THE FREEMAN SAGA In July 1992, at the annual Conference of the Sea of Faith Network in Leicester, the Rev Anthony Freeman had a 'conversion experience'. As he described it later, 'it was not a conversion from unbelief to faith, but from a Christianity which had become oppressive to one which brought a glorious sense of freedom and joy. This freedom came when I accepted that I did not believe in God as traditionally understood'.
Freeman decided to write a book about his conversion.
He wanted to underline the importance of sharing doubts as well as faith. He wanted to tell the world 'how positive and enriching and liberating' his experience was. Above all, he wanted to show 'how authentic a Christian experience' it had been.
Freeman was Priest-in-Charge of St Mark's, Staplefield, in the diocese of Chichester, where he also held an administrative post organising clergy training. He decided to send an advance copy of the book to his Bishop, the Rt Rev Dr Eric Kemp. Unwittingly, he had begun a process which would trigger the most far-reaching popular debate on God since the publication of Honest to God in the Sixties - and put Sea of Faith on the map.
The Bishop didn't like what he read and invited Freeman to withdraw his book, God In Us, which had been accepted by SCM Press. Freeman declined. The Bishop then fired him from his training post for views which were 'incompatible' with his diocesan responsibilities.
He would be allowed to stay as parish priest at Staplefield for a year, provided he used his spare time to 'study and reflect'. The implication was that if this resulted in another conversion, back to orthodoxy, he might get his main job back. If the required recantation is not forthcoming - and the Bishop will review the situation in May - he'll be removed altogether.
The Church Times broke the story on August 27: 'Book on Christian Humanism Costs Cleric One of his Two Jobs'. There was no comment from the Bishop. Freeman said he was 'sad that the Bishop had not felt able to be a bit more positive... I'm not by nature a rebel - I've always thought of myself as an establishment man'. Dr John Bowden at SCM Press described the sacking as 'scandalous' and 'a bitter blow for honest discussion within the Churches'.
The Daily Telegraph caught the scent. 'Bishop Sacks Priest Over No God Book', it reported on August 28.
What's more, the martyr of Staplefield was 'not the first WHAT THE PAPERS SAY Anglican priest to remain in holy orders while denying... the existence of God. An informal network of clergy called Sea of Faith holds annual conferences at which they discuss their lack of belief in basic Christian doctrines.' 'For' and 'against' letters appeared in the Telegraph in the next two days. One, over the signatures of Ronald Pearse and Stephen Mitchell, concluded that 'there is strict censorship in the Diocese of Chichester' (which the paper unhappily printed as Chester), adding that Freeman was being 'penalised just because his theology does not coincide with that of his bishop'.
Reluctant to let a good story go, the Telegraph followed up by sending a reporter to Matins at Staplefield next Sunday. He found one worshipper who commented 'Well done the Bishop!' and another, a younger woman, who said the vicar's stand had produced a 'wonderfully uplifting breath of fresh air for the Church...' All he is doing is challenging this supernatural view of God'.
Other papers were catching up. The Daily Mail joined the Telegraph in church, but reporter Suzanne O'Shea seemed more shocked that the 'vicar of little faith' lit a cigarette in his church porch, and even 'flicked ash on to the stone path'.
The Independent on Sunday sent Allison Pearson to the book launch party in the vicarage garden. 'Didn't anyone think it was dodgy to call yourself a Christian if you didn't think Jesus was the son of God? Eyes rolled.
Things had moved on a bit since my stint as a Sunday-school teacher'. She wondered what the difference was between the vicar's Christian humanism and 'being an incredibly nice Labour voter'.
The Independent proper, meanwhile, had cottoned on to the fact that there were other 'atheist vicars' out there, alighting on Hugh Dawes, vicar of St James's, Cambridge, who had published a similar book last year, of which 'no-one took any notice, least of all, it seems, his congregation'. One member of the congregation told the Independent: 'I don't agree with his views, but I think he's a bloody good vicar'. Hugh Dawes himself was reported as saying that if the Church can accommodate both supporters and opponents of women priests alongside crypto-fundamentalists, why can it not accommodate a few priests who share the doubts of their parishioners?
