Truest and Purest?

Some of us have been trying for many years to tell you about George Carey.

 

Far from being a bastion of orthodoxy, he has spent at least the last three decades assuming his own experience to be theologically normative, and then simply working from there.

 

Thus, for example, those of us who have noticed these things have been wholly unsurprised at his support for assisted suicide, backed up in the House of Lords by a piece of pure anecdotage that he described as "theology in its truest and purest form".

 

He has always been like that. Or, at the very least, he has been like that for a very long time.

 

The wonder is that it has taken so long for his faulty approach to catch up with him.

 

In the broadest terms, there are two strands to English Christianity.

 

One, which has been predominant ever since the creation of the Church of England (to which, however, it is far from confined), is doctrinally minimalist, or at any rate capable of astonishing doctrinal compromise, in the service of social conformity and political quietism.

 

But the other, to which even the Church of England is far from immune, is politically radical as the outworking of doctrinal orthodoxy.

 

A small but important part of one of my two little projects at the moment will be the restoration of a public profile to the various expressions of that latter tradition.

 

That would at least do something to balance the rise of an American-style Religious Right among British Evangelicals.

 

That would at least do something to balance the twin influences of the Tina Beattie Tendency and the poisonous little clique around Damian Thompson, half of whom are not even as posh as they are pretending to be, and a good half of whom are nowhere near as gay, although this is the cesspit that first gave the world Milo Yiannopoulos.

And that would at least do something to balance George Carey.