The Bluestocking, vol 230

dog-friendly with Fairtrade biscuits

Happy Friday!

This week I went to Hawksmoor and learned the calorie counts of my favourite sauces. It was a sad week. How do you even fit 570 calories into a small pot of hollandaise? These guys should be working on supplies for the space shuttle.

Helen

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Richard Coles. Photo: Tom Barnes for the Sunday Times

Richard Coles on retiring as a vicar (Sunday Times, £)

As more parishes tip into unviability, the trouble for me is that the least viable are the ones I like most. The Church of England I love is a church of liberal sympathies, of broad inclusion, beautiful worship, wise preaching, dog-friendly with Fairtrade biscuits, and when it comes to orthodoxy would rather its members were not Goneril or Regan, proclaiming their zealous devotion, but Cordelia, confessing her love. The churches that are viable — by that I mean growing in numbers and income — tend to be conservative, punchy, fundamentalist in matters of scripture, rigorous in matters of doctrine, and about as likely to offer choral evensong as I am to do the 400m hurdles.

Some of my friends, and many faithful Christians, are at home in churches like these, but if the future Church of England looks exclusively like that, I cannot see myself in it. This is not only because I find the worship not to my taste and the culture less congenial. I think I could live with all that if I had to — I have just been doing the clapping bit in Shine Jesus Shine with the kids for our school Easter service — but really because they are places where gay people are not welcome, and that rules me out. Not only me. In the past few months I have had a growing number of inquiries from same-sex couples dismayed to discover their relationships do not qualify for a blessing, or asking for reassurance that their kids in church schools will not be made to feel awkward for having two dads or two mums. The former I am not permitted to do [the Church of England does not recognise same-sex marriages]; the latter I am unable to, I am sorry to say. Things change, we are told; play the long game, and I have. But now I see change shifting more to exclusion than inclusion.

A really beautiful piece by the Rev Richard Coles on leaving the parish he has served since 2011, and moving across the country to a new home and a new life (without his partner, who died in 2019).

I also chose it because of the allusion he makes to the growth in evangelical churches, and their frequent more . . . hardline attitude to homosexuality. I’ve been talking to various Catholics recently for a documentary, and it’s noticeable to me how much even that church’s attitude has changed in my lifetime. For want of a better word, there’s less brimstone in it.

Not so in some of the evangelical mega-churches, which brings me to our next item. . .

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The Future of British Christianity Is African (Unherd)

You have to go to London, especially the inner-city, to find England’s most vigorous forms of Christianity. It is largely West African immigrants who fill the pews of decaying churches from Peckham to Woolwich, who renovate new churches in Brixton and Lewisham, and who volunteer for Christian centres and charities up and down the capital. If you want a solid sense of the sacred, a connection to Britain’s ancient Christian past, you are more likely to find it while eating jollof rice in a big tent in Kennington than eating a Yorkshire pudding in a small room in Harrogate.

This is not a utopian vision of liberal multiculturalism. London is the most cosmopolitan city in Britain. We all know that. But it’s also the most religious and socially conservative city in the country. 62% of Londoners, for instance, identify as religious, compared with 53% of the rest of the country. 25% of Londoners attend a religious service at least once a month; only 10% of people outside London do. 24% of Londoners think sex before marriage is wrong, compared to 13% of the population. London is the most homophobic city in the country: 29% of people in London think homosexuality is wrong, while 23% outside London think this.

Superb piece by Tom Owolade (think I have worn out those keys on my keyboard) which starts with Bukayo Saka—the England footballer whose Instagram name is “God’s child”—as an example of an “out” Christian in British public life, a category of which Richard Coles feels himself a rare example. Turns out he’s just a rare white example.

The socially conservative views of immigrant communities originally from west Africa and Muslim-majority countries are an important, but under-discussed, force in British politics. That’s a shame. We can’t understand contemporary political trends without breaking the reflexive assumption that diverse = liberal, or without taking into the account the role of religion in shaping social attitudes.

