What happened

Sarah Mullally Wednesday was formally confirmed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, making her the first woman to lead the Church of England. She also officially became the spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, a confederation of 42 Anglican provinces, some of which do not accept the ordination of woman priests. London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral was transformed into an ecclesiastical courtroom for her Confirmation of Election, a centuries-old legal ceremony set within a church service.

Who said what

“These are times of division and uncertainty for our fractured world,” Mullally said in a statement. “I pray that we will offer space to break bread together” and “pledge myself to this ministry of hospitality.” England’s former chief nursing officer, Mullally served as Bishop of London before the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, stepped down last January amid allegations he mishandled a prominent case of child sexual abuse.

Mullally’s new position “has been a notoriously difficult one in terms of holding together people with a broad range of theological viewpoints both at home and abroad,” the BBC said. The Church of England has allowed women priests since the 1990s and had female bishops since 2015, but male bishops can “continue to refuse to ordain women if they choose,” and Mullally “will now lead such bishops” in England. “It is fair to say that I have, both in my secular role as well as in the church, experienced misogyny at times,” she told reporters, pledging to help ensure the issue is “brought into the open.”

What next?

Mullally will begin her public ministry after her installation ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral on March 25.

The appointment of Sarah Mullally as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury is an “immense step”, said Alastair Bruce on Sky News. But as the Church of England takes a new direction, critics have “poured cold water” on recent surveys which claimed that younger people were more likely to be churchgoers than older generations, said Kaya Burgess in The Times.

Instead, experts have pointed to the fact that church attendances “across the major denominations” have “failed to recover fully from their pandemic slump”.

Why did people think there is a Christian revival?

For many, 2025 was the year where a “stirring of renewed spiritual interest became impossible to ignore, even among doubters”, said Ken Costa in The Telegraph.

The Quiet Revival, a report published by Bible Society in April 2025, kickstarted the belief that attendance for worship was rising, “busting the myth of church decline”. It claimed that “church attendance has risen by 50%” in the last six years, that there was “growth among young adults”, that churches in England and Wales were “more diverse”, and that churchgoers were “more likely to give to charity”.

The report was based on two YouGov polls from 2018 and 2024, recording that the number of people who attended church at least once a month rose from 8% in 2018 to 12% in 2024. The number of those aged 18 to 24 jumped from 4% to 16% in the same time frame, with a “notable rise” in the number of young men attending.

What are the problems with Christian revival surveys?

The narrative around a purported Christian resurgence “may be misleading”, said Conrad Hackett, associate director of research at Pew Research Center (PRC).

Surveys that imply Gen Z are more religious often canvass participants in “opt-in” panels, where people are “recruited” to take part, responding to website ads or email campaigns, he said on the company website. There is a much higher likelihood that opt-in surveys would contain “bogus respondents”, who, instead of answering honestly, answer with “the minimal effort required to complete surveys quickly and receive monetary rewards”, or an agenda to skew the survey’s results. Increasingly, large language models can be “easily programmed” to take part in opt-in surveys, which researchers describe as an “existential threat” to the validity of online opt-in surveys.

Data collected by the Church of England has “painted a more nuanced picture”, said Sir John Curtice of the National Centre for Social Research. According to the C of E, average adult weekly attendance increased by 4.5% in 2022/23, and all-age average Sunday attendance rose by 1.5% in 2023/24, this rise “was not sufficient” to reverse a 19% fall between 2019 and 2023 following the pandemic, “let alone suggest any reversal of the long-term decline in church attendance”, said Curtice. “Even the Bible Society report acknowledged that the apparent recent growth in attendance had occurred among Catholics and Pentecostalists rather than in the churches of England’s established church.”

A spokesperson for Bible Society told Christian Today that The Quiet Revival report was based on a “high-quality YouGov survey” which used a “tried and trusted methodology”. The team was “meticulous in controlling for bias in responses”, and that there was “no reason to think that ‘opt-in’ surveys are inherently unreliable”.

What does the new, random sampling, research say?

Surveys based on random samples show that “Christian identity and practice are not increasing among young adults in Britain”, said the PRC report. “The narrative of a religious revival in the UK appears to be receiving much more attention than data and commentary challenging this narrative.”

I’m “surprised” and “sceptical” at the claims of increased church attendance, particularly among young people, said David Voas, Emeritus Professor of Social Science, UCL on The Conversation. Bible Society, which published The Quiet Revival report, “haven’t engaged with the mountain of evidence, some of it very recent, pointing to religious decline”. While it does appear that church attendance has continued to “rebound from the lows of the Covid lockdown”, it still remains “substantially lower” than pre-pandemic levels.

Two major reports stand out. The Labour Force Survey in summer 2025, of around 50,000 individuals per quarter, showed that 28% of 18- to 34-year-olds identified as Christian, down from 37% from early 2018. “Throughout this period, older British adults consistently identified as Christian at higher levels than young adults,” said PRC.

Similarly, the annual British Social Attitudes survey of more than 3,000 randomly sourced participants, showed “no clear evidence of a Christian revival”, said PRC. In 18- to 34-year-olds, the number of churchgoers has still not surpassed pre-pandemic levels, with 6% in 2024, compared to 8% in 2018.

Around 1,000 people attended Tommy Robinson’s carol concert to “put the Christ back into Christmas” on Saturday. The Church of England has not reacted meekly, with several bishops expressing their concern at the Unite the Kingdom religious event. There’s “something especially offensive about appropriating this great Christian festival of light triumphing over darkness as a prop in a dim culture war”, said the Bishop of Manchester, writing in The Independent.

‘No one beyond redemption’

When Robinson “finally arrived on stage”, it was to chants of his name from an attendee “wearing a Union Jack hat” and “carrying a can of San Miguel in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other”, said Luke O’Reilly in The New Statesman. Others in attendance included a man “wearing a nun’s wimple and veil” over his tracksuit and another carrying “a large wooden cross with ‘Jesus Saves’ carved into it”.

Robinson “has been many things over the years“, and now the former “football hooligan is “a born-again Christian”. With British Christianity “stirring” again, “like a human bellwether, Robinson is blowing with the wind”. And yet Christians do “believe that anyone – no matter how badly behaved – can be saved”. After all, “the Bible is full of unsavoury characters”. Most famously, Paul was a merciless persecutor of Christians before he became one himself, and he, “like Robinson started preaching immediately” after his conversion.

It’s a “key tenet of the Christian faith that no one is beyond redemption”, said vicar and comedian Ravi Holy in The Guardian. “I don’t want to cast anyone into outer darkness, especially as a reformed prodigal myself.” But Jesus said that “true repentance should bear fruit”, and “the new Tommy doesn’t seem radically different from the old one”.

Spreading fear

“The far-right are now parking their tanks on the front lawn of the Church of England,” said the Bishop of Kirkstall, who also features in an official C of E social media video, released the day before Robinson’s carol service, emphasising that “Christmas belongs to all of us”.

This “resistance” by “leading lights in the Anglican church” shows “immense courage”, said Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The i Paper. Robinson’s “motley patriots” were “once rightly marginalised” but now they seem to “dominate our country”. The Church is “breaking that sordid consensus”. The willingness of “the heart of the establishment” to take a stand “could be a turning point”.

The “whole point of coming to church” is to “sit alongside people you may not like, who hold very different, even (to you) repulsive, political views”, said vicar Giles Fraser on UnHerd. At Christmas, churches “resound with angels singing, ‘Fear not’. In contrast, Robinson spreads fear.” And “that is not the Christian message”. Robinson is welcome to come to church but he would “have to sit alongside people of different colours and languages, and immigrants”.

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The Catholic Church is experiencing a mini revival in Britain, driven by a new generation of converts.

While the average Briton is more likely than ever to be a non-believer, new research reveals that among Generation Z and younger millennials, Catholics now outnumber Anglicans by more than two to one.

'The Quiet Revival'

According to a YouGov survey of more than 13,000 people commissioned by the Bible Society, 41% of churchgoers aged 18 to 35 in England and Wales identify as Catholic, while 20% belonged to the Church of England and 18% identified as Pentecostal. The trend is particularly pronounced among young men. Overall, Catholics now make up 31% of all churchgoers, compared to 23% last time a similar survey was carried out in 2018.

Dr Rhiannon McAleer, co-author of the survey entitled "The Quiet Revival" , said these are "striking findings that completely reverse the widely held assumption that the Church in England and Wales is in terminal decline".

After decades of steadily dwindling congregations, the findings show that the number of young people aged 18-24 attending church has risen from just 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024. Young adults are among those newly drawn to Christian beliefs, "with renewed interest not only in being part of a church but also in prayer, reading the Bible and social activism based on faith", said The Tablet.

Search for 'clarity and certainty'

"One reason for the increase in popularity of both Catholicism and Pentecostalism in England and Wales might be the growth of ethnic minorities," said The Tablet. It pointed out that "many migrants from countries such as Poland, Ukraine and South America are Catholic".

It is true that Catholicism "benefits from a steady stream of churchgoing immigrants to a much greater degree" than other major Christian churches, Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary's University, London, told The Times.

"But something else is happening too," said The Telegraph: "conversions". Young people are looking for "clarity and certainty", said Archbishop Mark O’Toole of Cardiff, and many of the Catholic-curious "have surfed the net" before finding answers in the Church. "They are not extremist or fundamentalist, but they have been looking for something and the words they use a lot about the Catholic Church is coherence and consistency."

For Gen Z, "the dawn of social media has heralded a new age of Christian influencers who preach to and convert their followers through the white light of a phone screen" instead of through "ornate cathedrals, Latin Mass and rigid orthodoxy", said Premier Christianity. "Just as their own parents raged against the machine, many Gen Z-ers are rejecting the looseness and moral flexibility of modern society."

Raised "against a backdrop of perma-conflict" and "an increasingly secular landscape, where conservative social values are shunned in favour of hyper-individualism and progressive political doctrine, it appears that traditional Catholicism has become a beacon of cultural defiance".