He added in a letter a few days later that he 'objects strongly to being described as an atheist, which I am not... I do not accept that it is possible to speak of God only from within a supernatural worldview.' The nationals having had their fun, the focus of debate returned to the religious press. The Catholic Tablet, having broken the news of Freeman's sacking on the same day as the Church Times, followed up on September 11 with a fair, informative and non-judgemental account of the Network. Meanwhile, after careful discussion, the Network office-holders had decided that the main thrust of support for Anthony Freeman would best come from fellow members of the Church of England, with the Network only responding in its own right when Sea of Faith was misrepresented. The firstfruits of this strategy appeared in the Church Times on September 3 as a letter signed by Ronald Pearse and 21 other C of E priests - not all of them SoF members. 'Whether they agree with Mr Freeman's ideas or not,' they wrote, 'the clergy of Chichester would surely benefit from consideration of these views, which are held by many in the Church - and by many who have left the Church because they found no space in it to explore such ideas... We hope that many will join us in expressing disquiet at the Bishop of Chichester's action'.
Many did. Many did not. The following week Canon Eke of Hove wrote thanking God for 'a bishop who is not afraid to do what a bishop is ordained to do!' Mr Paul of Bramcote declared 'we will all be grateful when those who subscribe to Cupittianity do the honest thing and resign their orders'. Mr Hughes of Oxford asked why congregations should be asked to pay a higher proportion of the cost of the clergy when they acted like Humpty Dumpty. Mr Guthrie of Worcester thought one good thing had come of the Freeman saga: the flushing out of 'a group of self-confessed atheist clergy' who should 'no longer be recognised, nor be allowed to masquerade, as priests'.
This in turn flushed out Don Cupitt. The Church, he wrote on September 17, was rejecting its own last chance of renewal. 'It ought to be a matter for gratitude that courageous members of the Sea of Faith movement are nevertheless prepared to soldier on and try to secure the legitimacy of thinking Christianity within the British churches' rather than settle for 'ossification and longterm decline'.
In an important review of God in Us in the Church Times on October 1, Peter Baelz, former Dean of Durham, thought Freeman's view 'profoundly mistaken', but argued that those who shared it - 'tentatively rather than dogmatically' - should be 'contained within the one pilgrim Church'. The debate rolled on through midOctober when we went to press.
It had been even more heated in the Church of England Newspaper. There, a fair-minded report by James Lindsay on September 3 had been accompanied by an astonishingly bitter and intemperate leader describing God in Us as a 'dishonest book' in its treatment of the paper's own brand of 'conservative Christianity'. A box purporting to answer the question 'What is the Sea of Faith?' described it as 'about 200 clergy of all denominations who subscribe to the belief systems of the Rev Don Cupitt', which it summarised as 'a position that sits somewhere between Buddhism and atheism'.
This demanded an 'official' response in accordance with agreed strategy, and David Boulton wrote to correct the impression of a small clergy-only network, making clear that the network 'has no creed but aims to explore and promote religious faith as a human creation...Some members describe themselves as "radical Christians", some as "Christian humanists", and some don't use the "Christian" label at all.' Richard Wilkins of the Association of Christian Teachers, Hemel Hempstead, replied that SoF's position was 'as dogmatic and narrow-minded as it is possible to be'.
The God in Us debate is as significant for the Nineties as the Honest to God debate was for the Sixties The paper that most fully grasped the fact that the God In Us debate was likely to prove as significant for the Nineties as the Honest to God debate was for the Sixties was the Guardian. Reporting Freeman's sacking on September 3, the paper's religious affairs correspondent, Walter Schwarz, linked him with Sea of Faith - 'more than 50 clergymen of various denominations' - and quoting Stephen Mitchell to the effect that there was 'nothing in the canons of the Church of England to say we have to adhere to a particular philosophical interpretation of God'.
Schwarz returned to the subject the following day with a full-page spread, suggesting that the new debate was more serious and more radical than that of thirty years ago. The new element derived from linguistic philosophy - '(nothing exists outside human language because human minds cannot perceive anything else)'.
This was picked up in the Guardian's own 'Face to Faith' column on September 11 by Christopher Mordaunt, Secretary of the Brixton Council of Churches. To say that God exists in our minds was useless, he argued, 'because the phrase was generally used to refer to something that doesn't exist. "It exists in his mind" suggests pink elephants or the bloodstains on Lady Macbeth's hands - things that are not really there.' Good point. 'Face to Faith' on September 18 was contributed by John Macdonald Smith, a retired nuclear physicist, retired priest and far-from-retired contributor to Sea of Faith. 'The important Christian symbol is Jesus,' he wrote. 'The theory used to be that he was a kind of celestial astronaut, come down to slum it with this poor, sad world and make it better. There are not many signs that he succeeded, so perhaps it would be better to see in him a clear example of a quality which is in everything - a quality of Godness. That makes Jesus a reminder that everything is sacred, and that to treat anything or any person as merely mundane is a misuse of that person or thing.' It was the Bishop of Oxford's turn the following week.
