It was in 1917 that the high-born suffragette Maude Royden coined that oft-quoted phrase linking the Church of England and the Tories: “The Church should go forward along the path of progress and be no longer satisfied only to represent the Conservative Party at prayer.” Over a century later, one might imagine the very opposite complaint: that the Church should no longer be satisfied to be only the Labour Party at prayer. That little world “only” being rather important in both cases, for if the Church of England is to be, in any credible sense, the church of the English people, there is something highly troubling about it having been captured so thoroughly by one political perspective.
A survey just out reveals only 6% of Church of England clergy admitted to voting Tory at the last election, whereas a whopping 40% voted Labour, believing that Jeremy Corbyn would make a better prime minister. Yes, it is a very small survey, but even accounting for a considerable margin of error, this is a remarkable finding. Indeed, what is also fascinating is how the number for Pentecostal church leaders was so dramatically different: among this group 49% voted Conservative whereas just 12% voted Labour.
This is especially interesting given that Pentecostal churches are predominantly made up of black Christians. Yes, IPSOS found that only 20% of BAME voters in general went for the Tories, but of that 20%, I’d bet a very high percentage were what the press likes to call “very religious”. And even disregarding that, it seems that minority voters are over three times as likely to vote Tory than the clergy of the Church of England.
As a recently Tory-voting clergyman in a black-majority, inner-city parish in the Church of England, I am unsurprised at these figures — both by the voting patterns of my fellow Anglicans and by those of our Pentecostal brothers and sisters, some of whom we share our church building with. It is clearly now the Pentecostal churches that have become the Tory party at prayer.
But what on earth happened to the C of E?
Historically, the Tory Party and the established Church were joined at the hip. But the sort of vision that once united them — a kind of gentle, originally rural, communitarianism, under God and the Queen — has been abandoned by both sides, the Tories becoming more libertarian, the Church more progressive. Whereas both were once brought together by the idea of human beings flourishing when rooted in community, over time both progressives and libertarians came to agree with each other that this was little more than some fusty bogus nostalgia, with one side exiting stage Left, the other stage Right.
That the Church should lean to the Left makes a certain kind of sense. It quite rightly recognises a Gospel imperative to care for the poor. But what makes less sense, to me at least, is that this imperative can best be realised by abandoning the idea of human rootedness in community and replacing it with an issues-based identity politics that can be achieved by campaigns run from head office. This is the core of what is behind the current debates within the Church about the role of the parish. Perhaps this is also why I think of myself as a Tory Socialist — a strange beast admittedly, but one put together by what I take to be the internal and historical logic of the Church that I love and serve.
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