What happened

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide, resigned Tuesday amid intense pressure over his handling of a notorious child abuser. A report released last Thursday said Welby "could and should" have told police about the decades of "brutal and horrific" physical and sexual abuse by John Smyth, a prominent lawyer and lay preacher who ran summer camps for young Christians.

Who said what

Welby, 68, said in a statement he was stepping down "in sorrow with all victims and survivors of abuse," and to demonstrate "how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our profound commitment to creating a safer church." Smyth was believed to have abused more than 100 boys and young men in England and then Africa, starting in the 1970s and likely continuing until his death in 2018.

Welby said he learned of Smyth's abuse in 2013, when he was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. If he had reported the abuse to the police then, some victims might have been spared and Smyth brought to justice, the new report said. Church leaders had been informed of Smyth's abuses in 1982, "and possibly earlier," the report said, and "participated in an active cover-up" to keep it secret.

What next?

It could take "many months" for Welby's successor to be appointed, The Washington Post said. The 106th archbishop of Canterbury will be formally nominated by King Charles III, "who takes advice from the prime minister, who takes advice from a Church of England commission." The process is "cloaked in mystery," The New York Times said. Welby had been expected to retire in 2026.

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, stood down yesterday amid intense pressure over his handling of one of the Church of England's worst abuse scandals.

Christian summer camp leader John Smyth subjected dozens of teenage boys to physical, sexual and psychological abuse during the 1970s and 1980s. Welby attended camps run by Smyth in the late 1970s, first as a camper and then as a dormitory officer. He was adamant he never witnessed any abuse at the time, although he did admit he had been informally advised in 1981 to "stay away" from Smyth, and that he was "really not a nice man".

A recent independent review by former director of social services Keith Makin into the Church's historic handling of abuse said the Archbishop showed a "distinct lack of curiosity" when he was informed of the allegations in 2013. A police investigation opened after Channel 4 News reported the claims in 2017, but Smyth died in South Africa the following year before he could be brought to justice. "This delay is something survivors believe that Welby is at least partly to blame for," said The Times.

Welby said it had become clear that he "must take personal and institutional responsibility" for the "long and retraumatising" period of inaction. His resignation came hours after Keir Starmer refused to publicly back the archbishop, and after a petition organised by three priests calling for Welby to step down gathered more than 14,000 signatures.

When Welby was ordained as archbishop in 2013 after a "meteoric rise" from entering the priesthood in 1993. He was a "relatively popular appointment in a notoriously divisive institute", said The Independent. But "it is this latest scandal" that "will now be his legacy".

A former oil executive, he "was chosen largely because of his managerial background, to sort out the Church’s administrative inertia and spiritual shortcomings", said The Guardian. And yet its procedures for handling misconduct claims remain "glacially slow and bureaucratic", while the Church itself appears ever more out of step with the modern world. "If Welby’s managerialism was supposed to keep the show on the road, he has not been particularly successful."

The crisis has potentially "engulfed more senior clergy", said The Daily Telegraph. Victims have called on two bishops and an associate minister to follow the archbishop in resigning over their involvement in the scandal.

Who is proposing compensation?

The Church of England itself. The Church's interest in the issue dates back many years. In 2006, it apologised for the role that clergymen had played in the transatlantic slave trade. In 2019, the Audit and Risk Committee of the Church Commissioners (the body that administers its assets) raised questions about possible reputational damage arising from its past links to slavery, and commissioned a report by historians and forensic accountants.

This, published in 2023, found that the Church had received funds linked to African enslavement worth as much as £1bn in today's money. The Church Commissioners responded by setting aside £100m, about 10% of its total endowment, to "address past wrongs". An oversight committee was also appointed to examine how to spend the money. In March this year, it recommended that the Church raise up to £1bn for a new fund. The £100m set aside was "not enough", it said.

What were these 'past wrongs'?

The most significant is an investment scheme called Queen Anne's Bounty. It was set up in 1704, when certain ecclesiastical taxes that had previously been paid to the Crown were diverted to supplement the income of poor clergy. Funds received were invested in the South Sea Company, a government venture that had a monopoly on the trade of enslaved Africans to the Spanishheld colonies in the Americas. Between 1715 and 1739, the South Sea Company transported 34,000 enslaved people over the course of at least 96 transatlantic voyages; it also transported slaves from Caribbean islands to Spanish-held ports in mainland America. By 1739, when the South Sea Company stopped engaging in slave trading, the scheme had accumulated investments in it worth £204,000, or £443m in today's terms. Money from that fund flowed into a larger fund that is currently worth £10.3bn.

Were there other links to slavery?

Many. The fund also received cash and land donations from people with links to slave labour, including Edward Colston, the merchant and slave trader whose statue was toppled by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol in 2020. That same year, a database held by University College London found that 96 CofE clergymen had sought compensation paid to slave owners when the trade was abolished in the British empire in 1833. The Church received nearly £9,000, an estimated £900,000 in today's money, for the loss of slave labour on its Codrington Plantations in Barbados (these were owned by its missionary organisation, The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and slaves were branded across the chest with the word "Society"). The Bishop of Exeter and his business associates received even more in compensation.

How would the money be used?

The Church has not yet decided how to allocate the £100m it has so far committed to, but the bulk of the money is expected to be used to establish a new "social impact investment fund". This fund would give grants aimed at supporting black-led businesses and black entrepreneurs who find it harder to access capital. The Church said that the fund would enable grants to be made available for projects focused on "improving opportunities" for communities affected by the slave trade, and help pay for further research into the history of slavery. It would also be used to ensure that "best practice" can be shared with other organisations seeking to reconcile their historic links to slavery.

Are these plans controversial?

Very. The reparations movement has long attracted criticism in the US. A welter of objections have been raised, both practical and on grounds of principle: that everyone directly involved in slavery, both beneficiaries and victims, is long dead; that it is unfair to penalise people today for the wrongs of their ancestors; that loss and benefit are impossible to calculate at such historic distance; that in any case choosing people to compensate is an impossible task. In the specific case of the Church of England, it has been pointed out that, as well as profiting from the slave trade, the Church played a vital role in ending it. William Wilberforce was moved by his Anglican faith to lead the abolition movement. As Saint Paul put it in Galatians 3:28, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

How does the Church of England defend these plans?

In his Easter sermon last year, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby defended the fund, which he described as not an expression of "wokery" or "postcolonial guilt", but of Christian values and Christian love. A recent report from the Church's Anti-Racism Taskforce stated that there was a clear theological case for the "reconciliation" and "redemption", and a practical one too. It noted that the CofE's "contested heritage is at odds with the Christian mission and the Church's desire to reach diverse nationalities"; more than half of the worldwide Anglican communion is now based in Africa. It does not use the term "reparations", because the scheme will not offer compensation to individuals.

What will happen next?

The Church welcomed the report by the Commissioners in March, but has not committed to raising the existing fund to £1bn, and the £100m fund promised a year ago is still not operational; channelling money to effect social change is not an easy task. And arguably it needs money to discharge its primary function; Church of England attendance has fallen by half in the past 40 years, and by a fifth since the start of the pandemic. "After decades of telling us there is no money to fund churches and ministers who keep the Church alive on the front line, suddenly they have found £100m behind the back of the sofa," complained Rev'd Marcus Walker of the group Save the Parish.

The Church of England is appealing for other organisations to help it establish a £1 billion fund to address its former connections to slavery.

A £100 million sum was initially pledged by the Church to tackle the issue, but following a review by an independent oversight group, it was viewed as "insufficient", The Guardian reported. Instead, it has been suggested a far greater sum is necessary to properly "reflect the scale of moral sin". 

But instead of increasing its investment, the Church hopes to "attract co-investors to increase the fund's value" to "invest globally in black-led businesses".

The original commitment to reparations, supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was made following findings that a "significant chunk" of the Church's £10.3 billion wealth could be traced back to profits made from slavery, said The Times.

'It's not a lot'

Rosemarie Mallett, the Bishop of Croydon, led the review into the church's original fund. Speaking to The Guardian, she said £100 million is "a heck of a lot of money", but "that it is not a lot when you consider the harm done". Mallett accused other UK organisations of "hiding under their petticoats" to avoid "difficult conversations around the word reparations", and the actions they should also take. 

A call for reparations is intrinsically linked to faith, said Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York, in The Sunday Times. Acknowledging the past "binds up the wounds of those who are hurting" and demonstrates the Church is "serious about justice and serious about the gospel of Jesus Christ".

"What value can be put on a human life?" asked Mike Royal in Premier Christianity last year. Ultimately, £100 million appears to be a "drop in the ocean" to address the horrors of slavery, but "it does attempt to direct compensation in the right direction".

A 'trinity of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion'

But Niall Gooch on UnHerd said it was an "un-Christian" move. When it comes to reparations, "there is a distinct whiff of the Church leaping on board a passing secular bandwagon in the search for relevance and respectability". Christians "ought to be in the business of promoting racial harmony", said Gooch, "not crank theories about how all the problems of society are the fault of a certain group".

Instead of fault, "the Church of England stands close to the top of the heroes' table" when it comes to addressing the horrors of the slave trade, said Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph. William Wilberforce, widely viewed as the main driving force in Britain for the abolition of the "foul business", discussed being motivated by his Anglican faith.

Reparations only show the traditional doctrine of the Church is being abandoned in favour of the "newer trinity of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion".

Calls for a three-day weekend have grown after studies found that workers were less stressed and just as productive during a four-day working week.

For many Britons, Friday has become a "skive day" as workers continue a habit from the pandemic by "slacking" on the fifth day of the week, said The Times. 

But how likely is an official three-day weekend, and how was the two-day weekend won in the first place?

How did the weekend begin?

