Let me begin by quoting some words which I wrote in my Rock article in February 2000. There I said:

what we are not at liberty to do, is to say that if some popular belief appears to be at variance with the truth which God has revealed to us in and through Jesus Christ, then revealed truth must be disguised, or hidden or explained away in order to help the mythical Joneses of this age the more easily to swallow what's left.

I went on, you may remember, to examine one such “popular belief”, namely that the chief end of man is no longer seen as being "to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever” as the Westminster Confession so lucidly put it, but has instead become the personal achievement by everyone of his (or her) optimal endstate, in whose attainment the glory of God has little or no part to play.

This month I want us to look rather more closely at another related popular beliefs.

It's the idea that what people popularly understand by democracy will somehow, of itself, ensure that the greatest degree of happiness will be enjoyed by the greatest number of people.

To see that this is not necessarily so we have only to go back to the roots of democracy in Athens during the 5th century BC. There (in theory at any rate) the whole "people" met together to make laws and to direct executive officers to see that they were carried out.

No doubt Direct Democracy (as this is called) satisfied a large number of people. It had, however, to the modern mind, one serious flaw: two-thirds of the population were slaves and therefore took no part in the democratic process at all. Nor, one supposes, was their happiness as great as that of their free contemporaries.

So Direct Democracy clearly will not do in the modern world, necessitating as it does a well-educated, leisured and responsible ruling class who act, supposedly, in the interests of everyone else.

Direct Democracy has therefore given way to Indirect Democracy, whereby the people (and that means every right-minded adult) entrusts the power of government to elected representatives to exercise on their behalf as they think best. The only official redress that the electors have is that of being able to choose different representatives after a period of time, perhaps three, five or seven years. Unofficially of course, there are a number of other levers of power which can be pulled, thereby effectively cutting down to size those representatives who grow too big for their boots.

It will immediately be seen that this system of Indirect Democracy guarantees precisely nothing. It may indeed be preferable to government-by-dictatorship, or anarchy, and, as such, it is something to be cherished and protected wherever it is seen to be in danger, whether from Trade Unions, Corporates, religious leaders, or even the danger of its own self-perpetuation. But to look upon democracy as some kind of magic process which will guarantee health, wealth and happiness for all is wholly unrealistic.

Yet this is in fact precisely what many people in the United Kingdom are doing at the present time. In the recent round of local elections, the turnout in many constituencies was less than 20% of those entitled to vote! Even the more conscientious parts of the country achieved no more than 40%. The truth of the matter is that providing most people feel they are receiving a reasonable proportion of the national cake, or, if not, perceive that their vote won't make any difference to the way the country is governed and the cake divided, they simply will not take the trouble to involve themselves in the only way in which the system enables them exercise their choice.

As A.L. Rowse said in An Elizabethan Garland (page 159) many years ago:

Naturally, with the erosion of standards that comes with the emergence of the masses, with the democratic assumption that everybody's opinion is as good as anybody else's about anything – a nonsensical assumption that we do not act upon in regard to our health, or we should soon be dead – with the lack of appreciation of quality, the absence of standards, so that people do not know what is good from what is bogus (and it is increasingly difficult for people to tell in the arts) – there follows a curious consequence. Whatever anyone writes or does or composes or constructs, there is no reverberation. It makes no difference what he says; for all the effect it has, he might as well save his breath.

Sounds familiar? It is, I suggest, precisely what the Church of God has been contending with, largely unsuccessfully, since the 1960s and perhaps some time before that.

The God of Scripture and the Jesus of the Gospels do not appear to have set much store by democracy in any shape or form. The God of Israel raised up Patriarchs, Judges, Kings, Prophets, Priests with what many people nowadays would see as being a shameful disregard to such considerations as "fairness" or "merit". Jesus Christ chose apostles according to criteria known only to himself, and it is not improbable as each new recruit joined the apostolic college that the existing members asked themselves "why on earth did the Master choose him, for goodness sake!" Whatever we understand Jesus to have meant by "your have only one Father, the heavenly One... and only one "Leader, the Christ" he was certainly not showing himself in favour of the democratic, Buggins-Turn Principle, in which everyone "has a go at being in charge" as present-day Political Correctness considers not only desirable but demanded by the principles of "Natural Justice". A more profoundly undemocratic body than the Church of God as portrayed in the New Testament would be hard to imagine. Such votes as they took were probably confined to questions such as "shall we have meat or fish for dinner today?"

During the twentieth century, however, the move to "bring democracy to the church" gathered momentum. In 1919 the Enabling Act was passed by the British Parliament, giving rise to the Church Assembly, Parochial Church Councils, Diocesan and Deanery Conferences and a great deal more beside. More recently, the whole process of Government by Synod was introduced and the process of "democratization" was more or less complete.

Or was it? It became apparent fairly quickly that, on the whole, the people who stood for and got elected to the various "democratic" bodies fell into three broad categories. All three had to have the money, time and leisure to travel to and attend the thrice-yearly sessions of Convocation/Church Assembly/General Synod, That being said, the groups consisted of:

1 The Conscientious: There were those who really believed that they represented "the way forward" for the Church of England. they took part from a sense of duty.

2 The Opportunists: Those who had a particular agenda to set forward or axe to grind for whom these meetings were a ready-made opportunity for doing so.

