Christianity

We’ve all done it: been overcome by a sudden sense of hard-upness at the moment when the collection plate comes round at the end of a cathedral service. We fumble in our pockets, feel a £1 coin and a £10 note, and decide that the £1 coin will do. This is a cathedral, for goodness sake, not a parish church: they must be rich, with all those gold-coloured vestments and choristers in ruffs. But if we want our cathedrals to be alive and singing psalms in 20 years’ time, this misconception about cathedrals must change. Indeed, the sub-dean of Coventry is openly clamping down. At the end of organ recitals, he

According to the Times, Dan Walker, the new BBC Breakfast presenter, is ‘a creationist’. A ‘senior BBC figure’ is quoted as saying that this ‘nutty’ belief would make life difficult for Walker if, say, he had to present a story about a 75,000-year-old fossil. How could he if he thinks the earth is less than 10,000 years old? Rupert Myers goes further in the Telegraph: ‘Creationists cannot be trusted to report objectively,’ Myers claims, ‘or to interact reasonably with their interviewees and with the public’. Before jumping to conclusions, it’s worth saying that Dan Walker’s beliefs aren’t publicly known. Anyone who thinks God made the world is a ‘creationist’ in some sense.

Christian columnists of left (Giles Fraser) and right (Charles Moore, Peter Hitchens) agree: Bishop Bell has been most sorely wronged. The Church should not have compensated the person he allegedly abused about seventy years ago. It has damaged the reputation of one of its major figures, without any sort of trial taking place. I disagree. I think the Church has behaved – shock, horror – Christianly. The Church knew what a huge step it was taking in believing this woman, who has now told her story to the Brighton Argus. (She was a relative of a member of staff in the bishop’s palace; she was occasionally read bedtime stories as she

A freedom-of-information request by Sikhs has turned up some curious statistics from the Metropolitan Police. They show that of the more than 400 ‘Islamophobic hate crimes’ recorded in the first half of last year, 28 per cent were not attacks on Muslims at all. They were either attacks on people thought to be Muslims (often Sikhs) or attacks classified as Islamophobic because of the absurd criteria (invented by the Macpherson Report on the death of Stephen Lawrence) which define such incidents as ‘any offence which is perceived to be Islamophobic by the victim or any other person’. Muslim bodies attracting government grants obviously have an interest in there being as

Given how apocalyptic the predictions were, Anglicanism’s make-or-break meeting about issues of human sexuality last week proved something of a damp squib. The Anglican Communion was supposed to be rent asunder. Upheaval was imminent. Schism was certain. Conservative African Archbishops were going to be tripping over their cassocks in the rush for the door. In the end, however, unity prevailed and the status quo was (boringly) upheld as the 36 primates gathered here together voted overwhelmingly to stick to the church’s traditional view of marriage. Nothing really changed: Anglican HQ merely recognised formally the break its American division has been boasting about for over a decade. So the summit ended

This evening, if you have time and are around central London, there is an interesting lecture at the British Academy by the admirable sociologist of religion, Linda Woodhead, whose book with Andrew Brown on the CofE, The Church We Left Behind, is as depressing as it is largely to the point. The title is ‘Why No Religion is the New Religion’, and that is pretty much the size of it: the default identity of Brits is no longer reflexively CofE, but not-religious. (Actually, I am a Catholic of sectarian bent but I would personally hesitate to describe myself as religious, on the basis it is a bit of a self-regarding

My line on the Anglican crisis is a bit eccentric. I think there are now grounds for hope that the Communion can survive – and the reason is the recent rise of gay marriage as the central issue. Lazy punditry says that gay marriage is the bone of contention. But it’s actually a new issue – it wasn’t being discussed a decade ago, when Rowan Williams was holding these summits. The real bone of contention is whether actively gay priests and bishops should be allowed. On this the two sides are obviously adamantly opposed. The arrival of gay marriage as a big issue seems to make the crisis worse than

The Egyptian driver of a London minicab said almost nothing during our journey but dropped me off at my destination with the words ‘What do you think of the condition of the world at the moment?’ He didn’t think well of it himself, he added: and I could not but agree. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so uneasy, not even during the Cuban missile crisis. The threats to international order and stability are now so varied and so amorphous that it is difficult to know how they are to be confronted, and even more difficult to predict when or where the next horror will erupt. But that, I suppose,

Are we really, as David Cameron claimed in his Christmas message, a country shaped by ‘Christian values’? Yesterday’s Evening Standard poll – which found that shopping is three times more integral to Britons’ Christmas than going to church – makes you wonder what the phrase even means. It doesn’t just mean do-goodery, though that is important. About 10 million Britons get help from a church-based group every year. If you see a queue of homeless people in a town centre at about 6 o’clock in the evening, you can bet there are a bunch of God-botherers handing out sandwiches at the other end of it. Where there is poverty, physical illness, mental illness, unemployment, the