How can the Church keep earning its right to intervene in politics?

Given the political parties are already well underway with their General Election campaigns, the Church of England couldn’t have waited much later to dispense its advice on how to campaign and what to campaign about. In this week’s Spectator, the Archbishop of York gets on with handing out some of that advice, telling me that politicians are behaving like men arguing at a urinal over who is ‘the biggest of the men’ and explaining why he’s edited what appears to be a pretty lefty collection of essays called On Rock or Sand? Firm Foundations for Britain’s Future. You can read the full interview here.

That book includes a chapter from John Sentamu and one from Justin Welby, and both contributions will unsettle members of the current government as much as the ‘Marxist’ Faith in the City did in 1985. Here’s just a highlight from the Welby chapter:

‘But, in another sense, the economic realities of today are even more complex than in the biblical parable.