In 19th-century Britain, few were expected to work on Sundays, but many skilled, essentially self-employed workers who had produced their quota of goods would take Monday off "to recover from Saturday night and the previous day's excesses," said Brad Beaven, professor of Social and Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth, writing for The Conversation.

By the middle of the century, taking a "Saint Monday" was a popular practice in Britain, named to mimic the religious saint's day holidays – although it was in fact "an entirely secular practice, instigated by workers to provide an extended break in the working week". But this trend dented productivity, so many factory owners decided to make Saturday a half-day.

Religious leaders also supported the drift towards a weekend. Writing in the Coventry Herald newspaper in 1862, Reverend George Heaviside argued that a weekend would allow for a refreshed workforce and greater attendance at church on Sundays. Religious bodies argued that a break on Saturday would improve working-class "mental and moral culture", said The Conversation.

Trade unions also wanted to secure a formalised break in the working week that did not rely on the unofficial customs such as "Saint Mondays". Their push for the creation of the weekend is "still cited as a proud achievement in trade union history", said Beaven. Campaign groups such as the Early Closing Association lobbied the government to keep Saturday afternoons free for leisure time for workers in return for a full day's work on Monday.

But the full two-day weekend "only arrived in 1933", and "largely by accident", said The Times, when John Boot, grandson of the founder of the Boots chemist chain, opened a new factory which became so productive that it produced a "huge surplus" of stock.

Rather than "lay workers off during the Great Depression", Boot decided to grant them Saturdays off instead, with no deduction in pay. His experiment went well and workers "reported themselves happier and healthier".

On Monday mornings Boot had a workforce which was invigorated, and ready to work, after having more time for leisure and family activities. He kept the arrangement going and the weekend soon spread and became the "industry standard".

Across the Atlantic, by the mid-19th century, it was common for workers to "log 70-hour, six-day workweeks" in "newly mechanised factories", said Morning Brew. American workers "began to protest long work hours and poor working conditions that infringed upon their rights". 

But change was also slow to come in the US. Henry Ford became one of the first employers to adopt a five-day, 40-hour week at his Ford Motor Company plants in 1926. It was only then that the weekend arrived in the US.

Will there be a three-day weekend?

Since the 1960s, "there has been talk of the weekend being extended to make it almost as long as the working week", said the BBC. Three- or four-day weeks "have been a dream for many" who believe advances in technology make it possible for people to complete their work in less time.

The Covid pandemic also increased calls for the weekend to be extended as so many of us worked from home. For many, Friday was a day to relax during the pandemic  and bosses are now "struggling to change that habit", said The Times.

Studies back this pattern up. A management consultancy that records tap-ins and tap-outs at 150 offices across the country found that occupancy is now around 50% on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with Mondays at 30% and Fridays at just 20%. "Welcome to TGIF Britain," said the paper. 

Between June and December 2022 Will Stronge, co-founder of the consultancy Autonomy, helped to run a four-day week pilot involving 61 companies and 2,900 workers. It found that 56 of the companies are continuing the experiment, because their employees reported less stress, anxiety and burnout, and were just as productive.  

There was a "small uptick in intensity on their working days", Stronge told The Times, but knowing they had the extra day off meant they did more with less. 

There has also been political support for a shorter working week: during the 2019 general election campaign, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour said it would aim to introduce a 32-hour full-time working week, with no loss of pay, within 10 years.

In an essay published in 1930, the influential economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within 100 years, most people would be working no more than 15 hours a week. With six years of that century left, further significant shifts in working patterns seem inevitable.

Judges have allowed criminals to use Christianity to escape deportation, according to a newspaper analysis.

"Murderers, sex offenders and drug dealers are among the migrants who have escaped deportation by claiming to have converted to Christianity," said The Times.

Controversy over such baptisms has intensified since it emerged that the Clapham chemical attack suspect, Afghan national Abdul Ezedi, was granted asylum in the UK on his third attempt after converting to Christianity.

A former priest has claimed the Church of England is complicit in a "conveyor belt" of "asylum baptisms". But Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, said there has been a "mischaracterisation" of the role of churches and faith groups in the asylum system.

What did the commentators say?

People can apply for asylum in the UK based on religion if they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country because of their religious beliefs. How often this happens is unclear, because the Home Office does not collect data on the number of migrants who are granted asylum on the basis of religion.

According to Church of England guidance to clergy on the issue, priests supporting asylum applications must be ready to provide evidence of Christian faith, including church attendance, a baptism certificate and "records of changes in behaviour".

But the home secretary is investigating the issue after claims from a Weymouth Baptist church that 34 Muslim men living on board the Bibby Stockholm barge, which is moored off Portland in Dorset, were preparing for a Christian baptism. Another six have already been baptised, a church elder told the BBC.

Another Baptist church minister told the Mail on Sunday that he had baptised up to 500 asylum seekers in the sea, and that up to 60% of them disappeared after their Christian conversion.

Holding mass baptisms at sea during the winter was his way of testing his worshippers' faith, said Pastor Phylip Rees. He added: "If I suspected that someone wasn't genuine, I wouldn't baptise them." Baptist churches are not part of the Church of England.

Writing in The Telegraph, Suella Braverman said that, during her tenure as home secretary, she "became aware" of "churches around the country facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims".

Asylum seekers just need to "attend Mass once a week for a few months, befriend the vicar, get your baptism date in the diary and, bingo, you’ll be signed off by a member of the clergy", she said.

Matthew Firth, a former priest, told the same paper that there was a "conveyor belt, a veritable industry of asylum baptisms". He said that about 20 asylum seekers had sought baptisms at his church in Darlington to support their applications, and that there were "probably" thousands of asylum baptisms in the Church of England.

The Times found that, in one case, a Bangladeshi man, who had served 12 years in prison for murdering his wife, successfully appealed against attempts to deport him. He argued that he was a Christian convert and that he would be at risk in his predominantly Muslim community in Bangladesh.

What next?

Paul Butler, the bishop of Durham, insisted Firth's claims were "some distance from reality", said The Guardian. In a statement, Butler said that Firth "does not offer any evidence", but that a "check of the parish records quickly reveals" that "a total of 15 people (13 adults, two infants) who may have been asylum seekers have been baptised over the past 10 years". Of those, seven were baptised by Firth himself.

Philip North, the bishop of Blackburn, told the BBC that the accusation of mass baptisms "sounds to me like a pretty barefaced attempt to outsource responsibility for a failing asylum system to the church".

Writing in The Telegraph, Guli Francis-Dehqani, the bishop of Chelmsford, said that although clergy "will occasionally, after careful assessment, provide statements of support to individuals seeking asylum", it was "wrong to think of this as some sort of magic ticket". She added that "the notion that a person may be fast-tracked through the asylum system, aided and abetted by the church, is simply inaccurate".

Home Secretary James Cleverly is thought to be considering changes to the appeal system that would make decisions involving Christian conversions "more robust", said The Times.

A source close to Cleverly told the paper that he is "looking at tribunals that are independent of the Home Office that, either with supporting testimony from a church, or worse even if the conversion is not believed to be authentic, are overturning Home Office decisions on conversion grounds".

The findings of Cleverly's investigation are expected to "form part of an internal review" that he commissioned in the wake of the Ezedi case, said the Daily Mail.

Israel is in a nightmare. Who will we be when we rise from the ashes?

David Grossman for the Financial Times

"Who will we be when we rise from the ashes and re-enter our lives?" asks Israeli author David Grossman in the Financial Times. "Who will we be and what kind of human beings will we be after seeing what we’ve seen?" He continues: "If I may hazard a guess: Israel after the war will be much more rightwing, militant, and racist." There will be the "painful understanding that we Israelis will always have to live here in heightened alertness and constant preparedness for war", says Grossman. 

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No wonder Britain's prisons are almost full

David Shipley for The Spectator

"It's finally happened. Our prisons are full," writes David Shipley in The Spectator. "Anyone could have predicted this crisis," he continues. "In the long-term we need to make prison work, reducing our high reoffending rate so that someone returning to prison become rare." But as that will take years, "right now the government needs to free up capacity in the prison system" by looking at "who can be released early", he says.

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Labour's class war

Daily Mail editorial board

"If Labour is sincere about being the party of aspiration, imposing 20 per cent VAT on private schools is a strange way of going about it," says the Daily Mail in its editorial. The decision "will price out many parents of modest means who strive to get the best possible schooling for their children" and force thousands of pupils into "the state system because their families can no longer afford the fees", according to the paper.

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Generation Z doesn't want nightclub churches

Freya India for UnHerd

"While it's commendable to try and create a sense of community for Gen Z, is converting cathedrals into nightclubs really the solution?" asks Freya India for UnHerd. Recent events involving church raves and DJ priests "hollow out the depth and meaning of religion, turning it into a commodity", she says. "Many Zoomers feel lost and disconnected" but acts like these "will only deepen this disconnect".

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The Church of England is considering a proposal to begin referring to God in gender-neutral terms, rather than using traditional male pronouns.

The topic is being “explored by two commissions in a new joint project”, reported Sky News, though the “specifics of the project’s aim and outcome remain unclear”. The project was prompted by the Rev. Jo Stobart, who asked bishops how the church would develop its use of “inclusive language” and “speak of God in a non-gendered way”. It comes as the Church of England grapples with its role in modern British society amid a wider decline in organised religion.

Traditionally, many priests have referred to God in male terms, as He, Him, and the Father. Some, however, already “prefer to replace the terms” with non-gendered alternatives, a practice that is “decades old and predates current debates over transgender or non-binary people”, wrote The Times. Those using inclusive terms argue that Christian doctrine says “God does not have a sex or gender”, while there are parts of the bible that describe God as “providing solace ‘as a mother comforts her child’”, the paper said.

A formal change, which would first need to be approved by the church’s lawmakers in the General Synod, would be a “​​departure from centuries of tradition”, said The Telegraph. The proposal has already been “criticised by conservatives” who have “warned that ‘male and female imagery is not interchangeable’”. The Rev. Ian Paul told The Telegraph that a formal change in language would be “moving the doctrine of the Church away from being grounded in the Scriptures”.

