Theo Hobson

In my first few teenage years I attended Christian holiday camps rather like the ‘Bash’ camps where John Smyth and Justin Welby prayed in the same dormitory. They were run by old boys from the school. It was a day-school, but obviously these camps had a boarding school feel. I loved it. It was like being at Hogwarts. I adored the clubby vibe, the belonging, the games, the lingo, the gossip, the praying together in the dorm, the sing-songs with cocoa. I went back for more every summer and Easter holidays for the next few years. It was a huge group of friends, still sweaty from a football game, congregating to worship.

Last week, Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury since 2013, started leading the Church of England. He got off the fence on homosexuality and backed a major change to the Church’s teaching. He said that that ‘all sexual activity should be within a committed relationship, whether it’s straight or gay'. This obviously goes against the Church’s existing official teaching, that sex should not occur outside of heterosexual marriage. The Church is now likely to change that teaching fairly swiftly – probably next year. I predict that Synod will affirm equal marriage within three years. This shift comes after about 25 years of painful paralysis.

Forget Nixon in China. That phrase needs renaming: Welby on sexuality. For it is now at last clear that he has shifted his position on homosexuality. Talking to The Rest is Politics podcast this week, he finally came out with it. He is not, as we all assumed, a conservative in the awkward position of presiding over a Church that is pursuing reform. He has quietly changed his mind. He is not, as we all assumed, a conservative in the awkward position of presiding over a Church that is pursuing reform In the last year or two, he has hinted that he is on a journey, moving away from the conservative position that he has taken throughout his career, but he has never quite clarified.

Some sociology academics have, after a three-year research project called 'Exploring Atheism', unveiled a startling discovery: there are a lot of people in Britain who don’t believe in God. I know, it’s quite a gut-punch. They do not quite claim to have found that most Britons are atheists. But they do claim that there are now more atheists than religious believers. By collating various social attitudes surveys from 2008 to 2018 they found a strong upward trend in those saying that they did not believe in God, from 35 per cent to 43 per cent. During this time, believers in God dropped from 42 per cent to 37 per cent. This has led the academics to claim that Britain has now entered its ‘first atheist age’.

The evangelicals really are revolting. After a lot of talk of the need to break away from a tainted, liberal, heretical Church, something significant has happened. Last month, two of London’s biggest conservative parishes – All Souls Langham Place and St Helen's Bishopsgate – held services ‘commissioning’ new leaders. It’s an obvious repudiation of the Church’s authority, and a step towards creating a new structure – a ‘de facto province’, as one of the vicars involved put it. When this new structure is authorised, they will be officially ordained into it, he said. This move doesn’t quite break canon law, as long as these leaders don’t preside at the eucharist.

My friend Andy is getting married. It’s about time – he and his girlfriend have a one-year-old daughter. He wants to get married in church, so I introduced him by email to the local vicar. I was copied in to their initial correspondence. The vicar told Andy that the Church of England prohibits sex outside of marriage, so a church wedding would not be possible unless the couple repented of their sin and lived apart in the run-up to the wedding. Of course I made up the last bit. The vicar congratulated him and his partner on their decision and started talking dates. But isn’t it true that the church teaches that sex should only take place in marriage? Yes and no. The ambiguity sheds important light on the current crisis over homosexuality.

Future historians of the Church of England might look back at this weekend as the beginning of the end. A selection of bishops and members of the General Synod are meeting at a hotel in Leicester to seek a solution to the impasse over homosexuality. They hope to make a plan to take to July’s Synod: a deal that keeps conservatives in the Church. That’s got to be a good thing, hasn’t it? It depends.  The story so far is that the Church decided in favour of same-sex blessings last year, and also in favour of new ‘pastoral guidance’ that is expected to allow gay clergy to marry, therefore officially condoning them for the first time. Conservatives, the large majority of whom are evangelicals, see this as false teaching, and are demanding their own structures.

Could Russell Brand, who has just been baptised, become a significant Christian figure? I suppose he could become a sort of British televangelist, God help us. But significant in a good way? It’s not impossible: he’s sharp and charismatic, and taps in to a major English spiritual tradition. But it’s not likely either: our culture needs figures who model wise restraint rather than juvenile hedonism, and Brand can’t entirely undo his image. Brand can probably never lose the aura of sleazy preening libertine Brand issued a video after being baptised in the Thames on Sunday, in which he said he had found his 'path' and was left feeling 'incredibly blessed' and 'nourished'.

It’s thirty years since the first women were ordained as priests of the Church of England. For ten years, there have been women bishops too. Well, at least one aspect of the Church’s reform is done and dusted.  Cue hollow laughter from those acquainted with the strange intricacy and agony surrounding this seemingly simple reform. In reality it was a Pyrrhic victory for the liberals that left them deeply demoralised. Not being much of a feminist (or a traditionalist), I was slow to tune in to this story. But its dark fascination gradually drew me, like an ecclesiastical car crash. Female clergy have been cornered into a psychological trap What happened is this: opponents of the change were allowed to stay in place.

When the New Atheism thing was new, I wrote a piece saying that the people who supported it were pretentious and cowardly. They pretended to know what religion is, and said that it caused great harm. I said this was ‘intellectual cowardice’. The intellectual coward is one who chooses simplicity over complexity and difficulty. One aspect of their cowardice related to Islam. Their popularity was a result of 9/11, and the widespread fear of religious extremism that ensued, but they didn’t dare focus on Islamic extremism; they wanted to say that religion in general was to blame, that mild-mannered liberal Christians were implicated in violence. Now Richard Dawkins is trying to sound more nuanced about Christianity. A recent radio interview with LBC is the latest example.

Perhaps Justin Welby expected gratitude from Ukraine, after the Church of England’s Synod debated the war this week. He certainly didn’t expect a double rebuke from the country, a sacred and secular censure. In letters to Welby that have not been published but have been shown to me, two official Ukrainian bodies have protested at the briefing document that was prepared ahead of the debate. As I argued yesterday, the briefing document is inappropriately even-handed, as if both sides in the conflict are caught up in a tragic muddle, and as if no particular religious body is more culpable than any other.