BRITISH BULLDOG
I’m starting to seriously worry about the Picar of Vutney. Giles Fraser is so incensed about the recent vote in the Church of England’s General Synod against women bishops that he can’t even think straight. He starts out by talking about a bullied school chum of his who became a Christian:
For his beliefs became a sort of barrier against the cruelty of the world. So the more people said his views were stupid, the more he felt the need for the protection they afforded him. His six impossible things before breakfast were a Maginot line against a world of hurt. Which is why he could never give them up or subject them to any sort of critical scrutiny.
Except that he’s a figment of the Fraze’s imagination.
Actually, I have made this person up.
He’s as fictional as Fraser’s “theology,” in other words.
But I am trying to paint a picture of the mentality of conservative evangelicals, the people who have recently scuppered the female bishop legislation,
All six of them.
without invoking the standard caricature of these modern-day puritans as life-denying fun-sponges obsessed with being right and with other people not having sex. Not that this latter image is all that far from the truth.
It is as far from the truth as the east is from the west, Fraze. But introducing Johnson’s Fourth Law of Anglican Thermodynamics. At least 99% of Anglicans who use the word “puritan” have absolutely no idea what that word means.
The problem is that from Marlowe, Shakespeare and Johnson all they way through to Blackadder (and that brilliant episode where his rich puritan relatives come round to fulminate against fornication and inadvertently chomp on a penis-shaped turnip), this has become an overused trope that describes someone who seems to have stepped out of the Tardis from another century. The thing is, they are alive and well in the 21st century.
According to Fraser, six of these “puritans” have the ability to control the entire C of E.
And the more we laugh at puritans, the more it confirms their worldview. Indeed, they have a text from St John’s gospel that seems to cover precisely this: “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world. That is why the world hates you.” In other words, the more hated you are, the more right you are. It’s one up from Millwall football club’s chant: “No one likes us, we don’t care.” Which is why the opprobrium that is currently being poured upon conservative evangelicals for voting against women bishops will make no difference whatsoever. It confirms them in feeling right.
So that whole “in the world but not of the world” thing is officially dead then? Pity. But that’s not what’s at work here, claims Fraser. This measure was voted down out of pure conservative malice and for no other reason.
Moreover, the fact that they have put a spanner in the works for everyone else is something they experience as some sort of secret pleasure. For the essence of the puritan mindset is revenge – as Nietzsche accurately described it, the revenge of the bullied who are subconsciously getting back at those who once made their life a misery. As the comedy puritan Malvolio rages at the end of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you.”
What now? There’s not much that can be accomplished when those dolts intentionally ignore our theological brilliance.
So what can be done? Argument is pretty useless. Conservative religious people are generally locked in a self-referencing worldview where truth is about strict internal coherence rather than any reaching out to reality. That’s why they treat the Bible like some vast jigsaw – its truth residing in a complex process of making the pieces fit together and not with the picture it creates.
Here’s an idea, Picar. Make an actual theological case for women’s ordination (because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re talking about here). There is one to be made for the PROTESTANT church that the Church of England obviously is. Don’t know whether it’s a good case or not but it’s a whole lot better than the Fraze’s, “Well, it’s perfectly obvious, you blinkered, philistine, pig-ignorant misogynists.”
For his beliefs became a sort of barrier against the cruelty of the world. So the more people said his views were stupid, the more he felt the need for the protection they afforded him. His six impossible things before breakfast were a Maginot line against a world of hurt. Which is why he could never give them up or subject them to any sort of critical scrutiny.
Except that he’s a figment of the Fraze’s imagination.
Actually, I have made this person up.
He’s as fictional as Fraser’s “theology,” in other words.
But I am trying to paint a picture of the mentality of conservative evangelicals, the people who have recently scuppered the female bishop legislation,
All six of them.
without invoking the standard caricature of these modern-day puritans as life-denying fun-sponges obsessed with being right and with other people not having sex. Not that this latter image is all that far from the truth.
It is as far from the truth as the east is from the west, Fraze. But introducing Johnson’s Fourth Law of Anglican Thermodynamics. At least 99% of Anglicans who use the word “puritan” have absolutely no idea what that word means.
The problem is that from Marlowe, Shakespeare and Johnson all they way through to Blackadder (and that brilliant episode where his rich puritan relatives come round to fulminate against fornication and inadvertently chomp on a penis-shaped turnip), this has become an overused trope that describes someone who seems to have stepped out of the Tardis from another century. The thing is, they are alive and well in the 21st century.
According to Fraser, six of these “puritans” have the ability to control the entire C of E.
And the more we laugh at puritans, the more it confirms their worldview. Indeed, they have a text from St John’s gospel that seems to cover precisely this: “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world. That is why the world hates you.” In other words, the more hated you are, the more right you are. It’s one up from Millwall football club’s chant: “No one likes us, we don’t care.” Which is why the opprobrium that is currently being poured upon conservative evangelicals for voting against women bishops will make no difference whatsoever. It confirms them in feeling right.
So that whole “in the world but not of the world” thing is officially dead then? Pity. But that’s not what’s at work here, claims Fraser. This measure was voted down out of pure conservative malice and for no other reason.
Moreover, the fact that they have put a spanner in the works for everyone else is something they experience as some sort of secret pleasure. For the essence of the puritan mindset is revenge – as Nietzsche accurately described it, the revenge of the bullied who are subconsciously getting back at those who once made their life a misery. As the comedy puritan Malvolio rages at the end of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you.”
What now? There’s not much that can be accomplished when those dolts intentionally ignore our theological brilliance.
So what can be done? Argument is pretty useless. Conservative religious people are generally locked in a self-referencing worldview where truth is about strict internal coherence rather than any reaching out to reality. That’s why they treat the Bible like some vast jigsaw – its truth residing in a complex process of making the pieces fit together and not with the picture it creates.
Here’s an idea, Picar. Make an actual theological case for women’s ordination (because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re talking about here). There is one to be made for the PROTESTANT church that the Church of England obviously is. Don’t know whether it’s a good case or not but it’s a whole lot better than the Fraze’s, “Well, it’s perfectly obvious, you blinkered, philistine, pig-ignorant misogynists.”
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