Theo Hobson

Public atheism has a new face. Your uncle Richard has been replaced by your cool cousin Alice. She’s bursting with fun facts about nature and history, but is also a well-rounded human, happy meeting other humans and smiling a lot. (Uncle Richard sometimes smiles, but it’s usually a by-product of sneering at the flawed footnote of an enemy.) But don’t call it atheism, Alice Roberts’ creed. Far too negative! In keeping with her human-ness, it’s called ‘humanism’. 'Atheism is defining yourself by an absence of something,' she told an interviewer. 'Humanism is a positive choice to base your morals on your own human capacity'. To explain this further, she has just co-authored The Little Book of Humanism with Andrew Copson.

The current resurgence of debate about racism shows that we still need the concept of sin. Seriously, sin? Yes. Without this concept, we can’t really understand the BLM movement. In the past, moral campaigns were tied to concrete demands for changes in legislation, or government policy. Ban the bomb, legalise homosexuality, overthrow capitalism, and so on. The BLM movement is rooted in frustration: it knows that laws already exist outlawing discrimination, but feels that such laws are hugely inadequate. For such laws cannot uproot systematic racism, which is built into the mindset of the majority. It declares that liberalism is too vague, too non-judgemental, too laissez-faire.

If only God had clearly decreed exactly what sort of music he wanted us to make in church. For uncertainty on this matter is highly problematic. If only he had said, for example, unaccompanied female voices on weekdays and an all-male choir on Sundays, with nothing composed before 1800 and no stringed instruments, except at Christmas. Or something else, similarly specific. The Calvinists of the sixteenth century decided that he had said something of this sort: no music at all, except for chanted Psalms. You can imagine the Dean of Sheffield Cathedral feeling a flicker of sympathy for this position. For Sheffield Cathedral has announced that its choir is not working and needs a fresh start.

I share the average liberal’s unease at woke-ism, or ‘hyper-liberalism’ – let’s call it Woke Zeal. But I disagree with those pundits who see it as a new thing, at odds with the vague liberal consensus of the past. Because it is willing to curtail freedom of speech in the pursuit of its aims, they say, and because it can advocate an aggressive tribalism, based on identity politics, it must be a fundamentally new creature. In reality Woke Zeal is a fairly natural development of our core shared creed. It is in some ways an intensification of liberalism, in other ways a cry of frustration at the limitations of liberalism. But it can’t be separated from the long tradition of liberal idealism.

The grumbling of high church clergy should now lessen a bit. They were complaining, in some cases furiously, about the Chuch of England's decision to go further than the law required when it came to the lockdown, telling clergy not to open their churches at all, and not to broadcast services from them. Some were threatening to re-fight the Reformation over the issue, saying that low-church Welby would really rather preach from his own kitchen than admit that churches are a necessary site of authentic sacramental worship. The Church has now relaxed its rules, allowing vicars to pray in their churches and broadcast services from them. And the Church has started to think aloud about the really interesting question, of how churches should respond to the easing of lockdown.

The closing of the churches over Easter is an opportunity to think about what church is, and what role it plays in our lives, if any. Plenty of Christians have already written in praise of their worshipping communities, saying how they miss the normal togetherness. My approach is more nuanced. Yes, I too miss going to church. But I also want to be honest: it is not top of the list of my current deprivations. I’m an awkward, semi-detached, leave-before-coffee sort of parishioner. Maybe this odd Easter is a chance to reflect on why. As a youth I was very into the sort of liberal reformist Protestant theology that is ambivalent about church, seeing most of its forms as too conservative, too nostalgic, as failing to express the radical message of Jesus.

Imagine being in love with someone who ignores you eleven months of the year, then suddenly seems really into you. Instead of elation you feel a weird form of pain as your beloved finally smiles on you, and finds you interesting, for you know that it is just a seasonal thing, and that frosty indifference waits in the wings. This is a bit like how Christians feel at Christmas. Our ruling culture finds the idea of worshipping Jesus Christ embarrassing, absurd, offensive. Or in fact it normally doesn’t bother feeling these things, it just shrugs with boredom. And yet for a few weeks it gives the appearance of venerating the little guy in the manger, buying into the myth that he brings hope for the world.

Why does the left have a problem with Jews? I don’t think the current analysis goes deep enough. We need to take two or three steps back from recent political events. The key concept is universalism. Socialism is a universalist ideology: it thinks it has a solution to the world’s problems that everyone ought to subscribe to. The right by contrast is semi-universalist: it thinks free markets are good for everyone, but this is more theoretical than heartfelt, and it balances this with some degree of nativism. Socialism has had an anti-Semitic streak from the start: Marx was an anti-Semite as well as a Jew.

I have heard surprisingly few Catholic responses to this week’s news of the conviction of Cardinal George Pell. I guess those who are not in denial are in shock. Let me interrupt the stunned silence with an outsider’s perspective. This is not just another paedophile priest story - Pell was a key figure in the Vatican under the last three popes - and a major public face of the church’s moral conservatism. So will his fall bring a new level of Catholic soul-searching, a new critique of the Church’s entire moral culture? Pope Francis himself often seems to call for such critique. Last week he warned against the potential dangers of moral rigidity, while speaking about the child sex abuse scandal in general.

General Synod has repealed the old law that every Anglican church must hold a Sunday service. It’s not really the end of an era, because the law has been flouted for decades: many rural vicars are in charge of a large handful of churches and cannot hold services at all of them every week. It’s a reminder that we have to think creatively about how to keep our parish churches alive. And this is not just the responsibility of Anglican churchgoers. Because we have an established Church, it makes some sense for an agnostic who never, or nearly never, attends worship to feel some connection with his or her local church. It is part of the public realm, part of the historic life of the village or district.

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian about the study of English at university. It’s in decline, says Susannah Rustin, which is a shame. Bright youngsters who might once have signed up to a few years of sonnets and Chaucer are feeling pressured to study something more useful like engineering. Let them, and those influencing their choices, not suppose that English is self-indulgent thumb-twiddling; let them not forget that it sharpens the critical faculties, and ‘has a humanistic role… in advancing a more expansive and democratic version of Englishness than the nativist one.

Sorry to sound sectarian, but the Archbishop of Canterbury should really be able to articulate a preference for Anglicanism over other variants of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism. Interviewed here in this week's Spectator, he was more or less invited to do so; instead he said that he was entirely positive about Anglican priests converting to Rome. Hard to imagine the Pope saying the same thing in reverse. Ecumenical enthusiasm is all very nice, but a Church is in trouble if it can’t say why people should stay within it, or choose it over other options. So what is Anglicanism’s selling point? The answer is unfashionable but unavoidable: its socio-political liberalism. Note that I do not say simply ‘liberalism’.