The time is ripe for a liberal revival of the Church of England

Things are looking up for the Church of England. Its painful era of disunity is behind it, or soon will be. A major revival is on the cards.

I am being ironic, you are probably thinking. For this is the poor old C of E we’re talking about, which lurches from crisis to crisis. No, I am not being ironic. We are so used to negative stories and predictions about our national church that good news is hard to process. But the new survey of clergy’s views by the Times is essentially encouraging. The Times itself assumed otherwise: its headline was that most clergy no longer see Britain as a Christian country. This is an irrelevant issue, or nonissue, of semantics.

The core findings of the survey are that a clear majority of clergy back reform on the gay issue and that an even clearer majority is tired of the older division over female clergy and wants the Church to reunite. There is a liberal majority that is getting a bit bolder. I call that good news.

On the gay issue, there are two significant findings. On the question of whether the Church should conduct gay weddings, 53 per cent are in favour, 36 per cent against.

This might not sound like a clear liberal majority but the survey also found that 64 per cent reject the official teaching that gay sex is sinful. The overall picture is that the clergy have got off the fence. For a few decades they were fairly evenly split over homosexuality. There was a narrow liberal majority all of this century but the gay marriage issue obscured this somewhat – most were moderately reformist but unsure about gay marriage so the division seemed deeper than it was. Now that gay marriage is part of the landscape, the picture is clearer: a clear reformist majority has emerged.

On the other division, over female clergy, the grounds for optimism are even stronger. Eighty per cent would be happy with a female Archbishop of Canterbury, which is what you might have guessed. More surprising and, from a liberal point of view, exciting, is that 63 per cent want the current toleration of division to be phased out. In other words they have had enough of the Church’s official line that opponents of women clergy are fully valid Anglicans entitled to their own bishops. This timid piece of theological illiteracy has demoralised the Church for decades and now its end is in sight.

So you heard it here first. The liberal revival of the Church of England is at last on the cards. But let’s be honest – there is a problem. The spirit of negativity has seeped into the clergy and two thirds think that the church’s decline will continue. Well let them look at these findings in a positive light and think again. For the first time in about 40 years it is possible to imagine a church that is united enough on gender and sexuality, and in tune with the wider culture. The era of division is ending, thank God. Now we just need some bold liberal leadership.