That Was the Church that Was by Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead (Bloomsbury Continuum, £16.99)
One of the most perplexing comedy successes of recent years was Rev, a BBC sitcom about an inner-city Church of England vicar. The puzzling thing about Rev was not that Anglicanism should be satirised—the Church of England itself had been doing that for decades—but that an audience existed that was familiar enough with Anglicanism to get the joke.
In their devastating, witty and—for anyone who has ever tried to love the C of E—profoundly melancholy critique, the journalist Andrew Brown and academic Linda Woodhead record the church’s inexorable decline over the past three decades.
In alternately authored chapters, beginning in 1986 when “Protestant Christianity... might not be what you believed in, but it supplied a solid point of reference for what you didn’t believe,” and concluding with the appointment of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013, to preside over a Church whose condition was compared by an Oxbridge chaplain to “the last days of East Germany,” Brown and Woodhead anatomise the schisms of rival evangelical and liberal Anglican factions over women priests and homosexuality, and the catastrophic loss of congregants.
The authors are well informed and stylish writers, with a notable talent for one-line character sketches: Sandy Millar, Old Etonian pillar of the Evangelical Holy Trinity Brompton franchise “started praying in tongues, and... has never stopped since.” But the elegant levity does nothing to disguise the fact that what they report is not farce, but tragedy.
One of the most perplexing comedy successes of recent years was Rev, a BBC sitcom about an inner-city Church of England vicar. The puzzling thing about Rev was not that Anglicanism should be satirised—the Church of England itself had been doing that for decades—but that an audience existed that was familiar enough with Anglicanism to get the joke.
In their devastating, witty and—for anyone who has ever tried to love the C of E—profoundly melancholy critique, the journalist Andrew Brown and academic Linda Woodhead record the church’s inexorable decline over the past three decades.
In alternately authored chapters, beginning in 1986 when “Protestant Christianity... might not be what you believed in, but it supplied a solid point of reference for what you didn’t believe,” and concluding with the appointment of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013, to preside over a Church whose condition was compared by an Oxbridge chaplain to “the last days of East Germany,” Brown and Woodhead anatomise the schisms of rival evangelical and liberal Anglican factions over women priests and homosexuality, and the catastrophic loss of congregants.
The authors are well informed and stylish writers, with a notable talent for one-line character sketches: Sandy Millar, Old Etonian pillar of the Evangelical Holy Trinity Brompton franchise “started praying in tongues, and... has never stopped since.” But the elegant levity does nothing to disguise the fact that what they report is not farce, but tragedy.
