Heading Out

The Lords Spiritual were never Lords for any spiritual reason. They were there because of the vast landholdings of the Medieval English Church, and then of the Church of England, which still holds them. But seats in the House of Lords on that basis are no longer occupied by anyone else.

 

From the first appointment of a woman as a bishop in the Church of England, that office will no longer even purport to express in any way the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, issuing in Church Fathers who, in an Established Church, function as Fathers of the Nation. Why, then, will Church of England bishops, as such, still have seats in the House of Lords?

 

If the point is to embody sexual equality in employment opportunities, then those seats ought to go to the trade unions, at least these days. If the point is to embody responsibility for and to every inch of the Realm, then those seats ought to go to local government, which, moreover, exists across every inch of the United Kingdom, unlike the Church of England.

 

Even if the point is to embody a specifically English Christianity, then the Church of England has never accounted for more than half of churchgoers in England since anyone first checked in the middle of the nineteenth century, and has not even been the single largest in a generation now.

 

The arguments advanced for its parliamentary privilege, and which make sense in the Home Counties, would be greeted with blank incredulity in the Nonconformist heartlands of the North and the West Country; in the Catholic heartlands of the North, the Midlands and many parts of London (although not the parts that write as the sole recognised voice of English Catholicism in the pages of the Daily Telegraph); and in the great swathes of London and of certain other centres where the black-majority churches are now so predominant that even Songs of Praise has had to be altered in order to reflect that fact.

 

The Church of England not merely supported, but wrote, the 1967 Abortion Act and the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, in reports dating back to the 1950s, long before such measures enjoyed anything like public support. The humane and necessary decriminalisation of male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private actually went nowhere near as far as the Church of England had recommended in the Fisher years.

 

Half-baked in ideology and half-hearted in expression were the attacks on the Thatcherism for which most of the Church of England's observant laity and at least a large minority of its clergy voted, in stark contrast to the heavily Labour-voting Methodists and Catholics, then as now, possessed as those were and are of the theological resources necessary in order to formulate such a critique.

 

The Church of England's reserved parliamentarians were thus unable to prevent the implementation of Tony Blair's wicked schemes to impose on the world by force of arms the logically inescapable combination of the 1960s and the 1980s.

 

They have thus been unable to affect in any way the previously unimaginable acceleration of all three of Jenkinsism, Thatcherism and Blairism by the present bestial Coalition, within and around which the Church of England's regular attendees are more prominent than within or around any Government in many decades, reflecting the voting habits of the huge majority of those regular attendees.

 

And as of today, there is no particular reason for those reserved parliamentarians to exist at all.