Damon is an apprentice devil tasked with learning to undermine and weaken the Church of England and wider Anglicanism. Lucius is a senior devil mentoring apprentices overseeing the work on all denominations. Lucius refers to the Church of England as the ‘English Patient’. Lucius is particularly keen to encourage the Church of England’s peculiar ecclesionomics, bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats. Lucius draws on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, published in 1942. These letters are published by Lucius for the benefit of new apprentices. – Lucius.
Living in Love and Faith
Dear Lucius
I am a bit fretful about the Church of England’s handling of same-sex blessings, equal marriage and human sexuality. My predecessors seem to have been much more successful in causing major car crashes at Lambeth Conferences and General Synods, engineering lengthy bitter rows over gay bishops, winding up right-wing clergy to say that AIDS-HIV was God’s wrath, and generally creating a climate for moral debate that was about as civil and constructive as Game of Thrones meets Warhammer.
Those were the days! The Conservative Evangelicals took no prisoners, and the Traditionalist Catholics had their don’t-ask-don’t-tell strategy which was very carefully managed with lashings of gin and lots of lace. And everyone could blame the liberals because they were the only ones talking about sexuality.
I am getting a little bit worried now, because it turns out that quite a lot of Conservative Evangelicals who were purportedly promoting orthodox views about sexuality were actually a different prospect in practice. And some of the Traditionalist Catholics seemed to have the same problem, namely saying one thing but doing another. The liberals still got the blame, however, which is of course a great result for us. The last thing we want is an honest, progressive church. God save us from that. Well, not God, obviously. I mean The One whose Name Must Not Be Spoken.
Anyway, I worry that the Church of England might be making progress. I am not sleeping too well at the moment, because I think there might be some kind of uneasy truce brewing. Can you put my mind at ease?
Your Servant, Damon
Dear Damon,
Yes. I can put your mind at ease. There might be an uneasy truce in the air, but it will cause more harm than good, and only deepen the divisions in the church. Your English Patient lacks the capacity to make a moral decision unless it secures 100% of the vote, so it is constantly hunting around for concessions and compromise. This VIABLE Church – a Very Important And Big Long-term Enterprise – is hell-bent (sadly, not literally!) on pleasing everybody, so ends up pleasing nobody. You honestly don’t need to worry.
Whilst the Glory Days of huge public rows at General Synod and Lambeth Conferences over sexuality are gone, you must remember that this was back in the day when the public and the press were a lot more engaged in the goings on of the Church of England. I look back with great pride at the attempt of a visiting overseas bishop to exorcise the demon on sexuality from an LGCM campaigner during a Lambeth Conference. That was a huge coup for us.
But it is important to see that the long-term impact of these earlier PR triumphs is that the press would not bother to report this kind of thing now. The pubic knows that on sexuality and gender, and quite a lot else, the Church of England is a basket case. The indifference of the press and the public is our victory. Nobody expects your English Patient to talk any sense on these matters or give any kind of moral lead to the nation. It is not even interesting to watch Conservative Evangelicals posturing to the tiny remnant remaining in the Church, trying to persuade listeners that if biblically conservative views on sexuality were restored, people would soon be queuing to get into worship services to hear more sermons selling Old Fashioned Certainty by the pint.
Personally, I think you should be encouraged by how the Church of England leadership is handling the debates on sexuality. It is laced with delays, anti-democratic, indecisive, and deliberatively diabolical. We could hardly do better. The bishops are showing us their best side – vacillating, mercurial, political, lacking any moral courage and compass, and also secretive and totally unaccountable. And we haven’t bribed one of them – honest! We don’t have an Insider or Double Agent fermenting this self-destructive behaviour.
We are truly blessed here – through obviously not ‘blessed’ in the way that the Other Side means! But it is amazing to think that after all the nasty rows and fireworks in sexuality debates over many decades, the Church of England’s leadership just decides to internalise its disagreements.
So, don’t worry about the lack of noisy bitter infighting on sexuality spilling across the pages of the press. The media are bored by the church, and very v jaded by its fearfulness and indecision. The good news for us is that your English Patient has really ceased to be news. It has become an irrelevance. To be honest, you’d need a very slow press day to carry a report on some wacko conservative Christian prattling on about biblical family values (minus the concubines, polygamy and slaves, obviously), trying to convince the general population there are only a few positions on sex that God really favours, and all the others merit a proper good stoning.
The really good thing about sex and your English Patient is that they just can’t bear to talk about it, at least in public. It is not a good look for a body preening and positioning itself to be so VIABLE: a Very Important And Big Long-term Enterprise in the public eye.
So, they’ve decided to take the subject behind closed doors and talk in private for an unspecified period. Those inside the locked room imagine that everyone else outside is waiting for some sight of the proverbial White Smoke. But in fact, everyone has either fallen into a coma, decided to snooze and catch up on a boxset of Death In Paradise (series 1-3), or just quietly gone home, despairing of the moral vacuum. By the time the bishops have anything to say, there will be nobody left for them to talk too.
Leave them to it, Lucius. The leadership are their own worst enemy.
Your Mentor, Lucius.
‘A statement to the diocese from the Bishop of Down and Dromore’
11 June 2025 expresses the concern of-‘Rt Rev David McClay’-about a lesbian bishop visiting and speaking in a Dublin cathedral. But is David ‘Rt’ or ‘Rev’ about situations he deals with in his own diocese? Or has he covered up some serious bullying and harm to innocent people?
David might struggle (or be forced to resign in disgrace) if a formal inquiry explored the disappearance of former ministry trainees in suspicious circumstances (James Hardy, Robert Graham, Joe Turner). Senior education professionals or teachers (Prof Helen Roe of QUB and Jill McClelland) were disgusted by the way evidence of disgusting student ill-treatment was not addressed by David McClay.
‘Creation-Conscience-Christ’ were the three key elements, when an old Church of Ireland Canon, recently deceased, presented Apostle’s Creed belief to my school class. Now we have fundamentalist fanaticism running amok. But clerical narrow mindedness can undermine public credibility in the central message of the Church. What do atheist or agnostic observers make of Bishop David McClay’s statement of alarm about a US lesbian bishop speaking at a Pride event in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral?
Whatever any person’s angle on male vs female bishops (or bishop’s sexual practices) is there a danger of people like David McClay naively gifting the media a chance to profile the institutional Church as a marriage and fertility cult? David McClay should pay far more attention to John Chapter 4, and to Matthew 22:30. He should also read this statement by KRWLAW legal firm: ‘Neely abuse: Church of Ireland Bishop ‘apologises’ for unnamed rector – ignoresBelfast-Tipperary transfer’.
A lesbian bishop getting invited to speak at a cathedral event will trouble some Anglicans. But was more harm done to the Church’s reputation by the cover-up of serious child abuse for almost 50 years? Why can Bishop David McClay not formally name Neely as an abuser, and invite further victims to come forward?