The Anglican Church

esp.with a nice cup of tea and a fancy or two

Good thing my mum didn't find this. Or maybe not, as it's only got four posts.

(God, I love the random thread button.)

Tattoo homosexuals, priest writes

Mr Mullen said: "I certainly have nothing against homosexuals. Many of my dear friends have been and are of that persuasion."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7655585.stm

Wha, is this the thing that was on the cover of one of the free mags on the way home?

"Priest wants gay men tattooed" - what, coz he likes a bit of rough trade? was the first thing that sprung into my head.

Yes, that's it.

He has some interesting views about people "of the Muslim persuasion" too:

http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2008/10/how-not-to-blog-by-church-of-england.html

Not to defend the Anglican Church or anything, but...

Obviously his opinions are shit and stupid and ill informed and reactions - but they're certainly not mainstream UK Anglican belief - as evidenced by the fact that he *is* being disciplined for spouting this shit.

But hey, that's right, religion is responsible for all of men's evils, rather than the other way around...

REACTIONARY not reactions, ugh, I need to go have some supper.

That New Humanist blog post makes it fairly clear that the Bishop of London could have taken action a lot sooner against the bufoon.

Current religious affiliation of England and Wales [St. Mary's University, Twickenham]

Anglican - 19.8%
Catholic - 8.3%
Other Christian - 15.7%
Non-Christian religion - 7.7%
No religion - 48.5%

A spokesperson for the Church of England said: “The increase in those identifying as ‘no faith’ reflects a growing plurality in society rather than any increase in secularism or humanism. We do not have an increasingly secular society as much as a more agnostic one.

“In a global context, adherence to religion is growing rather than decreasing. Christianity remains the world’s largest religion with over 2 billion adherents. In the UK the latest census found the overwhelming majority of people to have a faith.”

Spokesperson is slicing it pretty thin there.

Wondering what the figures are for Scotland and Northern Ireland

Only 7% heathens in NI iirc

That was 2011 and included non-christian god botherers.

Christians still ahead in Scotland, ya beauty!

Church of Scotland - 32.4%
Roman Catholic - 15.9%
Other Christian - 5.5%
Buddhist - 0.2%
Hindu - 0.3%
Jewish - 0.1%
Muslim -1.4%
Sikh - 0.2%
Another Religion - 0.3%
No Religion - 36.7%
Not Answered -7%

why wasn't agnostic on the list

xp when was that? "Findings from the Scottish Social Attitudes survey show 52% of people say they are not religious, compared with 40% in 1999 when the survey began." - that was last month.

p sure i still get counted as a catholic in scotland

despite having lapsed at age 12 and no longer living in the country

such pretty churches tho

Good rave venues.

the distinction between your religion and your precise feelings about a deity and certainty etc. is a good one imo, there are people in the church who would describe themselves as 'christian atheists' and a lot more whose faith and scepticism vacillate while still being very much a part of the church

curious to see at what rate people of other faiths are becoming irreligious/keeping the faith if anyone has any data

the anglican church has fallen such a long way, I think its moral claim to be the established church is very weak, though the british public are seldom sufficiently exercised by the injustice of undeserved power and authority to do anything about it

Well, it would be difficult to do something without having to deal with a more obvious (and more popular) target...

what a day that will be though

about 5 years ago I worked on an Anglican monastic church refurb. The impression I got was that the monks were dripping in money and only wanted the best and most expensive of everything, not very ascetical but it was a pretty shit hot install and I'm sure P Escobar would have approved of some of the way expensive Italian light fittings.

people love giving money to kit out churches, as if a new window or piano will ease them through the eye of the needle when the big day comes

Some places still have tithes. Iirc when I bought my house I had to get insurance against the local church roof falling in.

My cousin is married to an Anglican Dean, I think. I have never been clear on the hierarchy. He seems very positive the church will continue in a fairly socially progressive direction as the cantankerous old Bishops die off.

xp In England, some of it's not voluntary - when you buy a house you're recommended to pay for research to find out if you're in a parish where you might be responsible for upkeep of the church.

