Searching for God # 101

 That there is a growing sense of alienation amongst the white working class is evident; what is not sufficiently recognised is their sense of betrayal by the church.

At one time the Church of England and other mainstream churches stood at the heart of many working-class communities. No longer; over the past half-century many working-class people have come to feel that the church no longer connects with them or their values. They have become alienated from the church, and more importantly from Christ.

In industrial Britain, the parish church or chapel offered moral structure, social events, education, and welfare before the welfare state existed. Churches, chapels and missions were deeply intertwined with labour movements and mutual aid. Nonconformist chapels in particular played a major role in organising communities and promoting self-respect and social reform.

As industries and communities declined from the 1970s onwards, church attendance also fell. In response the church chose, instead of evangelism, to close, merge or repurpose once-busy churches. The community anchor disappeared. For many, this felt like an abandonment of the very people who had once built and sustained the church.

The Church of England in particular has become increasingly perceived as a middle-class, educated, southern institution, more comfortable in Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster than in the working-class parishes of Middlesbrough or Bradford.

Clergy today are too often seen as representing liberal, metropolitan values. People who speak the language of inclusivity and internationalism rather than concerns about stability, family and belonging. When bishops speak out on national issues, Brexit, immigration or race their tone often reflects liberal metropolitan priorities rather than the concerns of ordinary parishioners. The church hierarchy is often seen as distant, focusing on abstract moral or global issues such as climate change, diversity and international aid, rather than local deprivation, addiction or unemployment.

The church has moved from preaching sin and salvation to lecturing on social justice. Many working-class people have felt alienated by the shift from traditional moral teaching to progressive activism. Traditional values have been neglected, if not dismissed as belonging to a bygone age. Working-class communities often value tradition, patriotism and moral clarity; all too often they don’t get it from the church.

The church’s growing emphasis on progressive causes, gender identity, multiculturalism, migration and climate activism, is out of step with the priorities of the white working class. For many the church no longer offers transcendent meaning and purpose, instead it offers social commentary.

In the face of rapid demographic and cultural change many white working-class communities perceive the church as embracing multiculturalism and interfaith outreach in a way that neglects their own identity and traditions.

From Anglican.ink, in a piece entitled, ‘The church’s woke betrayal of the white working class’  by Campbell Campbell-Jack, November 25, 2025

A similar argument is being carried in The Telegram, today, March 28, 2026, as well as in the publication www.issacharpeople.org on the same date as it appeared in Anglican.ink.

The installation of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, Rt. Rev. Sarah Mullally, this past week, has helped to generate two obvious shots across the bow of the Church of England. The second one comes from the Vatican, an expression of the seven principles of Anglicanism, including patrimony, that the Vatican welcomes as gift and blessing to what it considers the origins of the Christian faith, and, inferentially, but boldly so, also presents itself as an invitation to all those defected former Anglicans, now associated with GAFCON, a conservative off-shoot, dedicated to defying the authority of the first female Archbishop, and the celebration of the LGBTQ+ community, including mixed marriages and perhaps even ordination.

So….hypothetically, on this Saturday morning in Lent, the day before Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday, let us take up silent, and imperceptible residence in the office of the new Archbishop, facing:

·      the growing cries of alienation from the white working class in small English communities many of whom believe that the church has stopped speaking to and with them and their traditional values,

·      the defiance of a large number of both former Anglican clergy and laity around the world, many of whom would echo the social alienation of the white working class in England, only with a specifically Biblical sword or arrow sustaining them in their quiver of opposition

·      the mixed-message from the Vatican extending an olive-branch of harmony and even unity on seven principles, while at the same time, putting on the world religion ‘table of contents’ for reflection and debate, a highly attractive implicit invitation to all disaffected Anglicans (from GAFCON and elsewhere) to return home to the Roman Catholic welcoming hearth.

Not only will it require a faith of eminent conviction and durability from the Archbishop, as well as a supportive community who fully understand and have earnestly and voluntarily signed on to her liberal theology, plus a level of erudite and sophisticated diplomacy even to begin formal and informal conversations with, first, her clergy, and the disaffected laity within those working class parishes, many of whom have already departed, if she is to have any hope of reconciliation of values that seem to be dividing much of the Western world.