Take this sentence from Owen Jones’s column on LGBT “conversion therapy”, which contains some horrifying personal stories of abuse and coercion: “Pre-pandemic polling by Galop showed that one in five Britons still think being LGBTQ+ is immoral, and one in 10 thought LGBTQ+ people were a danger to others.”

Those figures deserve a closer look. I can’t find any good data on LGBT attitudes broken down by race or religion in the UK, but my hunch is that, given the figures Tom Owolade cites, and the anecdotal evidence we have from people on the ground like Richard Coles, contemporary anti-LGBT views are often driven by religion—whether Christianity or Islam— and they’re often held by people who aren’t white. (The resulting moral waters are presumably too murky for Owen Jones, who would rather claim it’s all the fault of Mumsnet.)

One of the few politicians to show interest in shifting opinion within minority communities is Sadiq Khan, who has consciously tried to model open, devout and moderate Islam, and has bodyguards as a result¹. (I can’t think of an equivalent example from the African Christian diaspora, so write in if I’ve missed someone obvious.) We need more politicians and public figures who can speak to deeply religious communities with authority and authenticity, and shift their opinion on the “immorality” of being LGBT.

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Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses

Bluestocking Recommends: Slow Horses (Apple TV). Beyond my professional interest in screen adaptations, I was curious to watch this because I loved the Mick Herron series on which it is based. Gary Oldman is an appropriately gross-looking Jackson Lamb, and they’ve kept all the farting (apologies if this makes no sense, but if you know, you know) which I predicted was the main artistic challenge here.

The TV series has stayed faithful to the books’ grounding in a sense of place—both the feng shui disaster that is Slough House, and to grubby, glittering London as a city—while toning down some of the broader comic elements that wouldn’t work on screen, like the dumbass terrorist henchmen. It’s not high art but I don’t want high art at 8pm on a Tuesday. I want strong characters, tense reversals—and, apparently, farting. Sam West is also great as a politician full of clownish, booming bonhomie who can flick in a millisecond into pure menace.

At their best, Herron’s books are masterpieces of misdirection. For that reason, I enjoyed the Guardian review complaining about the paint-by-numbers story and performances, before concluding with a confident—and completely wrong—prediction about what would happen in episode three.

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Quick Links

1. Stephen Bush on why generations aren’t real. “One reason why boomers in the UK have become the electoral shock troops of the right is that their greater health and longevity compared to their parents and grandparents means that wealthy boomers live longer. But as boomers begin to die off, the great bulge of boomer inheritances will reshape politics: and reveal that, actually, the real divide in British politics is, still, about who owns assets.” (FT, but click here for some odd bootleg/syndicated version with no paywall).

2. “When Chloe woke up from an elective double mastectomy, she texted her mother in the waiting room: ‘Booba gone.’ This was a little over two years ago. She was 15 at the time.” I remain unconvinced that history will endorse the project of encouraging teenagers to remove their breasts as liberatory and progressive. (Common Sense, Substack)

3. “Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 82. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is 80. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is a comparative spring chicken at 71, though that makes him considerably older than every single member of the first Senate.” David Graham on Washington’s aged politicians. (The Atlantic)

4. Puzzle mania: Bluestocking reader Wareham Photographer recommends “Cladder”.

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Self-promotion zone: My interview with Henry Oliver of the Common Reader is out: here is a link to the audio version and a transcript. In the course of an hour, we somehow covered my entire life and work, plus: why Mary II needs a biographer, why I hold an anti-Callaghan animus, how Barbara Castle was the template for Thatcher, how WWII changed men (and how that was good for feminism), the most under-rated contemporary politicians, what I’ve learned from Laura McInerney’s career as “the shark of education”, and why journalism is too hung up on credentials.

See you next time!

1. What Sadiq Khan is doing is just as much addressed at white British voters as British Muslims, in my view—trying to demystify Islam for people who rarely encounter Muslims except through stories about terrorists or “child abuse gangs”. Disclosure: Khan once invited me and some other journalists for iftar at his house before he ran for London mayor. Full disclosure: it was delicious.