"Fecklessness and Irresponsibility"

Quite apart from the fact that being out of step with public opinion is rather reminiscent of Jesus and of the Prophets before Him, whose call was frequently and powerfully for social justice, the sometime News of the World columnist George Carey is an almost completely American figure with hardly any ties to the intellectual life of the Church of England, or of either liberal or orthodox American Episcopalianism rather than those nominal Anglicans who in fact inhabit his own transdenominational subculture. The political consequences of the disestablishment of the Episcopal Church in the South have been vast, and are very much ongoing.

He is a leading light among those figures very much of the present age, liberals with Charismatic backgrounds, who assume their own experience to be theologically normative. He retains a certain gut aversion to the mechanics of male homosexuality, but that is as far as any orthodoxy on his part really goes, and he cheerfully raised to the purple two men who engaged in such acts, both from the constituency at which the Ordinariate is aimed, although neither of them has joined it.

His closest links, of many decades' standing, are to the world of those who, if they read books at all, imagine the writings of Ayn Rand to be, if not the Gospel itself, then fully compatible with it, and who would have thought of George W Bush as a latter-day Saint Louis, if they had ever heard of Saint Louis. Yet, as his buddies across the Atlantic presumably do not know, he campaigned for the Crown Dependencies to adopt the 1967 Abortion Act. It is his much-maligned successor who is totally pro-life. Attempts to present Carey as a bastion of orthodoxy are simply laughable.

The fact that he can come out with this proves that: all that the bishops said, and the House of Lords accepted, was that Child Benefit (which some people seem to think is only paid to the unemployed - yes, they really are as out of touch as that) should not be counted towards the cap, since the procreation of human life is a good in itself. What would you have instead? Abortion? The mass importation of Muslims to fill the vast economic gaps left by underpopulation? What, exactly?

But Carey endeared himself to the ferociously pro-abortion Margaret Thatcher, likewise a person with no discernible political philosophy and dependent on blow-ins to conservatism (as was she), who were able to persuade the half-educated that their position was somehow at least amenable to the political expression of a Christianity to which, unlike Carey, she had in any case retained only a cultural attachment.