Although talk of a “Quiet Revival” of Christianity in the UK is probably over-egged, there is a clearly an element of truth to it: congregations in some churches do appear to be picking up, especially among the young. What is absolutely clear is that the revival of Christianity among young people is overwhelmingly occurring among those disillusioned with the sterility and emptiness of secular modernity. 

What such people are looking for, as James Marriott showed comprehensively in a recent Times piece, is “full-fat faith”, that is, forms of Christianity that unapologetically adhere to the traditional practices and doctrine of their respective denominations, or perhaps are the most sharply counter-cultural and unapologetic in their supernaturalism and rejection of liberal pieties. Such pieties are usually theological but often also political, in the sense of constituting the semi-secularised milk-and-water forms of Christianity which present themselves in terms almost indistinguishable from the beliefs of, say, Oxfam or the average Guardian leader: a “religion” of lanyard class talking points with occasional mentions of God. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the revival is happening most obviously among trad Roman Catholics, assertive evangelical or charismatic sects, and similar.

In this context, it appeared to be a great gift of providence that Justin Welby stepped down as Archbishop of Canterbury just as this revival gathered steam and the cultural moment was changing. New Atheism is cringe; everyone’s read Dominion by Tom Holland; many can see that what has come after Christian hegemony is far worse. People are looking for something different. As Nick Cave said recently, the most countercultural thing you can do is go to church. The time was ripe for a new Archbishop of Canterbury well-placed to exploit this new atmosphere: a theological heavyweight and spiritual big-hitter who could speak a more traditional, uncompromising language, tone down the Church of England’s invariably progressive mood music, and challenge the church’s creeping culture of bland managerialism. No one was expecting a Prayer Book purist who knows the Thirty-Nine Articles by heart, but it wasn’t absurd to hope for a small move in the right direction.

If I were to try to imagine a candidate for the new Archbishop of Canterbury who is the furthest away from this, the worst and least suitable replacement for Welby possible, I would probably pick someone along the following lines. They’d be a former state bureaucrat who made an entire career out of the sort of bland HR department-inspired managerialism that is destroying the church, probably a senior civil servant in (say) the NHS. They’d be on record as having every tick-box lazy progressive political and theological opinion imaginable. They would, of course, have lived and worked in London for most of their life and be a thoroughgoing metropolitan. They would have no record of any serious theological or scholarly work, but be thoroughly intellectually mediocre.

Whoops, I just described the person announced this morning as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally. The Church of England making an appalling decision is too common to be surprising, but even I was a bit taken aback at the sheer perversity of this choice. She is the pure distilled essence of the hectoring lanyard class, a bureaucrat, a proceduralist and a progressive down to her fingertips. Her entire professional career was spent in the NHS, latterly as Chief Nursing Officer and “Director of Patient Experience”; she is on the record as being “pro-choice”, pro-gay marriage, on board with the usual check-box list of LGBTQIA+ orthodoxy; she has lived in London for most of her life. She will occupy an Archiepiscopal throne once occupied by theologians of the calibre of Anselm, Cranmer, Michael Ramsey and Rowan Williams: her sole contributions to the intellectual life of the church are a couple of those paper-thin (in every sense) “Advent/Lent reflection” books, the authorship of which appear to be compulsory now among senior bishops, and the readership of which is close to non-existent. 

Although my first thought was that she is just pure Welbyism redux, right down to the less-than-pure record on clergy discipline and safeguarding, my second thought was worse.

One might remember that Paula Vennells, later disgraced for her culpability in the Horizon postmaster scandal, almost became a bishop. It was only sheer luck that saved her from being catapulted from a senior position in the quasi-governmental senior management class onto the episcopal bench: indeed, she was one of the rivals for the job of Bishop of London when Mullally was appointed, backed by Welby. There, but for the grace of God and some investigative journalists, goes the person who the establishment might now be celebrating as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury instead of Mullally (which I suppose is some sort of mercy).

Now, there is no reason to think that Mullally was responsible for any comparable scandal when a senior bureaucrat in the NHS, but in many other respects Mullally and Vennels are strikingly similar figures: both pursued careers within the nexus of the bureaucratic-management state and its corporate appendages and have near-identical views and backgrounds. They are both mediocre non-entities promoted above their abilities, partly, no doubt, to burnish the feminist credentials of those who appointed them, partly because their anaemic liberal views challenged no-one and they could be relied on to keep the procedural wheels of their respective institutions rolling. They both saw a second career in the Church as a natural extension of their first careers as managers within the therapeutic-technocratic state.

Read it all in The Critic