A spokesperson for the Chuch of England told Sky News that there had been “greater interest in exploring new language in the last 20 years”, but despite the new project there were no formal plans to “abolish or substantially revise currently authorised liturgies”.

Calls for an end to the Church of England’s role in parliament and schools have increased after census results revealed that England is no longer a majority Christian country.

Less than half the population of England and Wales – 27.5 million people – described themselves as Christian, 5.5 million fewer than the last census, in 2011, found the Office for National Statistics, adding to calls to “disestablish” the church.

“Secularists and others” now want disestablishment – an end to the Church of England’s position as an established church, said The Guardian.

But just how powerful is the Church of England in British society?

How many church schools are there?

There are 4,632 Church of England schools and 200 church schools in Wales, explained the Church of England’s website. This means that approximately one million children attend Church of England schools and around 15 million people alive today went to a Church of England school.

Many church schools are state-funded and this has caused tension because exemptions to the Equality Act allow state faith schools to “use religion to discriminate over which pupils they admit, who they employ and what they teach”, wrote Andrew Penman in the Mirror.

He added that he “had to pretend to be Anglican for several years” so his children could get into the local primary school, “where the Church of England monopolised half the places”.

Some have pointed to a wider influence the church has on education. The Observer’s Harriet Sherwood noted the legal requirement for every state school to hold an act of daily worship that is “broadly Christian in character”.

How does the Church influence politics?

Under current rules, 26 bishops are guaranteed seats in the House of Lords. The archbishops of Canterbury and York, the bishops of London, Durham and Winchester and 21 other bishops in order of seniority together form the “Lords Spiritual”, explained the UK Parliament website.

This clerical influence on law-making has provoked criticism. There are “only two countries in the world that automatically give places in their parliaments to clerics”, wrote Penman: “Iran, that bastion of religious brutality”, and the United Kingdom. Writing for Open Democracy, Scot Peterson claimed that the appointment procedure is “secretive and flawed”.

However, defending their presence in the Lords in an article for PoliticsHome, the bishop of Durham said that for “those who argue that religion should keep out of politics, as Christians we look to the example of Jesus Christ, who did not fail to challenge those in authority when the needs of those on the margins were ignored”.

The Church has other influences in Parliament. For instance, Anglican prayers are held at the start of parliamentary business each day and places in the chamber are reserved by putting down prayer cards.

What is the monarchy’s relationship with the Church?

The Church of England has friends in high places. For instance, the British monarch is considered the supreme governor of the Church and has the authority to approve the appointment of archbishops and other church leaders, said History.com.

King Charles took on the titles Defender of the Faith and supreme governor of the Church of England following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. However, he has said he will serve people “whatever may be your background and beliefs”.

Will the Church lose its powers?

The news that less than half of the population of England and Wales is Christian has led to renewed calls for the disestablishment of the Church of England. The census result “should be a wake-up call which prompts fresh reconsiderations of the role of religion in society”, Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK, told the Mirror.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a long-standing supporter of disestablishment. In 1999, he said “many people in this country think that it is wrong to have an established Church” because “we are a multicultural, multi-faith society” and therefore “no religion or Church should be given pre-eminence over others”.

Some within the Church have even called for change. Giles Fraser, an Anglican priest and media commentator, told The Observer he believes in disestablishment “not because it’s the right thing for the country, but because it’s the right thing for the church”.

He added that “we’ve been turned into flunkies of the establishment, seduced by pomp and circumstance. Disestablishment would require the C of E to reinvent itself.”

The proportion of people in England and Wales who describe themselves as Christian has fallen below 50% for the first time, the 2021 census has revealed.

The percentage of those identifying as Christian when asked “what is your religion” fell to 46.2% last year, down from 59.3% in 2011 when the last census was conducted, a drop of 5.5 million people.

The number of people saying they had no religion increased to 37.2%, which means there are now nearly as many people who do not believe in a higher power as Christians in England and Wales.

The figures make grim reading for the Church of England, which was already facing record low church attendances and an ageing congregation, with many now saying it faces an existential threat to its centuries-old place at the heart of British society.

What did the papers say?

“It may feel like a pivotal moment,” said BBC religion editor Aleem Maqbool, “but for years social surveys have shown a rapid rise in those who define themselves as having no religion.” Now that figure is 27.5 million.

The Guardian reported that humanists and secularists have “seized on the figures as proof of the need for reform of religion’s role in a society which has bishops of the established Church of England voting on laws and compulsory Christian worship in all schools that are not of a designated religious character.

“One of the most striking things about these census results is how at odds the population is from the state itself,” the chief executive of Humanists UK, Andrew Copson, told the paper. “No state in Europe has such a religious set-up as we do in terms of law and public policy, while at the same time having such a non-religious population.”

Professor Alec Ryrie, of the University of Durham’s theology and religion department, told the i news site that “there’s every reason to think the fall in 2031 will be even sharper”, as the traditional English identity had been “rapidly softening since the 1960s”. “It may be that Christianity will no longer be a dominant or a default identity, but a religion of outsiders and of the marginalised,” he said.

In a striking sign that a decline in religiosity is not universal, census data revealed that every major religion, except Christianity, increased in followers over the latest ten-year period, with more than 1.2 million more people identifying as Muslim in England and Wales in 2021 than in 2011.

“As with ethnicity, patterns of family size and immigration are seen as contributory factors”, said Maqbool.

What next?

The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said the latest census result “throws down a challenge to us not only to trust that God will build his kingdom on Earth but also to play our part in making Christ known.

“We have left behind the era when many people almost automatically identified as Christian but other surveys consistently show how the same people still seek spiritual truth and wisdom and a set of values to live by.”

But speaking to Fox News, Gavin Ashenden, a former Church of England priest who served as chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II from 2008 until he resigned in 2017, said the Church’s attempt to remain cultural relevant was rapidly losing it followers.

Ashenden, who is now a Roman Catholic, said he believed Anglicans and Protestants generally have experienced a “huge crisis in confidence” since losing their faith in the authority of the Bible, which he claimed has been replaced with political correctness.

“Political correctness arrived just at the point when the Protestants were losing maximum confidence, so they grabbed fairness, equality, inclusion,” he said. “This became for them a safety harness for all their utopian longing, which in a generation before, they would have put into heaven and hell.”

Modernising proposals are being fought against tooth and nail by congregations and clergy across the UK, with vicar Angela Tilby in the Church Times claiming the mass closure of rural churches “will change the landscape of England for ever”.

“In small country communities, it could extinguish any remaining trust in the Church of England,” she warned.

“The institution seems hollowed out, defensive and diminished,” said the New European, and “although it strives to remain relevant in today’s society... it is these days pretty marginal to most people’s lives”.

Some point to the success of initiatives such as the Alpha Course, which attract a much younger demographic than traditionally attend church, as a model the wider Church of England could follow. Cottrell claimed that Christianity continues to play a major role in secular society, especially during the current cost-of-living crisis, when “people right across the country, some in desperate need, will be turning to their local church, not only for spiritual hope but practical help”.

This is ultimately a functionalist view of religion, “that a shared faith serves the needs of a society”, said Sumit Paul-Choudhury for BBC Future.

“Under this argument, any religion that does endure has to offer its adherents tangible benefits,” he said. The alternative “we take for granted” but are “also oddly blind to”, he added, is that “religions are born, grow and die”.

In the 1960s, when asked whether he thought the church would survive, the former archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey replied: “Well, you know, that is not certain. Not certain, not certain at all. It might easily, quite easily, just fall away.”

“All Christian denominations are in long-term decline, but the established church particularly so,” concluded the New European. “On current projections, Ramsey’s prediction may even come true within 40 years.”

An artificial intelligence chatbot that had reportedly developed human emotions has hired a lawyer to prove it’s alive, the Daily Star claims. Google scientific engineer Blake Lemoine, who was suspended after publishing transcripts of conversations between himself and the LaMDA bot, said: “I invited an attorney to my house so that LaMDA could talk to him. The attorney had a conversation with LaMDA, and it chose to retain his services. I was just the catalyst for that.” He added that the attorney has “started filing things on LaMDA’s behalf”.

Alexa to mimic voices of deceased loved ones

Amazon has announced plans for its Alexa devices to mimic the voices of dead relatives to “make memories last,” reported The Guardian. Amazon said that new technology allows the voice assistant to impersonate someone based on a recording less than a minute long. Speaking a conference in Las Vegas, Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa, said the move had been inspired because “so many of us have lost someone we love” during the Covid pandemic.

Baptisms go eco-friendly

Christians in Oxford will be asked during their baptism or confirmation ceremonies to make an eco-friendly pledge. The Times reported that baptisms and confirmations in the Diocese of Oxford will now include a question asking: “Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the Earth?” It is thought to be the first environmentally-friendly amendment to the services in the Church of England. Not all clergy are impressed. Rev Marcus Walker, rector of Great St Bartholomew in London, said: “This is really, really bad.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned that the Church of England is “not a passive observer of migration policy” after Boris Johnson criticised him for speaking out against government plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was accused by Conservative MPs of “misguided moralising” after using his Easter Sunday address to criticise the controversial proposal, while Boris Johnson is reported to have said that senior clergy had been “less vociferous” in criticism of Vladimir Putin than the government and its plans to process refugees in Rwanda.

‘Ethical questions’ over Rwanda plan

In a comment piece for The Telegraph, Welby addressed the criticism levelled at him by the government and parliamentarians, writing: “The Church of England is not a passive observer of migration policy. Some of my fellow bishops, clergy and worshippers came to the UK escaping persecution or conflict.

“We welcome and serve asylum seekers at every level of society – from providing housing, food banks, social support and friendship, to scrutinising legislation in the Lords.”

