These “liberals”, as they like to be called, who constitute the hierarchy detest the Christian past and dismiss our forefathers in the faith as “primitive”. Really they are old-fashioned Whigs in new Guardianista clothing – apostles of the discredited doctrine of “progress”. And God help anyone who stands in the way of these ecclesiastical totalitarians as they bully conservative clergymen and steamroller traditional parishes into adopting their puerile new versions of the Bible and their trashy modern liturgies.
The modernisers among the bishops and in the General Synod have dominated the English church these last forty years and all but destroyed it. They have denied or distorted every cardinal doctrine of the faith. The Resurrection of Our Lord has been reduced to a subjective feeling of cheered-upness among the disciples. The Virgin Birth has been dismissed as a mistaken reading of the Book of Isaiah. They have swallowed whole the notion of secularisation
The result of all this iconoclasm is that people have voted with their feet and the congregations have diminished spectacularly. Where they have not diminished but increased and thrived is precisely in those churches so despised by A.N.Wilson: the Bible-based evangelicals and the traditional anglocatholics and high church. I must say that one of the great joys among traditional believers these days is the spectacle we can now enjoy of the liberal hierarchy’s Pyrrhic victory. At last there they sit in full control of the Church of England – except that the only meaningful parts of the church have gone their own ways, leaving the liberal bullies with no one to boss about.
I have been a priest for 35 years and watched the tyranny of apostates in high places and I know that people do not want a pale, euphemistic religion in which the gospel is reduced to a metaphor for the social policies of the soft Left. But they will come to church to be moved and stirred by words that are worth their weight in glory and to hear sound teaching.
