All Leftfooters Now

Doctrinal orthodoxy in the higher echelons of the Church of England is more uniform than at any point in living memory, and possibly ever.

Bishops are vastly more like that than are clergy in general either across the board or, especially, of the same age as themselves. There, the doubts about basic credal articles, and the outright denial of them, reflect what was or was not taught in the institutions that formed those clergy between the late 1960s and the early 1990s.

Cradle Catholics who whine about liberals need to know a bit more that they are born. Atheist, Deist or Unitarian Catholic priests, never mind bishops or archbishops, simply do not exist. But in the generation that was until recently in its pomp in the Church of England, such views were and are routine.

David Jenkins, a textbook English Modernist who did therefore believe in a personal God and in the immortality of the soul, was in fact quite conservative for the period. Thus, as we shall see, he was unusually radical. But Robert Runcie had no such convictions.

Within that context, consider the existence of precisely one serving bishop who is openly in favour of same-sex marriage, and of no serving bishop who expresses Dr Jenkins's doctrinal position or anything resembling it.

Consider the opposition to three-parent babies, and the intention of the bishops in the Lords (to the utter bemusement of Lord Carey) to vote in favour of an amendment proposed by the former John Selwyn Gummer. One is tempted to add, "of all people".

Consider the relatively high chance of being made a bishop if one belongs to the small minority that is Anglo-Catholic opponents of women priests, and the far higher than average chance of being so raised to the purple directly from parochial ministry.

Consider that the Archbishop of Canterbury's Suffragan See of Maidstone has been kept vacant for six years in order to fill it with a Conservative Evangelical opponent once women had become bishops. There is talk of a similar appointment in the North sooner rather than later.

All of this is a consequence of having ceased to be a very English institution at all. When the Church of England was terribly, terribly English, then it was light on doctrine and in many ways, as an institution, positively injurious to classical Christian morality.

But the sections of the Church of England that now pay the bills and make up the numbers take their lead from overseas provinces that are themselves products of Anglo-Catholic or Evangelical missionary activity. Those products never resembled the dear old C of E very much, having been founded by figures who disliked it intensely.

Moreover, the Church of England's own congregations are increasingly made up of immigrants from those provinces, of other immigrants from Africa and elsewhere who attach themselves to the nearest convenient Protestant church, and of converts to Evangelical Protestantism via what are sometimes little more than nominally Anglican parishes or other ministries (although they are more obviously of their denomination now than perhaps they were 15 or 20 years ago, but that is mostly because they have so successfully conformed the Church of England to themselves).

Those last, together with others who grew up in that milieu, constitute a very high proportion indeed of the candidates who are now presenting themselves for ordination. The present Archbishop of Canterbury is an Evangelical convert, and one whose rise through the ranks has been stellar. The present Archbishop of York is an African immigrant.

The fourth largest party in the House of Commons is a direct expression of Evangelical Protestantism. It is openly willing to work with Labour in the next Parliament and openly sympathetic to the agenda of Ed Miliband. On last week's Any Questions, one of its MPs, the bearer of the very name of Ian Paisley, pointed out that he had voted with Labour 78 per cent of the time since the 2010 Election, and that both the Conservative Party and UKIP would be fielding candidates against him this year.

If the Church of England had continued on what once seemed to be its only possible path, then it would have changed its mind on assisted suicide, as Carey has, and it would not have changed, either its implicit mind on what has become same-sex marriage, or its explicit mind on what has become mitochondrial donation. Carey's hurt, and that of those for whom he speaks, is as profound as their bewilderment. "What happened?"

When it comes to bioethiocal questions, rather than do the kind of heavy lifting for which their own tradition is simply unequipped, the Anglican bishops now seem to look up the Roman position and then give it a form of presentation acceptable to the House of Lords and to the BBC. They take that position off the shelf, fully formed. They play no role whatever in forming or formulating it. They are certainly adopting that approach this week.

Much the same, if not quite to the same extent, is true of their approach to issues of social justice (a term of Papal origin, like the Living Wage) and of peace.

Catholic bishops never were liberals in any Anglican sense, so they were always capable of criticising capitalism and its wars with the robustness that only orthodoxy makes possible. It is also worth remembering quite how Catholic were numerous communities, such as Consett or Liverpool or Glasgow, that bore the brunt of Thatcherism.

Funnily enough, those areas, ancestrally unwilling to vote for the party of the pit owners and of the Anglo-Irish landowners before them, have not become any more sympathetic towards that party with the passage of time. Check the colour of the constituency map against the centres of Catholic population before and after this or any other General Election.

Behind Thatcherism was the strong contention that Christianity had no political implications, by those who did not like the political implications that Christianity had. Thatcherism removed the churches, and more than any other the Church of England, from their originally and previously unchallenged position of something approaching centrality in and to the National Health Service, the state schools, the publicly funded universities, the heavily regulated broadcasters, and all the other aspects of the Attlee Settlement. The dismantlement of that Settlement was the most secularising force that this country had ever, or has ever, experienced.

Increasing overseas control, immigration from the developing word, a heavy reliance on Evangelical conversion that is in no traditionally English (if any) sense culturally Anglican, and a willingness to lift the teachings of the Pope or of the English Catholic bishops rather than go through the rigmarole of writing its own: these have given the institutional Church of England an unprecedented bottom-line orthodoxy, inevitably issuing both in a pro-life position that was never previously evident, and therefore in a fierce critique of capitalism and of its wars, not least including the entire principle of its weapons of mass destruction.