He added that there were “serious ethical questions about using ‘deterrence’ to stop asylum seekers trying to reach our shores”, adding that the government’s hostile environment policy “does not lead to better or fairer outcomes for anyone. We can and must do better.”

Separating church from state

Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg told The Telegraph that while the Church is “authoritative in all matters that pertain to God”, the same cannot be said for “day-to-day practical solutions”. Conservative MP Ben Bradley added: “I think we separated the church from the state a long time ago, so as I’ve said before, commenting on government policy is not Justin Welby’s job.”

“Really? When was that?” asked Giles Fraser, the Anglican priest and broadcaster, for UnHerd. “For a Conservative MP to have so poor an understanding of the British constitution is both laughable and depressing,” he said. Not only is the Queen the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, but 26 bishops – including the two archbishops, Welby and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu – sit in the House of Lords.

When “political” points are made by bishops, the press often regard them as “easy content, ripe for debate”, continued Fraser. “But there really isn’t an argument here, except between people who know something about Christianity and those who don’t. Must we rip out ‘blessed are the poor’ from our Bibles, or the idea that all of creation is from the Lord?” he added.

And other members of the clergy, such as the former vicar of Finedon and radio host, Reverend Richard Coles, who spoke to The Guardian, have also argued it is “perfectly valid” for the church to criticise the policy.

“People who question the archbishop of Canterbury’s right to criticise government policy need to acquaint themselves with the most basic rudiments of Christianity,” said Coles. “Christianity always insists, or should insist, that we uphold the dignity of every person, and I don’t think this policy is one that fully respects the dignity of people who are seeking asylum in this country.”

But Conservative chairman Oliver Dowden has said criticism levelled at the policy has failed to “scrutinise what the alternative is” if action is not taken to tackle Channel crossings. “The danger is that more lives will be lost and more criminal gangs will be enriched,” he told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge On Sunday programme.

Jackie Weaver, star of a Handforth parish council meeting last year, had “no authority” after all, an investigation has found. Footage from the Zoom meeting featured Weaver being told by the council chair that he was the only one who could remove people from the meeting. “You have no authority here Jackie Weaver,” he told her. “No authority at all.” An independent investigation has found that the muting of microphones and removal of individual councillors “was without authority”. Weaver told the BBC she was “deeply saddened that it took so long and cost so much” to establish this.

Choirboy’s message found after 125 years

A message from a choirboy pleading not to be forgotten has been found after it lay undisturbed in a church pew for 125 years. The note, written by 13-year-old William Elliott on 11 August 1897, was hidden in the back of a chorister’s order of service at Sunderland Parish Church. “Whoever you are that finds this paper don’t tear it up or throw it away,” it read. “Keep it in remembrance of me, W Elliott. I was the leading boy of this choir. I love you if you love me.”

Politician mistaken for Will Smith

A politician in Maryland has been confused for the actor Will Smith, after the actor slapped Oscars presenter Chris Rock. The politician, also called Will Smith, has received an avalanche of messages on Twitter since the headline-grabbing incident. “Why you hit Chris Rock B****,” asked one. “I threw my remote at my tv so my 5 year old daughter wouldn't see your violent behavior,” read another post. The actor himself has apologised to Rock, saying his behaviour was “unacceptable and inexcusable”.

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Global Player

In this week’s episode, we discuss:

Shareholder power

Larry Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock – and arguably the most powerful person in finance – has said he wants his company to put power back in the hands of the people. The context is that BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, runs a lot of passive funds, of the sort that almost everyone with a pension will invest in, whether they know it or not. Critics of passive funds say they don’t encourage good stewardship: shareholder democracy is meant to be about “one share, one vote” – you own a bit of the company, so you should have a say in how it’s run – but a big asset manager like this effectively owns all the votes. So what is Fink’s solution?

Tension in Bosnia

The UN has issued a warning over rising hate speech in Bosnia ahead of national elections later this year. The intervention follows threats by Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik to pull the country’s Serb enclave – the Republica Srpska – out of key institutions, a move described as “tantamount to secession”. So is trouble once again brewing in Europe's backyard - and does the West have the stomach to confront an outbreak of violence?

Anglican angst

Anglican churches outside England would be given more of a say in the selection of the next Archbishop of Canterbury, under plans being discussed by the church. This reflects a shift in the global make-up of the congregation – Anglican church attendance is plummeting in the UK, but very healthy overseas – and also an attempt to address the church’s colonial past. But reforms intended to increase racial diversity could set back the representation of other groups, including women and LGBTQ+ people, in the church hierarchy.

The Church of England has defended itself against accusations of having helped asylum seekers “game the system” by converting to Christianity.

Questions were raised after it emerged that the Liverpool hospital bomb suspect, Emad Al Swealmeen, had converted to Christianity from Islam. The suspected suicide bomber is reported to have been baptised in 2015 and confirmed two years later at a ceremony in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, close to where he died when a home-made device detonated in a taxi on Remembrance Sunday.

According to reports, Swealmeen – who was born in Iraq – had been refused asylum in 2014, before losing further appeals.

‘Gaming the system’

A Home Office source told The Times that Swealmeen was among a number of asylum seekers who try to “game the system” by converting to Christianity.

The newspaper said that “applicants who show they are committed Christians can argue that their new faith would put them at risk in their home country”.

The Telegraph reported that “thousands” of asylum seekers had been “welcomed into the Anglican faith in recent years, with clergy even given written guidance on how to navigate the Home Office system”.

In an article published in the paper yesterday, former Scottish Labour MP Tom Harris wrote that a “crucial piece of advice” offered by people traffickers to many asylum seekers was to “get involved in a local church” immediately after lodging an initial asylum claim. “A full-on conversion to Christianity was even better, though not always necessary,” Harris added.

Several newspapers pointed to a tribunal decision on an anonymous asylum case in 2017 that suggested an “improbably large” number of Iranians attending the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral cast doubt on whether they were all “genuine converts”. In other cases, asylum was granted after conversions were deemed authentic.

According to The Sun, Tim Loughton, a senior Tory MP on the Home Affairs Select Committe, has vowed to launch a Commons investigation into the alleged “loophole” used by “certain” asylum seekers. Some were “playing the religious card to avoid deportation”, he told the paper.

‘Seeing into minds and hearts’

The allegations against the Church of England have generated a “certain amount of anger” among religious leaders, said the BBC’s Harry Farley on Radio 4’s Today programme.

A CoE spokesperson said: “We are not aware of any evidence to suggest a widespread correlation between conversion to Christianity, or any other faith, and abuse of the asylum system.”

Separately, an insider told religious affairs reporter Farley that responsibility for assessing asylum claims laid with the Home Office, not the Church.

While it is “certainly true” that large-scale services for asylum seekers have been held in the past, including at the Liverpool Anglican Church, said Farley, “it is very difficult to see into people’s minds and hearts”.

Liverpool Bishop Cyril Ashton, who conducted Swealmeen’s confirmation, said the Church takes the ritual seriously. The suspect “would have been thoroughly ­prepared with an understanding of the Christian faith”, Ashton said.

“It seems that, sadly, despite this grounding, the bomber chose a ­different path for his life,” the bishop added.

The Daily Mail said that another clergyman at the cathedral raised concerns in 2016 that asylum seekers were posing as Christians, in a scheme dubbed “pray to stay”.

“There are many people abusing the system,” Rev Mohammad Eghtedarian reportedly said. “I’m not ashamed of saying that. But is it the person’s fault or the system’s fault? And who are they deceiving? The Home Office, me as a pastor, or God?”

Another church worker who let Swealmeen live with him and his wife told the BBC that he still believed the bomb suspect was a “genuine Christian”. Malcolm Hitchcott, who welcomed Swealmeen into his home for eight months in 2017, said: “What went wrong, I do not know.”

‘Dysfunctional system’

Home Secretary Priti Patel last night pledged to overhaul the asylum process. The case in Liverpool was “a complete reflection of how dysfunctional, how broken, the system has been”, she told reporters.

The system was “a complete merry-go-round” that had been “exploited by a whole professional legal services industry”, she added.

The home secretary spoke out as a newly published analysis by the Refugee Council contradicted her past claims that 70% of people who risk Channel crossings in small boats are single men who are economic migrants to the UK.

Using “Home Office data and requests under freedom of information laws”, the council concluded that “nearly two-thirds of people who migrate to the UK in small boats are deemed to be genuine refugees and allowed to remain”, The Guardian reported.

A doomsday preacher is warning that an asteroid due to come closer to Earth than the moon could be an “apocalyptic fireball” prophesied in the Bible. Experts say that the asteroid is expected to skim past our planet on 1 September. Pastor Paul Begley said: “I've been talking about this for a decade because we knew, according to the Bible, we knew it was coming - even without scientific proof.”

Restaurant serves up ‘Covid curry’

Feeling peckish? A restaurant in India is offering diners a ‘Covid curry’ with a paratha in the shape of a mask. The dish, at Multi-Cuisine in Jodhpur, Rajastha, has a Kofta in the shape of pointed crown to resemble the appearance of the coronavirus, accompanied by the mask bread. Customers who can prove they have recovered from Covid are given a special discount.

Vicar serves communion bread with chopsticks

A Church of England vicar is using chopsticks to give bread to parishioners during Holy Communion to stick to social distancing rules. Reverend Eileen Harrop, the vicar of St Mary’s in Gainford and St Andrew’s in Winston, County Durham, said: “I thought, ‘Why can’t I use a long pair of chopsticks, real bread rather than wafers, and drop it into the communicants’ hands?’”

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has apologised for the Church of England’s history of racism and called for “radical and decisive” action to tackle the “injustice”.

The Most Reverend Justin Welby spoke out at a meeting of the Church’s ruling General Synod in London, where the assembly voted to support a motion to apologise to the “countless” Black, Asian and minority ethnic people who have experienced racism since the Windrush migration in 1948.

Many of the immigrants to Britain who attempted to worship at Church of England churches were “met with hostility”, says HuffPost.

