I can’t dispel the nasty taste produced by my reading the Church Commissioners’ Annual Report and particularly its description of what the church is up to in Liverpool. A project called “Zone 2” which features “cafe-style worship” for the poor on Sunday mornings while the rest of the Christians attend the regular Eucharist. The Commissioners say they aim to extend this Zone 2 stuff into other impoverished areas. Thus the poor will be impoverished yet further.

As I brooded on this travesty, I thought to myself that things don’t have to be like that, and indeed there was a time when they weren’t like that: a time when the poor were not patronised and singled-out for dumbed-down substitutes for religion, but were offered only the best. Throughout the 19th century, priests went into the slums, lived among the industrial poor and adorned and beautified their churches with lights, colours, music, incense and sound theological teaching. We can name names. First there was the Clapton Sect of High Churchmen, followed by the Guild of St Matthew and the Christian Social Union. The priests in the ritual movement conducted worship to the highest aesthetic standards – not out of any culture-vulturism but because they believed that all worship must be to the glory of God and to the edification of the people

There’s not much glory and no edification in Zone 2.

Standards in worship were maintained for the first two thirds of the 20th century too. I was brought up in a Leeds slum without benefit of cafe-style worship. The Parish Eucharist was celebrated according to The Book of Common Prayer and the musical setting was Merbecke, sung by the whole congregation, a hundred and fifty and more of us. Choral Evensong was also as set in the Prayer Book with readings from The King James Bible, with fifty attending. None of our priests presumed to offer us something trashy just because we were poor. I suppose we churchgoing slum-dwellers of the 1950s would be regarded as “elitists” by the present shambolic regime.

The rot started in the 1960s with the first of the modern services and the proliferation of new hymns and songs of stultifying banality. Merbecke was dropped in favour of Lloyd-Webberish musical clowning which recognised no chordal progressions beyond tonic-dominant-subdominant. The disastrous invention of the General Synod in 1970 and parliament’s abdication of its control over forms of worship ensured the triumph of trash. And now in so many churches there prevails a new tradition – one of intellectual and aesthetic bankruptcy

The fact that some people are poor doesn’t mean that they are also stupid and incapable of an appreciation of beauty and the finest things, along with a response to the articulate teaching of the truth. It is beyond demeaning, it is shameful to patronise those who are materially poor and to deprive them of the best things of the mind and heart.

“Or which you, having a son which asketh for bread shall give him a stone?”

One of the main features of fascist regimes is their unwillingness to listen to rational, informed criticism. Well, if a perverse unwillingness to respond to criticism and to enter reasonable discussion and debate is a defining characteristic of fascism, then the Church of England authorities qualify perfectly. When the Liturgical Commission published draft revisions to the Baptism Service at the end of last year, this draft received much criticism of both theological and literary sorts. I am not talking about Yah-boo disapproval, but about intelligent, articulate comment. The authorities did not take a blind bit of notice and so this week the House of Bishops – why does that phrase make me think of a house of cards? – is blundering heedlessly ahead and incorporating their ill-advised alterations to the Baptism rite official. Having scorned debate first time round, this smug coterie of theological illiterates have again stopped their ears to reasonable discussion. Fascism, or what? Nevertheless, those who have ears to hear, let them hear… 

The new Baptism Service is a gross insult to Our Lord Jesus Christ and is therefore properly described as blasphemous. There is no mention of sin in the rite, no call to repentance and the devil is not so much as mentioned let alone renounced. The insult to Our Lord consists entirely in this: if there is no devil to defeat, no sin to atone for and no repentance to be made, why did Christ bother to come here at all and die for us? So it is time to ask just what the modern, euphemistic, coy, sentimental and touchy-feely so-called Christians who devised this (dis)Service actually believe and stand for?

They are specimens of that sort of theologically-vacuous liberal so tellingly dismissed by Richard Niebuhr a long time ago: “They believe that a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

True Christianity has nothing to do with this effete, sanitised, fawning, inoffensive fraud. Christianity is not very nice. It is not goo and slush sucking up to debauched and cloying notions of “family.” There is a proper sense in which Christians are a family: but we are a family at war against sin, the world and the devil. Or we used to be. Think back to something Rowan Williams said in his last sermon before he retired: that the church “has quite a bit of catching up to do with secular mores.” But that is what the church has been doing for the last forty years. The policy is one of appeasement so, if the punters don’t like the original message, no probs, as they say: simply change the message. And so the stark challenge of the gospel has been abandoned to accommodate the barren emotionality of our sentimental and infantilised society, and the new code of practice that is political correctness. The result is banality. And it was Aquinas – 800 years before Hannah Arendt – who told us, “Banality is evil.”

For forty years the liberals have ruled the church and they have destroyed it. The bland have led the bland and they have all fallen into the Kitsch. And behold, those who live by the euphemism will die by the euphemism.

In effect, Christian theology has been demoralised. The doctrines of personal sin and Original Sin discarded while, by way of contradiction, the notion of corporate sin – by the bankers, the capitalists, the social heretics in the nasty party – has been retained. So, insofar as any concept of sin remains, it is depersonalised and institutionalised and identified in a range of preferred targets. For the modern church – that oxymoron – sinners now are those who don’t sign up to foreign aid, who question the virtue of mass immigration, who deny global warming, who warn against the moral and social destructiveness of the benefits culture which condemns succeeding generations to dependence and lives of sheer pointlessness. In short, for today’s church, sinners are all those who don’t subscribe to the nostrums of the new Establishment, which is the socialised state.