3 The Performers: Mostly clergy, who liked nothing better than the chance which these occasions gave to hold the floor in front of a captive audience. It was largely thanks to such people that the debates were conducted with a high degree of decorum, and levelling devastating critiques at one's opponents, under the guise of making polite remarks about them, became one of the fine arts of debate.

Now, it takes only a little insight to realise that such a group of people was about as far removed from being "representative" as it is possible to be. Had the business of these gatherings been confined to discussing matters of little or no importance (which for the most part they were) then not much harm would have come of it all.

However, the time came when such bodies, General Synod (post-1970) in particular, began to imagine itself as competent to decide what was, and what was not, the will of God for his Church. The fact that most of the members knew next to nothing about theology, church history, liturgy, morality or ecclesiology was not seen as in any way disqualifying them from taking part in debates, and casting votes on matters which few of them could understand.

Indeed one sometimes heard it said how valuable was the contribution which the inexpert had to make. Were they not far closer to the Man-in-the-Street whom the Church of England, despite all its efforts, was so remarkably unsuccessful in persuading to cross its threshold? Wasn't half the problem due to the fact that Bishops and Clergy spoke a language which nobody else could understand? Well, here was the opportunity. Only let the People speak and the Man-in-the-Street will be bound to listen.

Unfortunately it didn't quite work out like that. The Man-in-the-Street, unlike his would-be missionaries, had the intelligence to see that what was being offered him bore little or no resemblance to what he understood the Christian faith to be about.

He may not have liked the truth which the Faith tried to teach him at school or in bible-class; he may have privately decided that it was based on the highly unlikely premise that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself; he may have known himself to have broken every commandment in the Decalogue not excluding coveting his neighbour's ass. But at least he knew that what the Church was on about was something called Sin and that, in the Church's terms he himself was a sinner. It's true, he may have decided to remain in that state rather than run the risks involved in looking more carefully at the gift of God being offered to him through faith in Jesus Christ. The fact remains that he was under far less illusions than his grandson is today about the state of his own immortal soul.

The outcome was predictable. Once having acquired a taste for doctrine-making-on-the-hoof, complemented by a supposedly unerring insight into what the Man-in-the-Street really wants, the Synodical Mind found that it was only a short step towards producing a religion which was tailor-made to the needs of his protégé, T.C. Mits Esq., The Celebrated Man In The Street..

What was this religion? Well, in a sense there can be no "was" or "is" about it since, like the Man-in-the-Street it must be an ever-changing, chameleonesque creature. Since it is axiomatic that the two must always be able to fit together it is, needless to say, simpler to change the religion to suit T.C. Mits rather than vice versa.

However, there are certain broadly-based principles with which any Synodically-Minded theology must comply:

1 Whatever else God is, he is always understanding. That means that the fear of the Lord is a wholly out-dated concept based on a patriarchally conditioned superstition.

2 Since God is understanding, he is therefore well able to imagine the reasons for our actions. That means that, in the last analysis, he is bound to forgive us any sins we may have committed. That rules out the possibility of everlasting damnation. It also behoves us to give others an infinitude of "second-chances" no matter how often they fail to avail themselves of them.

3 God is fair. That means that fairness, above all, must be the keynote of whatever we do. If one parish has more money than another, whether because it has been diligent in its spending or is in a more affluent neighbourhood then it must be forced to let the diocese redistribute it as it sees fit. In that way nobody will have more than anyone else.

4 The basic unit of administration is the diocese presided over by one benevolent person, the Bishop, advised by a Council largely of his own choosing. The diocese is a large enough unit to be self-supporting, but not so large that any reasonably competent Bishop and his Council cannot keep effective control over it.

5 In an Age of Transition (such as ours) it is inevitable that moral principles must be adapted to suit the wishes of the clientèle. Since racism, sexism, bigotry or discrimination are undoubtedly the biggest current threat to people's happiness then campaigns must be relentlessly mounted against them. At the same time we must be endlessly tolerant towards those whose nature and lifestyle is different from our own. To suggest that anyone's lifestyle or beliefs (apart from those of the racist/sexist/bigot, of course) may actually be displeasing to God is the height of impropriety.

6 Since it stands to reason that in the end all religions are leading us in the same direction, it is wholly inappropriate to try and persuade those of other beliefs that they may actually be wrong. We should rather be affirming them in their perception of the Truth whilst at the same time learning from them everything we can.

7 In the end there can be no losers and no winners. "All have won, therefore all must have prizes" as one Dodo so memorably put it.

It's possible, of course, go on and on and on ad infinitum in this way, but these Seven Stones of Synodthink should be enough to give some idea of where the whole thing is leading.

Like most other sins, Synodthink stems from pride. It has its origine in the wholly-miguided belief that somehow a revealed-by-God faith must necessarily be inferior to one which we have discovered for ourselves.

Once that dogma (for that is what it is) has gained a hold in people's minds then it begins to colonize them to the extent that anything which runs contrary to it must be wrong. Once the peacock spreads his tail it's only a short step to his imagining that God is saying "Who's a pretty boy, then!" to him all the time.

What the Church of England (and by association the whole Anglican Communion) needs more than anything else is a good dose of humility. In a later article I hope to be able to describe some of the ways in which that is already coming to pass.

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