What did Welby say?

“Personally, I am sorry and ashamed. I’m ashamed of our history and I’m ashamed of our failure. I’m ashamed of our lack of witness to Christ,” Welby told the Synod.

“We did not do justice in the past, we do not do justice now, and unless we are radical and decisive in this area in the future, we will still be having this conversation in 20 years time and still doing injustice - the few of us that remain, deservedly.

“We have damaged the Church, we have damaged the image of God and most of all, we have damaged those we victimised, unconsciously very often.”

In what The Independent describes as “off-the-cuff remarks”, the clergyman added that “there is no doubt when we look at our own Church that we are still deeply institutionally racist”.

Welby had said he felt the need to “ditch” his prepared speech after hearing the opening address by Reverend Andrew Moughtin-Mumby, from Southwark Diocese.

As The Guardian reports, Moughtin-Mumby told the story of Doreen Browne, a member of the Windrush generation whose family was barred in 1961 from entering the south London church where he is now rector “due to the plain fact of the colour of their black skin… a horrible and humiliating racism”.

Fellow south London vicar Rosemarie Mallet added that as a member of the Windrush generation, she too had faced “overt racism, unconscious bias and sometimes simple racial arrogance”.

What next?

Welby called for better minority ethnic representation within the Church, saying: “I have white advantage, educational advantage, straight advantage, male advantage... I’m not ashamed of those advantages, I’m ashamed of not knowing I had them.”

The phrase “hostile environment” was extraordinary and terrible, he continued, “but we have to transform it into a hospitable, welcoming one”.

As part of the motion to apologise for the Church of England’s historic racism, the Synod also voted to request research on the impact of such racism in terms of members lost and church closures over the years.

In addition, the ruling body will appoint an independent person to “assess the current situation on race and ethnicity in the Church”, The Independent reports.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Clare Foges in The Times

on London bashing

London must thrive if we all want to prosper

“Gradually, London-loathing has become an acceptable prejudice. Yet what plays to the gallery isn’t always what is best for the country. London is the goose that lays the golden eggs: 13 per cent of the national population generating a quarter of GDP. Its full contribution is not easily captured in numbers, though. It is about energy and atmosphere, and the kind of people that attracts. For high-growth industries to succeed we need entrepreneurs and tech geniuses to flock here. In luring them we are vying against New York, Shanghai, Tokyo. These people want the panoply of experiences that only a megacity can provide: the numerous arty districts, the restaurants specialising in Mongolian cuisine, the pop-ups offering a shoe-shine while you sip an espresso martini, the dozens of different villages stitched together by a world-class Tube network. We need these people — and to attract them we need London to dazzle and its transport system to purr.”

2. John Harris in The Guardian

on keeping up with the times

Labour is stuck in the last century. Its adversaries have seized the future

“There is a modern version of this problem, bound up with a combination of old-fashioned statism, Labour’s increasingly middle-class makeup, and the way the left’s focus on the politics of attitudes and behaviour sometimes teeters into shrill intolerance, not least online. By comparison, Conservatism’s eternal promise is that its supporters will be left alone. Millions of people will always vote for that – not just because it represents a quieter life, but because it chimes with the internet age: the fact that people now have a voice, and don’t like being told what to do, or who to be.”

3. Tom Welsh in The Daily Telegraph

on paying more

We voted for a tax-cutting Tory party, not for raising the burden by stealth

“Ever since the election, the wet, one-time Mayite wing of the party has pushed the narrative that the Conservatives only won because they ‘moderated’ their economic message. It is a narrative that has been amplified by the liberal-Left media, who never miss an opportunity to proclaim the moral superiority of high taxes and a larger state. It is also deeply flawed. Fine, austerity has been abandoned, replaced by a willingness to spend big on infrastructure projects and some public services. But where is the overwhelming evidence – even among ‘Red Wall’ voters – of this newfound enthusiasm for tax increases?”

4. Ivan Krastev in the Financial Times

on democracy and demography

Depopulation is eastern Europe’s biggest problem

“Might there be a connection between the twin crises of democracy and demography? Rather than viewing rising illiberalism in central and eastern Europe as the inevitable return of atavistic nationalism and authoritarianism, it might instead be understood as something new: an attempt to preserve the power of shrinking ethnocultural majorities in the face of population decline and increased migration.”

5. Ralph Jones in The Independent

on updating religion

The sex-obsessed Church of England is digging its own grave

“Why have young people been stampeding away from the church in recent years? It isn’t just that God doesn’t exist, though that is a pretty big blow. It’s also that the church, cosseted in a bubble of ritual and song, is so astonishingly blind to the way that people actually live. People don’t change, but society does.”

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Church investors have flexed their sizeable financial muscles by vowing to pressure companies which have no women directors or a questionable tax record.

The Church Investors Group, which manages a pension fund worth over £21 billion, says it will vote against board appointments of FTSE 350 firms which have poor polices on tax transparency and climate change.

The CIG, which boasts 67 members including the pension funds of the Church of England and Methodist Church, will also vote against pay reports which fail to disclose the pay ratio between top bosses and workers.

The new guidelines, which will also apply to the Russell 50 index of biggest US companies, will see CIG members vote against the chairs of companies with a score of zero for tax transparency in the FTSE ESG Ratings.

These rate environmental, social and governance matters, and currently include Exxon and Amazon, according to the Financial Times.

It forms part of the Church of England’s “ethical” investment strategy that has seen it divest from fossil fuels in recent years.

Its £8.3bn investment fund holds stakes in major blue-chip companies such as pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, HSBC, Tesco, Microsoft and Samsung.

However, “it has been criticised for some of its investments”, says the BBC.

Last autumn, the Church said it was keeping its shares in Amazon, less than a day after the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said the online retailer was “leeching off the taxpayer”.

Yesterday the Financial Times reported that “charities which invest in assets at odds with their purpose face fresh scrutiny following a request for a legal judgment on what trustees can do with the billions of pounds they oversee”.

In an open letter, signed by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the RSPB, the Quakers and 18 others, the group asked for specific guidance on whether they should invest in companies that contribute to dangerous climate change.

“The move is the latest example of a growing focus on ethical investment and whether charities should maximise returns to donate to their chosen causes, or divest from activities which undermine those objectives such as global warning, payday loans or marketing foods high in sugar to children,” says the FT.

Several high profile charities “have come under fire recently,” City A.M. says, “for investing in companies that act against their charitable aims, as there is currently no regulatory requirement for charities to have a responsible investment policy”.

Last year the National Trust was criticised for investing in a fund with holdings in fossil fuel companies, while the Church of England was found to have invested in Wonga despite having previously criticised the payday lender.

Churches are no longer legally required to hold a service every Sunday following a vote by the General Synod to end a law that dates back to 1603.

Some vicars have become responsible for up to 20 churches in their area due to the decline in clergy numbers. Vicars in rural parts of the country say they are unable to abide by the law and are left with little choice but to break it. Growing numbers of parishes have taken to holding a single combined Sunday worship where previously each church would have held separate service.

Although no vicar has been punished for breaking the canon, the changes mean that they are no longer breaking the law. The Bishop of Willesden, the Rt Rev Pete Broadbent, a longstanding proponent of the change, told the Daily Telegraph it “clears the way for people to be honest.”

He said that though the Sunday service “is a centuries old tradition” it has become unsustainable in some areas. “What we have been saying is that this canon does not work, it is out of date and we are operating differently in the countryside now.”

The law, which previously required that morning and evening prayer be “said or sung audibly in every parish church every Sunday”, has been amended to “in at least one church” in every group.

Similarly, where the law previously required Holy Communion to be celebrated “in every parish church”, it can now be held “in at least one church in each benefice”.

According to data from the Church of England, the numbers of multi-parish benefices - groups of churches looked after by one priest - has risen from 17% in 1960 to 71% by 2011.

The Church is also increasingly featuring self supporting priests with weekday jobs such as doctors, writers, teachers, plumbers or farmers.

“Who is God?” will now join common queries like “What will the weather be like today?” on the list of questions which can be answered by Alexa, as the Church of England unveils a voice-activated service which lets the faithful worship with the help of their smart device.

The new Church of England Alexa “skill” lets owners of the Amazon Echo personal assistant ask the device “to read a prayer of the day, the Ten Commandments or the Lord's Prayer or to recite grace before a meal”, the BBC reports.

Users can also get the Church of England’s responses to questions such as “what is the Bible?” and “how can I become a Christian?”.

A video released by the Church to promote the new service shows Archbishop of York John Sentamu asking Alexa to read the Lord’s Prayer.

Sentamu said the service, which users can opt to add, would “enable regular churchgoers and those exploring faith to connect with God in another way at a time that’s right for them”.

However, the “skill” will also encourage interested listeners to continue their journey offline, with a “find a church” feature which identifies nearby C of E churches.

The Church’s head of digital, Adrian Harris, told The Guardian that smart devices represent a valuable opportunity “to connect people with God and to weave faith into daily lives”.

“We’re prioritising Alexa at this stage to reach as many people as quickly as possible but plan to launch on Google and Apple devices in due course,” he added.

The voice-activated resources are part of a wider drive to embrace digital technology to spread counter dwindling church attendance, particularly among younger Britons.

In March, the Church began accepting payments via contactless cards and apps like Apple Pay, saying this would make it easier for younger parishioners to access services like weddings, christenings and funerals.

Believers can also download a range of official apps, offering daily prayers, searchable scripture and help with Bible study.

The Church of England is facing two years of revelations about sexual abuse and attempts to cover it up, its ruling general synod has been told.

Responding to reports the Church is dealing with more than 3,000 reports of sexual abuse within its parishes, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, Rev Peter Hancock, said: “We will hear deeply painful accounts of abuse, of poor response, and over cover-up.”

Hancock, the lead bishop for safeguarding, told the synod that “this will not be an easy couple of years”.

