Theo Hobson is co-editor of Created for Love: Towards a New Teaching on Sex and Marriage.
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Last week, Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury since 2013, started leading the Church of England. He got off the fence on homosexuality and backed a major change to the Church’s teaching. He said that that ‘all sexual activity should be within a committed relationship, whether it’s straight or gay’. This obviously goes against the Church’s
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Forget Nixon in China. That phrase needs renaming: Welby on sexuality. For it is now at last clear that he has shifted his position on homosexuality. Talking to The Rest is Politics podcast this week, he finally came out with it. He is not, as we all assumed, a conservative in the awkward position of presiding
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Some sociology academics have, after a three-year research project called ‘Exploring Atheism’, unveiled a startling discovery: there are a lot of people in Britain who don’t believe in God. I know, it’s quite a gut-punch. They do not quite claim to have found that most Britons are atheists. But they do claim that there are
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Questioning the sincerity of a fellow Christian’s faith is a big no-no. It would be wrong, then, to doubt the sincerity of Russell Brand’s Christianity, just as it would be wrong to pour scorn on the boy who broke out of Sunday school into the main church during the sermon, shouting of his joyful discovery
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The evangelicals really are revolting. After a lot of talk of the need to break away from a tainted, liberal, heretical Church, something significant has happened. Last month, two of London’s biggest conservative parishes – All Souls Langham Place and St Helen’s Bishopsgate – held services ‘commissioning’ new leaders. It’s an obvious repudiation of the
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I suppose you could say that I’m an ‘amateur’ artist, that art is my ‘hobby’. In fact no, I take that back. I’m no amateur hobbyist dabbler. I’m an artist. I’m a bloody artist. If you take something seriously, the hobby label grates. And I take art seriously. I might not be on track to
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The House of Commons has a more secular character than ever before. Roughly 40 per cent of MPs have chosen to swear in using the secular ‘affirmation’ rather than a religious oath. Only 24 per cent took the secular option at the start of the last parliament. The current secular affirmers include half of the
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My friend Andy is getting married. It’s about time – he and his girlfriend have a one-year-old daughter. He wants to get married in church, so I introduced him by email to the local vicar. I was copied in to their initial correspondence. The vicar told Andy that the Church of England prohibits sex outside
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Future historians of the Church of England might look back at this weekend as the beginning of the end. A selection of bishops and members of the General Synod are meeting at a hotel in Leicester to seek a solution to the impasse over homosexuality. They hope to make a plan to take to July’s Synod: a
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Why do faith schools excite such passions? Obviously people care a lot about religion, and education, but there’s something else at work too. Schools are microcultures, bubbles, little versions of society, in which the secularism of our culture can be shut out, defied. It sounds like a strange exaggeration, but if a religion has its
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Could Russell Brand, who has just been baptised, become a significant Christian figure? I suppose he could become a sort of British televangelist, God help us. But significant in a good way? It’s not impossible: he’s sharp and charismatic, and taps in to a major English spiritual tradition. But it’s not likely either: our culture needs
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It’s thirty years since the first women were ordained as priests of the Church of England. For ten years, there have been women bishops too. Well, at least one aspect of the Church’s reform is done and dusted. Cue hollow laughter from those acquainted with the strange intricacy and agony surrounding this seemingly simple reform.
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When the New Atheism thing was new, I wrote a piece saying that the people who supported it were pretentious and cowardly. They pretended to know what religion is, and said that it caused great harm. I said this was ‘intellectual cowardice’. The intellectual coward is one who chooses simplicity over complexity and difficulty. One
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When the government raises big questions about our national values, one has a choice: to see it as an opportunity to say something constructive, to deepen the debate. Or one could respond like a cynical intern at the Guardian, saying, in effect: how dare they try to sound all high and mighty? Where’s some holes
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When does radical religious conservatism become a dangerous bid for theocracy? It’s a question that some American commentators are pondering, in relation to ‘Christian nationalism’. David French has argued in the New York Times that we should be wary of the term ‘Christian nationalism’, which is often attached to Trump-supporting evangelicals. There is nothing very
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Perhaps Justin Welby expected gratitude from Ukraine, after the Church of England’s Synod debated the war this week. He certainly didn’t expect a double rebuke from the country, a sacred and secular censure. In letters to Welby that have not been published but have been shown to me, two official Ukrainian bodies have protested at
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The Church of England’s Synod is debating the war in Ukraine today. There will be a vote on a motion that sounds uncontentious: Synod affirms the peace-making efforts of various churches, calls for the highest possible protection of religious freedom, and calls for UK political parties to work for a peaceful international order. But sometimes
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Justin Welby has just visited Ukraine. While there he spoke clearly against the false religion that underlies Russia’s ideology, and called Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox leader, a heretic, a war-criminal and a perverter of the Christian gospel. Alas, only the first sentence is true. Welby has never, as far I can see, called out
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We all know the Church of England is ‘divided’ over homosexuality. But it’s not a very equal division. Reform is favoured by a clear majority of bishops, the clergy and Anglican worshippers. So how are the conservative evangelicals managing to hold back the tide? Perhaps the problem is a lack of leadership. The archbishops have
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On Saturday, I was in a public library, waiting for an old guy to finish with the Times. But he seemed to be reading every word of every section, and sort of peering at it frowningly in an annoying way. So I did something I hardly ever do: I picked up the Daily Mail. I had forgotten
