The Church of England
Or the lengths to which some men will go to get pussy.
So, bluff King Hal established the Church of England and effected the Protestant Reformation in that country basically as a means to get inside Anne Boleyn.
We all know how that turned out. Why wasn’t he content shagging her sister Mary? She seemed to be a complacent and obliging woman. What more could a man ask for? Was he easily manipulated by that pimp extraordinaire, the Duke of Norfolk who, once both his Boleyn nieces had been used up, one put to pasture, one to the sword, coerced or cajoled another niece, Catherine Howard into the King’s bed. And a fat lot of good that did her.
The King’s pleasure and his desire for an heir gave us The Church of England. What is this Church? As far as I can tell it is Catholicism Lite. They made some changes to the Liturgy, moved the position of the alter, don’t bounce up and down so much during worship and that’s about it. Oh, and the sacrament is figurative and not cannibalistically literal.
These days they have even diluted doctrine and two thousand years of theology to the point that even their own Archbishop, the number two in the entire Church, Stephen Cottrell is questioning established tenets of Christianity.
In 1972 my family moved to England, and I attended a school which at the time was a grammar school but is now independent. One especially interesting change for me having come out of a US public school was the fact that the English school had mandatory chapel two days a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. We had a half day of school on Saturdays which initially was a bit of a shock for me, although I eventually thought that it was not a bad idea as it reduced the amount of potential boredom that adolescent boys might experience by engaging them six days a week. Saturday afternoons were taken up with what the British call games and what Americans call sports.
The chapel was Church of England i.e. Anglican and the school had a permanent Chaplin. Now the C of E is basically the most wishy washy of all the Protestant churches.
Every single Anglican divine I ever met adopted some over the top faux self-effacing attitude. One time when I dropped my glove outside the chapel, the chaplain scurried over to pick it up and when he handed it to me said “Oh, thank you”. Unfortunately, the written word cannot convey the accent or cloying tone of humility with which these words were delivered. Every Anglican divine gives off the impression that he (now she as well) harbors some secret aspiration to be a Christian martyr, like Terry Waite tried to be. Actually, if they burned a few of them at the stake it might reinvigorate the church. At least in the 70s they still believed in God and the central tenets of Christianity.
What the Anglicans have singularly failed to realize is that in the modern world the Church is really part of the entertainment industry and that it has to compete for people’s time and attention. The American churches understand this. It’s one reason why Christianity is the way it is in America. Frankly I’d rather listen to a sermon by a charlatan such as Jim Bakker or Bob Schuler than the namby pamby limp-wristed pablum I’ve heard coming from the pulpit of an Anglican church. For a truly accurate rendition of how cloying an Anglican sermon can be watch Alan Bennet from Beyond the Fringe presenting ‘My brother Esau, he is a hairy man, but I am a smooth man’ It can be found on YouTube at Alan Bennett. My Brother Esau, Beyond The Fringe, 1964 — YouTube.
They do get one thing right, however, and that’s music. There are absolutely fantastic choirs in churches all over England. If you are a tourist in the country, I cannot recommend highly enough that you attend the Sung Eucharist at St Paul’s Cathedral or Southwark Cathedral if in London or Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, or any cathedral anywhere in the country. Listen to the music, commune with God and try to tune out the sermon.
However, let me state that England is not really a Christian country. The true religion of the country is materialism. Also, in keeping with the trend away from established religion these days, about a third of the country now identify their religion as Jedi.
Finally, I love twitting Anglican divines. They are so easy to bamboozle since they are so desperately naive about the world.
To give you an example, in about 2003 I went to listen to the Sung Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. The priest or Bishop or verger or deacon or whatever the fuck he was gave a ridiculous sermon about the war in Iraq about which he clearly knew nothing. As an aside I have tried to read Anthony Trollope's series of novels on Barchester. I think that I got as far as about halfway through Barchester Towers when I had had enough about the 19th Century Church of England as I could stand and gave up.
In any case, as I exited the Cathedral and ran into the Divine, I had to relate to him the following reality about Iraq.
I said, “There is one thing about Iraq that you have to always remember. It was the first country on Earth that Satan ever came to, when he came to Babylon and there was a very good reason that he chose Iraq; it was because the human population there had the greatest potential for him to work with.”