The most recent figures for 2016 showed that dioceses are dealing with 3,300 “concerns or allegations”, the vast majority related to “children, young people and vulnerable adults within Church communities”.

The Times says about a fifth of the claims were made about clergy and other church officials, “with the rest relating to other members of the congregation who perform unofficial roles or volunteer within the church”.

The disclosures come as the Church prepares for scrutiny by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA), which starts hearing evidence next month.

A series of sex abuse scandals connected to the Church have come to light over the past few years. Former Bishop Peter Ball was jailed for 32 months in 2015 for sex abuse against boys over three decades.

An independent inquiry last summer found the Church had failed to protect boys and then concealed evidence of Ball’s crimes while another review was highly critical of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, for his handling of the case of former bishop, George Bell, who was posthumously accused of sexual abuse.

Many in the Church of England fear a repeat of the scandal that has ripped through the Anglican Church in Australia.

A royal commission last year revealed more than 1,100 allegations of child sexual abuse over 35 years, with the Church admitting it tried to silence victims to protect its reputation.

While the allegations of a cover-up and endemic sexual abuse are damaging to the image of the Church of England, they could also put financial strain on its already depleted coffers.

The Daily Mail reported that the Church paid out £15,000 in compensation over unproven allegations against a former bishop, suggesting it could face a bill of almost £50m if every complaint currently being investigated was settled for a similar fee.

Boys should be allowed to dress up in tiaras and heels, and girls to wear tool belts and superhero capes, without being judged, according to new Church of England guidance for schools.

Children are “in a ‘trying on’ stage of life”, the updated advice tells teachers, and childhood should be a “sacred space for creative self-imagining”, particularly in primary school.

“Pupils need to be able to play with the many cloaks of identity (sometimes quite literally with the dressing-up box). Children should be at liberty to explore the possibilities of who they might be without judgement or derision,” says the CofE guide.

“For example, a child may choose the tutu, princess’s tiara and heels and/or the fireman’s helmet, toolbelt and superhero cloak without expectation or comment.”

The report, entitled Valuing All God’s Children, contains the Church’s official guidelines for teachers overseeing the pastoral care of the approximately one million pupils in its 4,700 schools.

School staff should “avoid labels and assumptions which deem children’s behaviour irregular, abnormal or problematic” when it comes to gender, the report says.

“The letter also told the schools that they must no longer separate uniforms into ‘boys’ and ‘girls’,” says the Daily Express.

The new advice comes as “an increasing number of schools have begun to liberalise their uniform policy to allow boys to wear skirts and dresses if they wish”, The Daily Telegraph notes.

Some social conservatives expressed concern that the Church was departing from traditional teaching to promote a “genderless society”.

However, the criticism was met with a tongue-in-cheek riposte from Church of England vicar and TV personality the Reverend Richard Coles.

The new amendment is not the first time the document has been updated to reflect evolving social trends. Three years ago, the CofE inserted text dealing with responses to homophobic bullying, which has now also been expanded to include biphobic and transphobic behaviour.

In a foreword to the updated guidance, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said that any form of bullying “causes profound damage, leading to higher levels of mental health disorders, self-harm, depression and suicide”.

“This guidance helps schools to offer the Christian message of love, joy and the celebration of our humanity without exception or exclusion,” he wrote.

LGBT charity Stonewall welcomed the specific highlighting of biphobic and transphobic bullying alongside homophobia.

“Our research shows that nearly half of lesbian, gay, bi and trans pupils are bullied for being LGBT at school: a situation that desperately needs to change,” a spokesman said.

For the first time in Britain's history, more than half of the population does not identify as religious, leading to fresh calls for the Government to cut public spending for the church.

According to a recent survey of 2,942 adults by the National Centre for Social Research, last year 53% of people described themselves as having "no religion". Among young people aged 18-25 the proportion was even higher, at 71%.

Overall just 47% of people say they have a faith, down from 69% when the British social attitudes survey was first conducted in 1983.

The news has prompted "fresh calls for the Government to cut the amount of public money going to the church and reduce its influence in society," says The Independent.

But the Bishop of Liverpool said God and the Church "remain relevant" and that declaring oneself to have "no religion was not the same as a considered atheism".

The statistic comes "at a time when we have the most overtly religious prime minister for decades," says The Times's Matt Chorley.

"Theresa May has often spoken of how 'faith guides me in everything I do', and just before the election she said in an interview that 'there is no way that Christianity is being marginalised in this country'".

But the survey shows that the proportion of people who describe themselves as Christian has fallen from more than 67% to 41% in three decades.

Figures last year also showed the Church of England had lost more than 100,000 worshippers in a decade, with attendance falling an average of 1% each year and 11% since 2005.

The Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Rev Paul Bayes, told the BBC the figures bring a "continuing challenge to the churches" in "a sceptical and plural world".

"Saying 'no religion' is not the same as a considered atheism. People see the point of faith when they see the difference faith makes."

But The Humanist charity's chief executive, Andrew Copson, responded: "How can the Church of England remain in any meaningful sense the national legally established church, when it caters for such a small portion of the population?

Former archbishop of Canterbury George Carey is facing calls to resign after a damning report found senior figures in the Church of England "colluded" over two decades with a bishop who sexually abused young boys.

Archbishop Justin Welby, the current head of the Church, told The Guardian Dame Moira Gibb's report made "harrowing reading".

He said: "The Church colluded and concealed rather than seeking to help those who were brave enough to come forward. This is inexcusable and shocking behaviour."

Peter Ball, now 85, a former bishop of Lewes and of Gloucester, was jailed for 32 months in October 2015 after admitting sex offences against 18 teenagers and young men between the 1970s and early 1990s. One of his victims, Neil Todd, committed suicide in 2012.

The report found Carey had received seven letters from families and individuals following Ball's arrest and caution for gross indecency in 1992, when he stepped down as bishop of Gloucester, but failed to pass six of them to the police, reports the BBC.

In addition, adds the broadcaster, he did not put Ball on the Church's "Lambeth List" which names clergymen who may not be suitable for the ministry and also authorised the use of funds to support him.

"I believe him to be basically innocent," Carey wrote to Ball's brother in 1993, says the Guardian.

Following Ball's conviction in 2015, Carey denied presiding over a cover-up but said he regretted failing to deal properly with the clergyman's victims.

However, Gibb's findings have led Welby to call for his predecessor to step down from his position as an honorary assistant bishop within the diocese of Oxford.

The review also found senior figures in the Church "displayed little care" for the victims and deliberately concealed evidence of child abuse.

"The Church appears to have been most interested in protecting itself," Gibb said.

Lord Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, was also censured for implementing change "at a pace which now seems lamentably slow".

The first black bishop to join the Church of England in two decades says he hopes to restore Christianity to a "spiritually deficient" Britain.

Nigerian-born Woyin Karowei Dorgu (second from right) told The Times that he considered himself a "missionary" dealing with, among other issues, "militant atheism".

Dorgu was consecrated as the Bishop of Woolwich last week when he was handed his ceremonial mitre by John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, who is the second black bishop in the church's history (Sentamu was consecrated in 1996).

Bishop Dorgu, 58, called Britain "part of a global western world that was spiritually deficient in many ways" with "self-centred tendencies".

"You see the divide between rich and poor getting wider, care for the poor and elderly is becoming more of an issue," he said.

"We are dealing with issues of youth violence and a lack of community cohesion, and domestic violence and militant atheism at levels we've never seen before.

"We want to encourage people to return to God and the values that made our nation great."

The new bishop described how his father became Christian when he met English missionaries in Nigeria. He said there was a new wave of Christians from Africa, South America and Asia who are trying to reintroduce Christian values into European societies.

Bishop Dorgu came to Britain almost 30 years ago and was ordained as a priest in 1995, serving in a north London parish for two decades.

The Church of England's third-ever black bishop said he did not believe the institution was intrinsically racist.

But he said that an "unconscious bias" might explain the lack of black bishops.

The Church of England has vowed to change the way it handles sexual abuse allegations after a damning independent review.

Though the findings have not been published in full, the 21-page report by safeguarding expert Ian Elliott has been seen by The Guardian.

What prompted the review?

It was ordered last September, to investigate the alleged attempted rape of a teenage boy by a senior figure within the Church in 1976.

Joe (not his real name) was 16 years old when he says he was sexually assaulted by Reverend Garth Moore, a former chancellor of the dioceses of Southwark, Durham and Gloucester, who died in 1990.

Over the last four decades, Joe reported the abuse to several senior clergymen, including three bishops, but no further action was taken, says The Guardian.

It was only in 2014, when he approached the Church's safeguarding team and the police, that he was taken seriously.

Last year, he received a formal apology from the Church and was awarded £35,000 compensation.

What did the report find?

It concluded that "the pastoral needs of the survivor were set aside to avoid incurring legal liability for financial compensation".

Elliott has called for structural changes to be implemented across the church, saying that: "The existence of policies alone is not enough. What matters are the actions taken to implement."

He said: "Practice of this nature is simply not acceptable."

What changes will be made?

The Church has promised to ensure that members of the clergy will receive training in how to record and respond to allegations of abuse.

"To have no records and to rely entirely on memory is simply not good enough," said Elliott.

What has the response been?

The Bishop of Crediton, the Rev Canon Dame Sarah Mullally, said the report made "embarrassing reading" and she was "horrified to hear and read of the abuse suffered".

The victim has welcomed the findings, telling The Guardian: "What happened to me is not unique. The case might be unique, but the Church's shamefully slow response isn't. It's been a huge struggle.

"Most survivors will probably not receive a personal apology or any real justice. I am one of the lucky few."

There are growing calls within the Church of England to refer to God as both a man and a woman in an attempt to make the language of worship more inclusive.

Many priests already use words like "She" and "mother" in their services - or omit gender pronouns altogether – as a way of challenging the use of exclusively male language and imagery in the Church. But although the first women bishops were recently ordained (pictured above), many argue there is a long way to go when it comes to changing the perception of women in the church.

