The C of E sinks into idolatry

The salaries of employees reflect their relative value to the employer. Hence, if someone receives double the salary of someone else, the former is deemed to be twice as valuable.

Starting from this unassailable observation, we can then assess properly the current Wanted advertisement run by the Church of England, London diocese. The job advertised is that of a “head of racial justice priority”. (Is it possible to be a head of priority? You tell me.)

The salary on offer is £66,646 a year, which happens to be more than twice the stipend received by parish priests. The inescapable conclusion is that to our established church a chap capable of mouthing woke twaddle is twice as valuable as someone who preaches the word of God. Vox DEI speaks louder than vox dei.

The ad says that the successful candidate will “foster a culture… built on love, fairness, equity, justice, collaboration and integrity”, enlightening people on “the injustice and impact of racism”. He will “break down mental, cultural and institutional barriers… to engender true race equality,” thereby helping “address the historical legacy of slavery and challenge systemic racism”. 

I’m sorry, am I missing something? I thought equality before God is an integral part of any Christian message to the multitudes, and it’s the job of a priest to deliver this message from the pulpit. On the other hand, the sermon of secular DEI in relation to race or anything else is properly delivered by social workers, left-wing dons and Labour politicians.

A Christian minister and a Labour minister are jobs not just different but diametrically opposite, although DEI propaganda compromises both. But at least a politician indulges it in a secular context.

God knows it’s wicked enough even there, but in our democracy run riot securing 20 per cent of the electorate is supposed to give politicians a mandate to do as they please. Hence we may huff and we may puff, but we can’t argue that a woke politician is corrupting his mission.

He is, but this isn’t an argument we can ever win. However, when our established church misappropriates its finances to fund DEI propaganda, the church isn’t just going beyond its mission. It makes a mockery of it.

This isn’t to say that the church should never comment on worldly affairs. Not at all. It should sit in judgement and cry foul whenever a government acts in ways inconsistent with Christian morality. But it should steer clear of any faddish ideology specifically because it’s a) faddish and b) an ideology.

Fads come and go, but a church should overlook the transient in favour of the transcendent. Governments these days act as weathervanes, turning this way or that depending on the way the wind blows. But because the church’s mission is eternal, it should be impervious to political vicissitudes.

When it comes to committing itself to an ideology, the church should remind itself what all ideologies are. The term first appeared in France at the very end of the 18^th century, and new words are coined when they are needed to denote new concepts.

The need for this particular concept sprang from the very nature of the Enlightenment, which, when stripped of its sloganeering cant, was a mass revolt against Christendom – not just its founding religion but the civilisation it had produced. When troops go into battle, they need to inscribe something on their banners, and ideology is what provides the text.

An ideology was to the philosophes a system of rational convictions designed to supplant irrational superstitions, which is how they saw Christianity. However, it was understood even then that such rational convictions may be held for reasons other than purely epistemic, that is based on evidential reasoning. Irrational was the new rational.

In other words, an ideology isn’t a philosophy but a secular creed perceived to be in competition with religious faith, which it sees as its mortal enemy.

Now, Christianity is a rational religion and, as such, isn’t at odds with science or philosophy. But it is at odds, indeed at war, with cults, false religions claiming they preach the truth but in fact peddling lies. Worshiping such cults is called idolatry, which word fits any ideology like a glove.

Ideologies appeared at the crest of the Enlightenment to fill the gap left by religious faith. Man was now perceived as merely a higher order of animal, but the ‘enlighteners’ knew he was the kind of animal who had an innate need to rise above his quotidian existence. Man has a compulsion to believe in something higher than himself.

That’s where ideology steps in. It gives people a chance to worship the superpersonal without rising to the supernatural. Yet upon closer examination, any ideology is found out sooner or later. It turns out to be not a philosopher’s stone but fool’s gold.

That’s why people susceptible to ideological temptation tend to float from one ideology to another. They look for a secular god, but because that god is false they can’t find it. At least they can’t find a single one, which is why they resort to secular polytheism.

And their rites grow more and more bizarre. Sexual equality turns into a ritual dance around a woman’s phallus, quest for peace turns into shamanistic shrieks for unilateral disarmament, social justice into rampant levelling, racial equality into a wholesale repudiation of Western history.

Like Greek gods who all lived on the same mountain, ideological idols also stay close together. They inhabit their own temple, that defined by hatred of Christendom. Yes, our civilisation has already been relegated to the status of distant memory, but iconoclasm tends to persevere long after the icons have been smashed.

All this is to say that for a church to feel the need for a highly paid “head of racial justice priority” is tantamount to worshiping idols at the expense of its mission to worship God. This comes close to my understanding of satanism and it’s useful to remember that, etymologically speaking, Lucifer means ‘enlightener’.