Stephen Platten, Chairman of the Liturgical Commission, explained that the devil is omitted from the new Baptism Service because the devil is “theologically problematic.” Now that’s a fine example of strangulated bureaucratic jargon. It is not the devil who is theologically problematic, only the Liturgical Commission is. Since the 1960s and the first appearance of alternative services, marketing a different gospel, each succeeding rite has been more accommodating to the spirit of the age than its predecessor.

But the spirit of the age is unchristian, secularised, diverse and multicultural, while Christianity is particular, definite, dogmatic and, as St Paul said, scandalous. St Paul said the cross is a stumbling block. The modern church has removed the stumbling block and replaced it with an ornament. No original sin? No devil and all his works? No need for personal repentance with weeping and gnashing of teeth? Then, dear Jesus, you had no business coming here, preaching your offensive parables of the wedding garment and the sheep and the goats. You might have spared yourself the bother of being flogged to the point of death and then nailed on a cross of wood and left to die a lingering death on the first long Good Friday. Why didn’t you simply stay up there in heaven easy-listening to soppy charismatic choruses and watching the General Synod’s flatulent proceedings on your I-pad?

The catastrophe of the church’s collapse was not something forced upon it by external enemies, but willed upon itself in a decades-long process of serial self-emasculation. The gruel has got ever thinner so that now there is nothing there. Or, to change the analogy, it is a case of wine into water. Every one of the modern Services has been purged of “offensive” reality. No worms or vile bodies at funerals. No fornication or men as brute beats with no understanding or dreadful day of judgement at the marriage. No devil and all his works at the christening. The new hymn line is effectually “No Lord, no faith, no baptism.”

What can be done? Much. But we must not pretend to ourselves that when Our Lord promised St Peter he had set his church on a rock and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it, he had our contemporary, simpering Church of England in mind. The church is thriving – but not in England, not in Europe the civilisation created by Christian values. In the centuries when Europe professed Christianity, in obedience to Christ’s command to go into all the world and preach the gospel, it sent out missionaries to Africa – an heroic achievement now disparaged by our trendy prelates and spiritless theologians as “cultural imperialism.” It is salutary to notice that today African Christians are returning to preach Christ to our godless continent.

For the individual English Christian all that is left is to hang on to the faith and try, however desperately, to find a place where it is still preached. This may involve crossing denominational boundaries. It will certainly mean doing the equivalent of those early Christians who went into the desert to think, pray and worship. There will be a renewal, for the gospel is true and therefore indestructible. Only don’t expect our decadent Ecclesia Anglicana to provide it.

I have at last discovered where the real Church of England has been hiding out. This has taken some time. I moved to Eastbourne last May and for the last ten months I have been trying to find a place to worship where prayer remains valid. In the process I have come across a great variety of tomfoolery, religion so trendy it sets your teeth on edge, sackless thespian parsons who put the stress on all the wrong words: one said, every week, “He took bread and gave IT to them.” Liturgies at once so tedious and infantilised they might have been written by a partnership between the circumlocution office and Enid Blyton’s Noddy. One church so fastidiously committed to interior design it could have had its own stall at the Daily Mail’s ideal homes exhibition: instead of Epistle and Gospel candles, one on each side of the altar, rather a candelabra all at one end. And then the politically-correct prayers about “rights” and right-on causes, the intercessions elaborated into something resembling the grand tour. They forget, these clerical politicos, Evelyn Waugh’s saying, “Praying for Nicaragua when you live in Tunbridge Wells is the first sign of madness.” There are many other such signs following: the Peace, which is invariably the noisiest part of the service with all its froth and phoney friendliness; the aisle-dancing; the bloody guitars; the inane and unmusical choruses which repeat half a dozen time words that were not worth singing once.

Well good bye to all that.

I have found the real Church of England alive and well in the parish of St Thomas A Becket, Lewes. And it only takes me three-quarters of an hour to get there, door to door. I take the train. But honestly, I’d go if I had to walk it. The Service is Book of Common Prayer Holy Communion and nothing else – except the welcome addition of four traditional hymns. No burbling on with imbecile mentions of parishioners whose birthdays fall that week. No more of that sickening new version of the Prayer for the Church in which the bishops have accorded themselves precedence over the Queen.  English in all its lapidary simplicity and easy-goingness.

The priest is a priest. He has presided there for thirty years and he is well past retirement age. There is no vicarage. Fr George lives in his own house in the parish. He is not paid. I said Fr George but he is known to all his parishioners as Brother George – because he was once a monk who left the monastery to come to Lewes to look after his mother when she became frail, and he has been there ever since. Sage and the nearest thing to a saint I’ve ever met. He preaches with disarming plainness and invariably about fathomless truths. So easy and all unaffected. One of the reasons he comes across so well – quite apart from the learned holiness of the man – is that his words echo those found in the real Bible and the real Prayer Book. There is no jargon, no pretence, no thespian frolics, no thrashing around to force a link between St Paul’s Epistle and what they were banging on about on the BBC news bulletin; and no affected sincerity. He is the complete natural, a man as at home inside his own skin as i have ever come across. There is a tangible bond of love between Brother George and his people: the real thing, all calm and unstated, not the hyper-inflated emotionality and sickening touchy-feelyness which is the aroma filling the air in so many parish churches.

The proper words. Scholarliness. Honesty. Brotherly love. I am healed of my ten months’ distemper by the mere touch of the hem of his garment.