In Canada, (bear with me, for a moment, as this may seem off-topic), this morning, coming from the whiteribbon.ca is a report part of which reads in part:

Ø 73% of educators are concerned about harmful online content targeting boys and young men

Ø 80% of educators have witnessed misogynistic behaviours in the classroom

Ø 84% of Canadians aware of online influencers with misogynistic views say these influencers have a negative impact on boys and young men

This cluster of data is not intended to assert, and certainly not imply, that the issue of gender relations is the only one confronting the church, the state, and families throughout the West. However, there are clearly some deep and divisive, also potentially tragic and reprehensible implications should the world continue down a path absent of and incapable of gender reconciliation.

The depth and range and rapidity of change over the last quarter or perhaps half century is astounding, shocking, unsettling, and deeply chaotic. We all know and ‘feel’ the many tentacles of these changes, everywhere. At the same time, we all feel impotent, and even dismissed, from having an impact on their depth, range, and especially on the complicit political body of both opinion and incest with the changes. Chaos reigns, and we all experience alienation, powerlessness, isolation and abandonment, from the crucibles of power, money, laws and institutions.

And that phenomenon is, like space, time, money and death, boundaryless. Oh, and of course gender and sex. Alienation, to the degree of evoking and inflicting trauma, whether individually or collectively or both, is an integral and intimate ingredient of the lives of most, if not all humans. We all ‘feel’ as if we are riding a jet-speed roller-coaster for which no previous inspections, corrections and control supervisions have been either permitted or imposed on that machine. And, of course, given a serious ‘perceived threat’ (from the classical, behavioural psychologists, and their ‘flight-fight’ impulse) we, consciously or not, have chosen a personal response. Our personal faith and relationship with/to God may or may not have played a part in that leaning.

Science, pandemic, new digital technology, environmental existential threat(s), globalization and the flow of money spiking upwards to the top 1% or fewer (the vast majority are men!) …taken together there is a picture so blatantly obvious, and yet also so obviously and blatantly unsustainable and nefarious, heinous and despicable, that it not only impacts both directly and indirectly, all people of the world.

Trouble is, only a very few men seem to have the volume and ubiquity of megaphone-power, that we are deluged with, frankly, ‘narcissistic-steroidal-teestosteron-infected-masculine-irresponsibility’. Of course, neither the digital oligarchs nor their political sycophants are ever going to accept and acknowledge their responsibility nor are they going to be held to account. They will forever be absolved of any guilt, shame or full responsibility having attained the conditions necessary for ‘impunity and immunity’ from having to reflect, reconsider, and both pause and desist their shared, pathetic, insidious and lethal hegemony.

Bombs, missiles, drones, and the ‘freedom’ to deploy them on oppressed, innocent, and frightened people, men women and how-can-they boys and girls, including babies, along with tariffs, racism, religious bigotry and an arsenal of spies and national security cyber-sleuths are all in the service of a lethal, amoral, global white supremacist (religiously enhanced) cabal.

Needless to say, the fine-tuned facts, and their broader implications often do not penetrate into the lives and minds and psyches of men and women who are just trying valiantly to put food on the table, to send their child to school and, if possible, college or university or even an apprenticeship. That is not to insult ordinary people. They ought not to have to become intimate with the workings of national governments, especially given that such governments have been working rather quietly and unobtrusively and reliably for well over a century.

Of course, not every political or social ill has been effectively resolved or even ameliorated. Much work for social justice, equity and inclusion still remains, especially among those least visible, and with the least access to a microphone. The alpha-males currently and inscrutably in power (think U.S.A., Russia, Israel, Hungary, North Korea and perhaps others) have formed an oligarchic cabal with their respective ‘cyber-bullies’ and their bank-accounts, as well as their admittedly nefarious obsessive-compulsive addiction to making us all addicted to their machines and devices. Our new normal comprises lies, not truth, bullying, not collaboration, or conciliation or negotiation or resolutions of our shared ‘complaints’ frustrations, alienations, and abandonment.

They, those running the machine, couldn’t care less about our ‘pitiful’ frustrations. They have bigger fish to fry. Indeed, they have such hubris that they will continue to ride roughshod over all normal, official, legal, and reasonable boundaries to their presumed and assumed total power and control. And as the Pope reminded Italian journalists this week, start reporting on the victims, not the soldiers and politicians in these military conflicts.

It will take many such addresses by many more voices by Pope, Archbishop, theologians, sociologists, and especially politicians, such as the Prime Minister of Spain who has boldly and courageously declared his nation unalterably opposed to both the war in Gaza and in Iran. Refusing to co-operate with the pugilists is a political position that might constrain their hubris and their ambition and their untethered political will.