The church doesn't have to be nearby - there's a story from 10 years ago of a couple being stung for £100k for repairs of one 100 miles away: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/mid/3023276.stm

For all the Church of Scotland folks, my local (or ex local) church was
Always 30-40 sexagenarians+ each Sunday. And this was a historic church, about 1150ad. I stopped attending because of the churches stance on gay rights - my old minister was very pro, and said she would be willing to marry a gay couple. But the new minister was a bit more conservative, and in Kirkcaldy I got in an argument with the minister because he used a sermon to denounce homosexuals and stress the reality of hell. It's irritating, and I only got baptised about six years ago, so I'm maybe more bolshy than they are used to. I still believe the church can be a great force for good, even if it's been the opposite in the past.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/152217519/Menace-of-the-Irish-Race-to-our-Scottish-Nationality

What's this all about?

Someone in the bell ringers was a sexual abuser?

Allegations concerning the bellringer at the heart of the dispute are believed to date back more than 15 years, and further concerns have emerged more recently.

The York bellringers are a close-knit team, including several members of one family. Last week, the bellringers and their supporters reacted with anger to the dismissals, accusing the minster of behaving in an “unchristian” manner.

It sounds like one of the bellringers was dismissed because of something dodgy in their past and then the others weren't feeling very harmonious about the decision.

it is a volunteer gig, so it isn't like they will need recourse from Bellringers Benevolent Fund. But if they were true christians, they would at least move them on to another church elsewhere to ring the bells:p

John Sentamu has a bot (presumably) that sent me a PM blessing me for following him on twitter. This is a significant step up from prayer wheels on the way to fully automated spirituality

i dunno Sentamu seems like a guy with time on his hands

the thread linked to in this tweet is a rare delicacy

So, last night I was talking at an event with Rowan Williams. I pop into the vestry at the church beforehand and he’s there. The parish priest introduces us:

Me: ‘Hello, a real pleasure to meet you’
The Lord Williams of Oystermouth: ‘Greetings from Thai Sweet Chilli’

AMAZING https://t.co/QPtYz9D0Q7

— Fergus Butler-Gallie (@_F_B_G_) June 11, 2019

lol I knew Dr Francis Young would be referenced on that thread. He's a fellow from English history twitter who sometimes dresses as an Anglican priest to demonstrate the vestments of different eras.

Wow

One day I'll tell you about the time my pal made him say 'minge'

— Jon Mackenzie (@Jon_Mackenzie) June 11, 2019

From the perspective of international Christianity, the Church of England has always struck me as more progressive than most, so this absurdist statement comes as a bit of a surprise to me:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/23/sex-married-heterosexual-couples-church-of-england-christians

Great opening post itt.

C of E is a complicated creature but are they fuck "progressive"

ye might tell me

was or is jerusalem that much of a feature in yer sundays over there as it seems from the outside

pardon my ignorance now if there's shades of english protestantism that isnt anglican that are the more crusadey ones

ok to the things you were surprisingly old when you learned thread

We Americans didn't emphasize it as much in my recollection.

look ive only just also found out there's american anglicans its obviously my evening to reel

but on that note if not the crusades and/or oppressing my people all the way to the far shores of seasonal employment, what exactly is then the character of the yanklican communion? bake sales?

The Episcopalian Church is the official member of the Anglican Communion for the USA and yes bakesales are petty much it, and they are in full communion with the mainstream Lutheran denomination in the US (meaning clergy and laity can mover between churches freely and take the Eurcharist no problem).

There are right-wing “Anglican” churches in the US who don’t belong to the Episcopal Church but instead to some of the more retrograde members of the worldwide Anglican Communion like the Church of Nigeria whete they don’t allow women or gays to preach.

There are Irish Anglicans, couldn't you just ask them about Anglicanism?

Mainline Protestants are adorbs.

if you gave me some names tom

otherwise you'll appreciate it isn't exactly one of our starter questions at dinner parties

tho i am godfather to a fella where the ceremony wasnt one or tother and that appears to have been high anglican catholic and whatever you're having yourself, save for that despite the parents (and presumably child) being vegan the entire affair had no saladin

"hm hello yes which ones are you the ones who did it but are angrier than us about it or the ones who made most of the profit but find the topic rather embarrassing and a bit tiresome now oh excellent excellent yes "

Milo and others- anything after "protestant" is a bit too inside baseball for me save what i know from observing the local variants (as you'll note)

if you've never read A Tale of a Tub that'll cover you for most of the details

we were encouraged to swift only in the abridged versions with the allegory and satire redacted tbh

which essentially meant i was reading jonathan instant tbf

quite right, it's a terribly irreligious book

^ swift tub veteran for truth and reconciliation

mainline Protestants are normcore Christians - your Churches of England, Methodists, etc. as opposed to evangelicals/fundamentalists

