The press
A media church?
Paul Johnson
Easter is upon us, the climax of the ecclesiastical year. When I was a schoolboy, the Wednesday of Holy Week saw the last of the four great eschatological sermons, on Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven; and dominating the week were the dramatic, quasi-operatic performances of Tenebrae. The length and splendour of the services were prodigious, culminating in the special liturgy on Holy Saturday morning, which lasted about four hours. Each member of a huge religious commun- ity exerted every fibre of his being exhort- ing us to raise our eyes from the clayey longings of this world and fix them firmly on the one to come. That, we always understood, was what clergymen were for.
Well: that is not what they think they are for these days. Lent has brought an excep- tional caterwauling from the Anglican episcopate, with the Right Reverends elbowing each other out of the way in their anxiety to get in front of the television cameras and tell us that it is material things which matter; the next world, if it exists at all, is purely 'symbolic'. The new Bishop of Durham chose the occasion of his first speech in the House of Lords to make a passionate plea for more 'numeracy'. We are to be saved by numbers. 'Here is wisdom,' as St John said. 'Let him that. hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six' (Revelation xiii 18).
Margaret Thatcher calls these political clergy 'cuckoos' popping out to remind us that spring is here. I prefer to be less rude and quote the Song of Solomon: 'And the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.' Turtles or cuckoos, there is no doubt that Anglican bishops, in recent months, have lowered themselves in the eyes of those whose esteem they should seek most ardently: ordinary Christians. To many people the behaviour of the political bishops makes no sense at all. All they win by their outbursts is the grudging, tempor- ary and fundamentally contemptuous approval of the atheist Left, people who have never set foot in a church in their lives and never intend to. At the same time, they distress and alienate the dwindling band of regular churchgoers, who still accept the teachings of the Anglican com- munion and believe — albeit with growing reluctance — that such as Bishop Jenkins .are the successors of the Apostles. Why grovel before your enemies and spit at your friends? It does not seem to make any sense.
Alas, I think it does make a certain amount of sense, at any rate according to the ways of the world. We do not live in an apostolic age. We live in a media age. What our political bishop's are trying to construct, in an empirical and sometimes fumbling manner, is a media church. There is a parallel here with politics. Smart politicians tell you that nowadays, and especially at election times, there is no point in wasting too much energy on actual political meetings, attended by the faithful. Of course you have to go through the motions and pretend they are important. But what wins votes now is what happens on the air waves and especially on televi- sion. All the rest is traditional mummery.
Bishops have been slow to come to this realisation. But the principle applies to them too, assuming the values of a mater- ialistic, admass society. In conventional terms, the Church of England is at the end of the road. Every year it has fewer adherents. Its congregations are small and increasingly elderly. How many regular Anglican churchgoers are there in Durham? Or in inner Liverpool? Pitifully few. Their magnificent cathedrals, the one the most sublime English artifact of the early Middle Ages, the other the finest building erected in all Europe during the 20th century, are stranded whales left by an ocean of faith which has retreated, probably for ever. Those vast naves and transepts can be filled on special occasions what traditional place of entertainment cannot? — but for the rest of the year it is a case of 'bare, ruin'd choirs', left to tourists or silence. From a numerical point of view — and as the bishop says, it is numbers that count nowadays — the tiny Anglican flocks are scarcely worth bothering about. A bishop can instruct, charge, hector and exhort them until he is the colour of his canonicals, and no one outside will hear a word of it.
The mass media, however, offer an alternative strategy. It is the one way in which an Anglican dignitary can get him- self talked about. You would have to be blind and deaf not to have heard of the present Bishop of Durham. Naturally grab- bing the media involves a certain change of subject matter. The television cameras are not interested in episcopal appeals to keep the Ten Commandments. It is a switch-off when a bishop tells us to say our prayers or avoid the occasions of sin, or even to be dutiful subjects of the Queen. If Bishop Jenkins quoted the famous injunction from Chapter 13 of St Paul's epistle to the Romans, 'Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers . . . . For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil', not a single reporter or television producer would notice. But if a bishop praises Scargill, or backs a strike, or denounces the Government; or if an archbishop, as happened last year, gives a sensational political interview on the eve of the Tory Party conference, then the media are at his feet, and he can have as big a headline and as many minutes of air time as he pleases. Thereby the bishops make themselves important, or at least seem important. And by being important they defend their order and its privileges. The world is a hard place. The BBC has discovered that, when the ratings slip, the licence fee becomes insecure. Similarly, if Anglican bishops retreat into decent obscurity, it becomes progressively more difficult to defend the Church by law established and all that the law guarantees: their seats in the Lords, their access to royalty and Number Ten, their possession of our ancient cathedrals and what remains of the vast inherited wealth of the mediaeval church. Without these material supports, the Anglican Church would virtually disappear in a single generation, fade into a shadow, like its tragic sister-churches in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. So the Anglican leaders cannot afford to be out of the news: they warm their old bones in the television arc-lights, they clutch at headlines as a drowning man reaches out for a raft. As the actress might have said to the bishop: 'After all, we're both in showbiz these days.'
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