Melanie Phillips the columnist is more articulate apologist in her defense of Christians than the ABC. She fleshed out his comments nicely.  If you examine the responses to RW’s comments it is obvious there is animosity out there toward Christians.

And is anyone saying that the UK government *isn’t* culturally suicidal?

And this excellent column is written by ... a Jewish woman!  Phillips understands the foundations of British culture better than does the leader of the state Christian church.

Ironic, isn’t it, Katherine?

This pervasive hostility to genuine, biblical Christianity is the deep, underlying problem that confronts the Christian Church in all its forms throughout the Global North, even in America, where church attendance is much higher.  The Constantinian or Christendom era is clearly over almost everywhere in the industrialized, secularized, pluralistic West, or at least fading fast where it’s vestiges still remain.

And that REQUIRES a completely new approach to the relationship of Church and Society, since essentially western societies have opted out of the old marriage of Christianity and Western Civilization, and they’ve (mostly covertly) chosen a new spiritual foundation, whether you call it secular humanism, pluralism/relativism, inclusiveness, or whatever you prefer.  We no longer have any real choice; a forthrightly, in-your-face, Christ-against-culture stance is practically dictated by the social powers that be.

And that has very, very far-reaching ramifications for the Christian Church.  Especially for former state church traditions like Anglicanism that will now have to reinvent themselves.

David Handy+
Passionate advocate of post-Christendom style Anglicanism

The Archbishop’s anguish at the onslaught upon Christian faith is very real. But unless he starts promoting the Church as the transcendental custodian of a civilisation rather than the Guardian newspaper at prayer, the society to which it gave rise will continue to sleepwalk off the edge of a religious and cultural cliff.

The key to my mind about this comment is rooted in an understanding of “freedom”.  While the Guardian and others would see “freedom” as pure autonomy, the Gospel of Jesus would ask profound questions first about our forms of slavery and thereafter what our human freedom is FOR, what is its ‘telos’.  Which is where the transcendent enters writ large - something BTW that escapes the delegates’ imagination in Copenhagen ...

The forms of society spawned by the Faith in the North have now quite simply morphed into a perversion of ‘freedom’.  They have cut themselves off from their roots.  That is why the New Reformation Advocate is utterly correct.  So: can the likes of the ABC summon the courage (like Joshua 1) to truly engage?

Unlike U.S. mainstream Churches which, as descendants from the English Puritans, remain deeply wedded to the Biblical tradition, the Church of England has always looked down on true Scriptural believers as half-wits.

With such a half-hearted foundation of religious belief, it has been more vulnerable than other Churches to the secular onslaught against religion.

And ditto for its progeny (TEC, ACofC) in the former North American colonies?  As one who came to Anglicanism from the Reformed tradition, it never ceases to amaze me how biblical literacy, let alone scholarship or (heaven forbid) exegetical preaching is treated with attitudes ranging from pleasant dismissal to outright contempt by many Episcopalians.  This is NOT to say I haven’t found folks who know their Bible, and allow it to nourish and inform their faith.  But I’ve met a LOT who have a real disdain for “fundies,” or whatever they like to label those who actually crack a Bible and profess some real belief in what it might actually say on matters of faith.