The Spectator

Letters: The C of E has become too broad a church

issue 15 April 2023

Too broad a Church

Sir: I am not implacably hostile to Justin Welby; I share Christian empathy with the Archbishop’s earnest struggles to attract a spiritually dead nation back to the Church of England as described by Dan Hitchens’s article (‘The lost shepherds’, 8 April). However I cannot agree with his strategy. A liberal church is doomed to failure because it’s selling something that we already have. I ask our bishops: what is the Church’s USP? What does it offer that we can’t get elsewhere? The Church used to stand apart as a bastion against a hostile world, but if all it does is follow along behind modern secular fads then it is admitting its own redundancy. If you permit everything, you stand for nothing.

Robert Frazer
Salford, Lancashire

Rishi’s no Nigel

Sir: A nice try from Rishi Sunak (‘What Nigel Lawson taught me’, 8 April), but I’m not buying it. I don’t think for a moment that Nigel Lawson would have presided over the Sunak Covid policy that contributed significantly to domestic inflation – the world’s most generous, unnecessary and longest-running furlough scheme.

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