Moral Leadership

It is of course fatuous to rebuke the Church of England for insufficient concern with the teachings of Jesus. If the Church of England had any belief in the Gospels, it would withdraw from the House of Lords and all its members would be wandering the country without a spare coat, doing psychosomatic conjuring tricks and proclaiming the end of the world. The charge of hypocrisy is a little harder to dismiss, even assuming sufficient faith to blind one to the fact that the Church greeted the onset of the coalition's assault on the poor by calling in the City of London's boot-boys to hose protesters off the steps of St Paul's. Since then the Church has been largely concerned with its various sexual problems; but a mere seven years into the disaster its chief salesman has delivered a sermon against zero-hours contracts and corporate tax-dodgers, only to find, mirabile dictu, that the Church employs people on zero-hours contracts and invests in corporate tax-dodgers. It is of course fatuous to argue that religion and politics should not mix, since both of these ancient professions are intimately concerned with essentially the same issue, namely the profitable duping of our fellow sinners.