In the US mainliners have been in decline for decades, they’re pretty much irrelevant as a political or cultural force.

i do appreciate the detail but honestly

still too inside baseball

us --> them

them--

catholic fundies (us but no thanks)

unionist ones (methodist? angry. culturally embedded. masonry/orange order seems a thing)

anglican (home counties, embarrassed, sing about jerusalem a lot though)

CofE (may actually be the above)

CofI (may also actually be above but cannot say it)

lutheran (ive no idea have we even got these)

methodist (non unionist) (scottish, dont eat a lot, look like less happy proclaimers, probably have reasonable technical skills, get a lot of bbc roving presenter work)

protestant fundies (them but even more into it and without ensuing literary/artistic benefits of any of it)

Jehovahs witnesses (good joke fodder when i was at school, no blood please we're skittish, in my head as close to mormons as we have in our cultural milieu, idk?)

and thats just the christians i know of which i know nothing of

I think Methodists are more North of England and traditionally politically connected with radical/left politics? You've forgotten Presbyterians and there's a lot of those in, er, certain parts of Ireland.

On Presbyterianism, it seems curiously not that well known in Scotland that the English (Charles I to be accurate) tried to impose Anglicanism in Scotland and the Scots won two subsequent wars to ensure that didn't happen - which also helped kick off the train of events and wars that led to Charles losing his head.

John Wesley, founder of Methodism:

Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly; from that age make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it

ah i did know presybterianism it just got folded into methodists because well i admit im struggling

are they the severe scots then

who are the methodists

dont know if this will help but the UK labour party was often said to be made up half of methodists half of marxists

my mum would sometimes talk abt "primitive methodists" -- technical term in the history of religious dispute in the uk tho to me this was just a rude way of describing those as lived two miles across in bomere heath

are they the severe scots then

One of them but still not severe enough for some people!

Frank Delaney seemed to think that CoI and anglicans weren’t Protestant but some form of catholic light. This chimes with my school Chaplin (Westminster abbey) who used to snigger about going off to ‘smells and bells’ church -> some kind of crypto catholic mischief within the Anglican communion.

Not wanting to deadname someone formerly of this parish but they always used to say than ‘in the Anglican Church we don’t worship god we worship England’.

In short it’s a church for priest holes and for those who want to feel out priest holes.

My gg grandfather was an Irish Methodist from Strabane, who emigrated to Canada after serving in the Royal Fusiliers in the 1850s. I know nothing further about him apart from profession (farmer) and number of children (14, at least three of whom became doctors). I’m named after his wife Susannah, whose family were also Irish Methodists but from somewhere in Leinster.

I fell off the Frank Delaney novel sequence when he tried to recreate Smokey and the bandit 2 with a giraffe. So he may be an unreliable theologian.

my mum was also very taken with the story of the street trader jenny geddes throwing a stool at the head of the minister reading in 1637 from the newly imposed scottish prayer book (as cited above: a mark of scottish resistance to stuart high anglicanism and a harbinger of the english civil war)

i can't find actual the picture of it she liked best (it's from a children's history book): here's a more charmless version from wikipedia

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Witnessesfortru00unkngoog_0082JanetGeddes.png

tbf to my mum i don't think she cared much abt the politico-religious implications, she just liked thinking abt throwing objects at the vicar's head

your mum otm

Primitive Methodism

Thought it was “stool” and not “a stool”

look ive only just also found out there's american anglicans its obviously my evening to reel

Some freaks aside, being raised Episcopalian was very chill in my upbringing, which only happened because my dad's dad was raised Catholic, my dad's mom was Quaker, and the Episcopalian church was the one nearest to where their house was. My mom didn't care much either way and was/is essentially atheist but enjoys Christmas vibes. Regularly served as an acolyte in during high school but after I went to college, after a vague "I wonder where the nearest denominational church is around here" impulse when settling in at UCLA, I just shrugged it off. This is why I am perfectly simpatico with what I call an Anglican guilt complex, because it doesn't exist; my dad still happily attends and helps at the local denomination and is very comfortable with his faith but has zero time for fundamentalists and idiots.

