faction in their support among the patronising classes. My favourite, not very theological, example of this comes from the will of Lieutenant Colonel DJ Player¹ who directed that the incumbent of a living in his gift should be “A man who approves of hunting, shooting, and all manly sports, which are the backbone of the nation”.

The resulting diversity might look like congregationalism, in as much as it made parish clergy largely independent of the opinions of their bishops. But the parish priest was also independent of the wishes of his congregation. They did not pay him; the patron or the parish endowments did that. The parson’s freehold meant that it would take a really spectacular crime to dislodge him from his position. No wonder the bishops exerted themselves to be rid of it, and succeeded so well that they are now the only people to enjoy the independence which was once the prerogative of every vicar or rector. The Bishop of Newcastle is still free to pursue the Archbishop of York as if he were a fox and she Lieutenant Colonel Player’s country parson.

Other fragments of the older system remain, such as the convention that partnered gay men become cathedral deans, since they are now ineligible as bishops.

Congregationalism crept in round the edges in the course of the twentieth century. Mass transport, suburbanisation and the consumer society all helped congregations to sort themselves into likeminded groups. But only the evangelicals have used it in a politically intelligent way and only since the 1970s has it become a source of political power.

The interest of the uncommitted laity in the Church – those who go twice a year to church, if that – has waned with their loss of power. The clergy have been gradually converted from officers into managers — from those who are under orders, and can give them, into those who are managed and must themselves manage. This is the way authority more generally has shifted in post-Imperial Britain.

In some ways the great shift has improved the Church. Two of the worst abusers I know of — Peter Ball and Victor Whitsey – were themselves bishops. So was Eric Kemp, who protected Ball, and who was, I think, the last bishop to have been chosen without any formal input from the Church of England. None of them would have survived in today’s Church.

Save the Parish dreams of a disintermediated church, with the money flowing down from the centre to their favoured parishes in an uncomplicated way. But this can’t happen, partly because the sums don’t add up, as Tim Wyatt has demonstrated, but mostly because money always comes with strings attached. Someone must always decide who gets it and on what basis. The great advantage of drawing your funding from dead people is that they can’t object to the way you spend it. But when the money from legacies and endowments runs out the finances of the church become a subject of open political struggle.

The progressives seem to think that concern about money is vulgar and somehow unChristian. We will see how long they can afford to strike this attitude. The Diocese of Newcastle loses nearly a million pounds a year. This is not exceptional. The last time I did the figures, only one diocese was not running at a loss.

All the factions in the Church agree on one really important point — that if there is only enough income to sustain half the present Church, it would be better if it were their half only. One interesting thing about Justin Welby is that he thinks they’re all wrong. Back when there were 800,000 regular Sunday attenders, I asked him once whether it wouldn’t be simpler if the Church just split formally down the lines of its schism about sex. That way neither half would feel it was being held back by the other. He didn’t agree at all. He thought that no church of 400,000 people could command respect or expect to grow much. Knock off a quarter of these attendance figures to allow for the passing of ten years and his point looks still stronger. A Church agreeable only to Guardian readers would head for the same end as the Guardian’s print circulation.

1. I found him in Keith Douglas’s marvellous account of tank warfare in the Western Desert, Alamein to Zem Zem. The detail about his will comes from a biography of the poet, but I’ve lost it, along with my paper copy of the book. The last few of his collected poems make clear what a loss his death was, only 24.