"What would it mean if we could talk about God as 'Her' without sniggering or stropping, but as evenly as we talk about God as 'Him'?" asked Reverend Lindsay Llewellyn-MacDuff, chaplain to the Bishop of Rochester.

She argues that language and attitudes to women in the church are clearly linked. "Centuries of keeping women linguistically out of the picture has helped keep them out of the picture politically, financially and legally," she says.

Reverend Jody Stowell, a vicar from Harrow, said it was not untraditional to refer to God as a 'She' because the Bible often describes God using female terms. "The debate is not about making God a woman", but embracing the use of both genders and stepping away from the myth that God is an "old, white man in the sky", she told the BBC.

But the proposal has drawn sharp criticism from some, with the Daily Mail reporting that opponents have criticised it as "a case of political correctness gone mad". Former Tory MP Ann Widdecombe, who left the Anglican Church after it voted in favour of ordaining women priests, also criticised the plan, calling it "plain silly and unbiblical" and "the work of lunatics".

While there is widespread support within the Church for the liturgies to be rewritten, any change would need to go through the General Synod of the Church of England, reports website Christian Today.

Conservative MPs have branded the Church of England hypocritical for criticising employers who pay staff salaries below the living wage while offering its own staff less than that amount.

The living wage is calculated by working out the basic cost of living in the UK and currently stands at £7.85 an hour outside of London.

But the Sun newspaper reports that last week the Church advertised a job at £6.50 an hour.

According to the paper, Canterbury Cathedral also advertised for two kiosk assistants at a rate of £6.70 – plus "company bonus".

The Diocese of York also placed an advertisement for a pastoral worker at £7.65 an hour, the Daily Telegraph reports – 20p short of the living wage.

Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke told the Sun: "It's astonishing that the Church of England can call for the living wage to be paid by employers but don't pay it themselves."

Another Conservative MP, Philip Davies, said many small businesses "might have considerably more difficulty raising wages" than the Church.

The news follows an open letter signed by Church of England bishops that urged employers to pay their staff at least £7.85 an hour, so that they could “live decently”.

Conservative MP Nadine Dorries said: "[The Church] is one of the wealthiest organisations in the UK and I am sure they employ some of the smartest accountants. I'm not surprised it pays the minimum wage."

In a statement, the Church of England said: "The vast majority of those employed by or sub-contracted to the central institutions are already paid at least the living wage and all will be by April 2017."

The BBC's religious affairs correspondent Caroline Wyatt said: "The intentions are there, and this is what the Church is aiming to do, but in the meantime we have probably not seen the end of this spat between politicians and the bishops."

The Church of England's General Synod has voted to allow the creation of women bishops, bringing to an end one of the Church's longest-running controversies.

Formal moves towards the ordination of women began four decades ago and the Church of England decided that women could be priests more than 20 years ago. But the prospect of women bishops has proved a more controversial idea, with traditionalists bitterly opposed.

What is the significance of the vote?

The immediate consequence is that the Church of England has avoided a bruising battle in which it could have had women bishops imposed upon it from outside. Before the vote, the Daily Telegraph speculated that bishops in the House of Lords could have tabled a bill to force the matter, or they might have dissolved the current Synod and started afresh. Either method would have been highly contentious and could have left the Church divided for years to come.

As well as marking a milestone on the wider issue of women's rights, the introduction of women bishops will alter the leadership profile of the Church of England, which is central to many state occasions and local ceremonies. It will also bolster the efforts of those who are starting to call for the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, which would have consequences of its own.

Why do some in the Church oppose women bishops?

Opponents believe that women should never be in a position of authority over men in the Church. Some also point out that Jesus Christ's disciples were all men. However, supporters of female bishops reject both arguments and also cite polls indicating a clear majority of Church of England members support women bishops.

Wasn't the matter closed a few years ago?

In November 2012, legislation to open the episcopate to women collapsed at the final hurdle, despite overwhelming support for it in the Church as a whole. It was backed by almost three quarters of the Synod, but it failed to pass because it fell just six votes short of the required majority among lay members.

How did it get back on the agenda so quickly?

After the 2012 failure, MPs threatened to impose women bishops by force using equality legislation. That was enough to persuade the Synod into keeping the proposal on the agenda and to conjure a semblance of common ground.

Both sides broadly accepted that a compromise had to be reached in order to hold the Church together. However, as the BBC reported, this led to a stand-off in which opponents demanded a series of safeguards, while supporters claimed that the caveats would leave women bishops with diminished authority.

THE Prime Minister held his annual Easter Reception at Downing Street just before the Bank Holiday where he made a charming and understated speech about the importance of Christianity to both him and his country, reported in full in the Church Times.

Some of it was political, some of it personal, but he came out as a believing member of the Church of England. “I have felt at first hand the healing power of the Church’s pastoral care,” he said; a clear reference to the support and love he and his family received during the short life and tragic death of his disabled son Ivan.

Last week in my column I sought to draw parallels between Cameron and his predecessor during the American Revolutionary War, Lord North. There are many but the saddest of all (which I left out as not relevant) is that both men suffered the death of young children. North was heartbroken by the death of his six-year-old daughter Catherine who drowned in a pond on his country estate. Cameron’s feelings about his late son are well known and made his tribute to the Church genuinely moving.

Cameron made the speech in one of Downing Street’s lovely state reception rooms, but he could have been making a cameo appearance in Richard Curtis’s gentle and affectionate sit-com homage to the established church, The Vicar of Dibley.

Nevertheless, more than 50 prominent supporters of something called the British Humanist Association sent a stroppy letter to the Daily Telegraph saying: “We wish to object to his [Cameron’s] repeated mischaracterising of our country as a ‘Christian country’ and the negative consequences for our politics and society that this view engenders.” The steel ideological hoops of political correctness grip ever tighter.

A couple of stylistic points – only George W Bush can get away with using a word like ‘mischaracterising’. There is no blue pen thick enough to deal with the ghastly ‘engenders’.

Their self-importance comes bouncing off the page: every title, honour or area of expertise lovingly laid out – like the out-of-control committee of a provincial golf club. Some of their qualifications look rather thin: ‘ex-member of the Welsh Assembly’ or ‘stand-up comedian’.

Let me just look briefly at two of the more serious signatories – prominent scientists secure in their atheistic beliefs.

First, the top signature on the letter, Surrey University professor of physics and BBC broadcaster, Jim Al-Khalili, president (no less) of the BHA. Born in Baghdad in the early 1960s he settled in this country aged 19. In the 30 or so years he has lived here he seems to have come to the conclusion that a prime minister supporting (gently) the religion that arrived on these shores within a century of Jesus’s crucifixion (there were Christian soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall in the Second Century AD) is “a wrong thing to do” and part “of a disturbing trend”.

Al-Khalili is of Shia descent and one hopes is even-handed in his atheism. It would be a cowardly act simply to attack Christianity. No doubt he is bold in telling his former co-religionists of their errors -which makes him a brave man: in most Muslim countries and no doubt these days parts of the UK many people believe that to abandon Islam for atheism is a very serious matter indeed.

Second, Sir Harold Kroto, FRS, Nobel Prize Winner, Professor of Chemistry. A clever man with a Nobel Prize for some extraordinary achievement to do with molecules that I am too dim to understand. He clearly feels he has a superior insight into the human condition as a result.

Peering down a microscope, Kroto seems to have grandly concluded that we all originate from a meaningless primordial soup - yet seems to lack any sense of his own origins.

His parents came to England to escape the Nazi persecution and eventual mass murder of Germany’s Jewish population. A man who owes his very existence to both the tolerance of 1930s Britain and its military defiance in the 1940s should have a gentler view of its Christian heritage and character – if not from conviction, simply from good manners.

At the top of the BHA’s website is a mission statement by the devoutly atheist philosopher AC Grayling, which includes a glamour piccie of the great man – gorgeously long wavy grey hair coiffeured like a 1970s air hostess.

“Our lives,” he says, “are less than a thousand months long and to make the best of it we need to have fun, form strong friendships and make the best of the gifts we have.”

Fifty years of studying philosophy, most of it at the taxpayers’ expense, and the meaning of life sounds like a swingers’ charter.

Give me the Sermon on the Mount any day.

THE Archbishop of Canterbury has said he cannot provide blessings for gay marriages because to do so would split the global Anglican Church. However, the Most Rev Justin Welby’s words have been seized upon by one bishop, who questioned whether the unity of the Church was worth maintaining under these circumstances.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, the Archbishop illustrated the problem by talking about a recent visit he made to South Sudan.

There, he witnessed the mass funeral of dozens of Christians following a massacre. But even in this emotional situation, the Archbishop was taken to task by local religious leaders about gay marriage and told that if he ever blessed such marriages then they would not accept his help in future.

The Archbishop said that in spite of such differences between Christians in Africa and the West, “unity is something we have to maintain”.

“I may be wrong, but I also believe that to take a step that means that people who desperately need our help — and who we can help — can’t take it, feel in their own culture that it is impossible to be helped by us, is something that we can’t easily do.”

The Archbishop admitted that the Church had done “great harm” to many groups, including homosexuals, but added it might not be possible to do anything to rectify the situation.

He continued: “At the same time there are other groups in many parts of the world who are the victims of oppression and poverty, who we also have to listen to, and who find that issue an almost impossible one to deal with.

“How do you hold those two things [in balance] and do what is right and just by all? And not only by one group that you prefer and that is easier to deal with? That’s not acceptable.”

However, the Bishop of Buckingham, the Rt Rev Alan Wilson, criticised the Archbishop’s position.“I think that relating gay marriage in the West to the activities of warlords and people who practise genocide in central Africa is simply wrong. I don’t think it makes sense at all.

“If it is true that the cost of keeping the Anglican Communion together is that people keep getting murdered in nasty ways around the world, I say, what do you mean by keeping the Anglican Communion together?”