Nevertheless, with considerable anxiety, even stress, I am going to introduce into this ‘cauldron’ some insights from a renowned, yet somewhat unfamiliar poet from England, whose searching and searing mind and imagination has a unique, creative, pulsing and even challenging interpretation of what is Christendom’s major event, The Original Fall. It is the depth of the penetration of religious symbols and images and their meaning into our Christian, western culture, that, while perhaps considered ‘too liberal’ by many, needs to be continually and imaginatively plumbed for meaning.

And meaning is what William Blake offers those of us, ordinary men and women who are deeply concerned that, by focussing on the symptoms of our social malaise, we are letting those with inordinate power off the hook. Universality, as humans, cannot be either ignored nor dismissed by all religious faction.

Blake imagined a different kind of “Fall”….based on what he considered an androgynous God and androgynous Adam and Eve, until the separation in masculine and feminine.

From the website divinehuman.org, in a piece entitled, Gender and Perception: William Blake and the Fall into Male and Female, by Northrop Frye,Posted on September 18, 2022 by Golgonooza

Blake believed that Consciousness was originally integrated, non-gendered, and “androgynous” (as he terms it). Human consciousness was, before the Fall, the “image” or likeness of this: indeed, as the Book of Genesis itself notes: “God [“the Elohim”, an honorific plural] created man in his [ie their] own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” “God” here is originally both what we now term “male” and “female”, denoting the integrated sexuality of the sacred. As our imagination fell, due to the advance of rationalising and moralising (judging) processes within the brain, the world appeared increasingly literal and separate from this integrated consciousness. In Blake’s terms, it “fell” (or divided) into a rationalising Spectre (Adam) and a feminine Emanation (Eve). The beauty of the world, human consciousness now thought, was “external” to the perceiving consciousness of it. Poets are the last reminders of this primal connection – what is called in literary criticism “the pathetic fallacy”. Except of course it’s not a fallacy. If anything it’s a “phallus-y”, a newly gendered schizophrenia within the perceiving consciousness – that is to say, within perception itself – which now fragmented or divided into “subject” and “object”, perceiver and perceived, active and passive, and eventually “male” and “female”. This was the world of Eden now seen in terms of Generation, of divided opposites, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

Now, does this scribe expect the newly installed Archbishop of Canterbury to bring these perceptions and their implications into formal discussions with her clergy, laith, the press or even the Vatican? Of course not. Nevertheless, the question of how men and women relate, and the question of the imposition and deployment of power are both highly radioactive in today’s culture than embraces urban and rural, working class and white-collar workers, the political class, as well as the economic oligarchs and the political tyrants. It also includes the teachers and professors who are attempting to strengthen and deepen and broaden the sphere of influence of the human imagination. We, men women and children, inhabit the same small and fragile, yet beautiful planet, as observed and photographed from space; we drink from the same lakes, rivers, oceans and we plant seeds and bring food from the same shared soil. And while that argument tends to become pigeonholed into environmental protectionism (or denial or hoax) it is also a religious, ethical, moral, political, economic and even a national security issue.

Our best theology, whatever name and faith dogmatic foundations it carries, can and must embrace a shared agape for the whole world, and we can and must bring our best and most clarifying and clarion voices to the table whose menu has to include the meal on which we can and will all survive.

And war, military munitions and ambitions, racial and religious hatred and bigotry, linked to political and national hegemony and narrow-minded heroism are not on the menu.

Humility, the image of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey celebrated tomorrow, is a far more fitting, resonant, and androgynous beacon and role model for all faiths. Christians do not have exclusive ‘rights’ to that story or that image. And, it offers a far more life-sustaining, life-giving and life-sharing image, including, of course, the final willing sacrifice on Good Friday to the unjust, irrational, and overweening violence of the mob, to death in the interest of relationality.

Violence, in all its many faces, forms, iterations, domestic, military, economic, political and religious, is the shared enemy of the human community, and its ubiquity and penetration into the cultural psyche and ethos, Hillman’s anima mundi, is so pervasive that none of us is spared a plethora of opportunities to non-violently oppose with force that violence, that bullying. And it will take all of us, in an inclusive and sustainable, courageous, and faith-inspired and emboldened collective voice! And time is short!