Oddly - and craftily - he criticised Sea of Faith for not sharing his own respect for atheists. The atheist was without hope, but he struggled nobly on to make a better world. The Christian could struggle with more confidence, knowing that his aspirations went with 'the grain of the universe'. Poor old Sea of Faith, neither atheist nor theist, was out of its depth, misled by one Don Cupitt who was 'a very good television presenter'.
Among the several replies this provoked was one from the editor of Sea of Faith magazine, in consultation with the Network chair and secretary. 'Whether we use God-language or secular language to affirm human values, it's surely the affirmation-in-action that matters, whether by "atheists", "Christians" or those who find both labels obscuring more than they clarify'. The Guardian printed the editor's address, with the result that SoF suddenly had a rush of membership enquiries with every post.
But the fullest response to the Bishop of Oxford came with Don Cupitt's contribution to 'Face to Faith' on October 2. The Bishop, he said sadly, had led us to the conclusion that the churches were structurally irreformable. He added: 'The Sea of Faith group... is an independent, non-confessional and creedless society of people who are trying to imagine something new that religion might become in the future. We don't threaten the status quo - apart, of course, from voicing the fear that it has become locked on course and unable to renew itself.' Local papers around the country joined the fray. We have not been able to monitor them, but when far-flung journals like the Westmoreland Gazette open their usually-fundamentalist-dominated 'Christian Corner' to SoF-types, then the times they are indeed a-changing. The Loughborough Echo, on the other hand, unearthed a local vicar who vowed not to attend clergy chapter, synods or diocesan conferences because he refused to 'rub shoulders with heretics'.
Broadcasters followed the story too. Anthony Freeman gave a calm and eloquent exposition of his ideas, first on BBC radio and later on BBC TV's Heart of the Matter (which treated the SoF position far more intelligently than it did a year ago, though Joan Bakewell oddly described the network as 'a breakaway from the Christian church'). Wire TV in Bristol devoted an edition of its national Cable TV programme Live Wire to a debate about God in which SoF was well represented, Stephen Mitchell in particular finding the right light touch for such a knockabout occasion. BBC Radio Oxford also ran a live (if not particularly lively) discussion between the Bishop of Oxford and the editor of Sea of Faith.
Cartoonists and humourists were not to be left out. Miles Kington in the Independent reported that the Tory High Church had 'agreed to let the Rev John Major stay on till he has worked out his problems. Your prayers for him are sincerely asked for. And for all of us, come to that'.
Private Eye came up with its own Non-Credo: 'I do not believe in God the Father Almighty, nor in any of the rest of the rubbish. But I do believe in continuing to draw my salary, being written about by the Daily Telegraph and living in the Vicarage for ever and ever. Amen.' Anna Freeman (presumably no relation of Anthony) wrote to the Guardian that 'a god who gives every indication of having been out to lunch for nigh on the last two centuries, consistently failing to answer our communications with regard to famine, war, poverty, injustice, inequality or any other major human concern (let alone take action) is frankly of no relevance or interest to me. There is a view that this apathetic ineffectual male chauvinist requires me to worship him. I can't say I'm totally surprised, but he hasn't got a hope'. S Hayward, replying, knew where God was. 'Like many absent fathers he is keeping his head down in case the Child Support Agency get him. The mother of his child, like many abandoned mothers, is still living on handouts. And his son, like many other fatherless children, is still getting himself into trouble.' Two bright notes to end on. One Heart of the Matter viewer was so taken by Anthony Freeman that he wanted to join SoF. But where to find us? He rang Lambeth Palace - and they put him in touch. We'll do the same for them, any time.
And the final word to the Sun, a paper which usually interests itself in vicars only when they are horizontally challenged by page three girls. 'The way the Church of England is going these days,' it moaned, 'the Rev Anthony Freeman will probably end up a bishop'.
Next issue: a review of God In Us and of David Hart's forthcoming book Faith in Doubt.