My parents were married in an Episcopal church in my dad’s original home town, and I was baptised/christened in one in my mom’s home town.

big fan of vibes-based religious communities that involve hanging out with gentle squares and enjoying holidays and not succumbing to some kind of toxic bigotry

My brother was baptized Episcopalian but then I wasn’t baptized at all, we never stepped foot in a church and not a word about religion was ever spoken. Not sure if my brother got dipped to make a grandma happy or what.

i was raised liberal american catholic (when that was a thing that existed), later was "received" into the episcopalian church... the episcopalians don't call it "conversion" if you were a catholic, to them it's like, look you were already obviously a christian, you're just joining our particular church. in america at least they make no claims to being the "one true church". they gave me a copy of the book of common prayer, but like...

you know how catholicism has all of these things that aren't _technically_ rules, like "humanae vitae"? episcopalians are kind of like that. like "yeah here's what it says, interpret that however you want, this shit is complicated". communion, for instance. the idea i had of the prods is that they didn't believe in transubstantiation, that they thought it was symbolic, but the episcopalians are like "you know what, some of us believe in literal transubstantion, some of us think it's symbolic. you do you."

there's this phrase that gets used on tvtropes, "shrug of god"... with the episcopalians, that's pretty much literally true.

that said the impression i get is that episcopalians are a lot more "progressive" than the anglican synod as a whole. when i was a member the episcopalians were on Super Secret Double Probation for being really in favor of gay rights.

mainline protestants are ok mostly. when i was an episcopalian one of the clergy there - i don't know, not the vicar, but something - she was a lesbian, but a lot of the people there didn't know that. she was open about it, but not to the point where she shouted it from the pulpit. ultimately that was why i left, i think it's the kind of thing we should be shouting from pulpits. mainline prods don't roll like that. mainline prods are like "everyone is welcome!" which is cool except for the bit where they welcome the folks who want me dead. i understand not wanting to start a holy war, but if someone believes that my existence is an affront to god, i got a hard time considering them one of my brothers and/or sisters in christ.

in terms of services, the episcopalians are kind of more catholic than catholic. my understanding is that in the 19th century there was this guy named john henry newman, and he was a key mover in the Oxford Movement, which was basically him saying that the Anglicans should do things more like the Catholics do. by the time he did the inevitable and just fucking converted to Catholicism, the Anglicans had already completely redone their worship services and weren't going to going to change back. most of the people who preferred things the old way had probably become methodists or something in the meantime. the thing is, then the Catholics had Vatican II, and the Anglicans for obvious reasons didn't. nobody does latin mass or anything but they had this little guard rail up so that we couldn't cross over to the altar and we knelt to receive communion

the church i went to was definitely High Church, i'd just come from being a unitarian universalist and i left because there was no fucking hierarchy at all, which meant that there was constant drama. episcopalians had plenty of structure. mainline protestants are very Old Money. like, the church i went to got a grant in the 1970s and they'd been funding their operations since off the interest from that grant. that's the other reason i left, i found out that's how they kept things going and i was like "well that doesn't sound very christ-like".

that said i think they got a legit argument for doing things that way. my transfem support group meets in one of the rooms at a local mainline protestant church - methodist, i think, but same thing. the episcopalian church and some certain variety of methodist church are "in communion", i remember, which i think means that the denominations mutually recognize each other as christian. the episcopalians recognize catholics as christian, but Catholicism is of course the One True Church. well, that's not fair, the holy see is always making it clear that they're happy to welcome any church that believes and practices Christianity in the exact same way they do. very ecumenical of them.

my experience of the mainline prods that are still around is that they have these big churches and a well-organized national and international infrastructure and money to maintain them and no, like, parishioners. i was looking on my queer social calendar and in the off week from my support group they were hosting an Introduction to Rope Bondage workshop. i've been to that workshop, though not at that particular church. it was a good workshop. as much as in theory i am like, we should liberate these structures on behalf of the international proletariat, the truth is they do a pretty good job keeping the place going, and they're better-disposed towards us than the government. i have a hard time actually getting mad at them, whether or not institutional christianity systemically promotes patriarchal ideals blah blah blah. i mean at least they don't have a problem with institutional child abuse. i'm not sure how they could, honestly - i was just about the youngest person at the episcopalian church i went to when i was 40.