It seemed, at first, that nobody wanted to know. Ronald Pearse and a handful of helpers had worked hard to persuade some sixty-five priests of the Church of England to sign a letter protesting against the sacking by the Bishop of Chichester of Anthony Freeman, Vicar of Staplefield, Sussex, for refusing to recant the views he had expressed in his book God in Us. That, surely, was news.
Well, not really, said The Times, The Guardian and The Independent when the signature-laden letter reached them, only - like Anthony himself - to be spiked. When nothing appeared, a little prodding seemed in order. The Times didn’t have the space. The Guardian’s Walter Schwarz, who normally dealt with such things, was on holiday. The Independent promised to unspike and reconsider. It published the letter in full on July 28 - the day two hundred SoF members met in Leicester for their annual Conference.
So now it was a story. The rest of the press scrambled to catch up and get ahead, descending on Staplefield like a plague of locusts. Where was the errant vicar, the godless man of god, the defiant priest, the dog-collared apostle of atheism? At Leicester, of course, but no-one, least of all Anthony’s wife Jacqueline, let on.
Satan in Staplefield
The Guardian did find Mrs Helen Shepherd and her baby daughter Jennifer, who had come to drive Satan out of Staplefield. ‘‘Satan has obviously got in here,’’ explained Mrs Shepherd, a born-again Christian from an Evangelical Free Church in Haywards Heath. “‘It’s exactly where he would attack’’, she explained, which seemed a little unfair to the residents of an olde England village which is surely hardly more be-devilled than anywhere else. One of Anthony’s own parishioners blamed not the Devil but the vicar’s unexpected and apparently unwelcome integrity: ‘‘He was true to his principles, but that didn’t suit a large number of people’’. A principled vicar - now we can’t have that! What is the Church coming to?
The Daily Telegraph pictured ‘‘Mr Freeman: humanist”’ alongside 24 spectacularly unclothed female limbs, 12 of them apparently raised in salute. On closer inspection these turned out to belong to a story about the chorus line from 42nd Street. The adjacent ‘‘Vicar Defiant’’ story quoted Mr Jonathan Pritchard, diocesan secretary to the Bishop of Chichester, likening the author of God in Us to “ta leader writer who said his newspaper told lies - how long would he last in the job?’”? This became the prototype of several increasingly over-stretched similes: a vegetarian in a butcher’s shop, a mechanic who can’t stand cars, and something from Lord Snowden (who joined the campaign to get Freeman sacked) about a photograher who didn’t believe in cameras.
Christian atheists
The Sunday Times got wind of Leicester and paid a visit.
They found 200 ‘‘modern-day doubting Thomases, Christians who have reversed down the road to Damascus’’.
And, they warned, ‘‘their numbers are growing’’. SoF’s appointed spokesperson told reporter Lesley Thomas that for every up-front Freeman there were a hundred priests who shared his views. Sure enough, over a five-column headline, ‘‘100 Vicars Do Not Believe in a Supernatural God’’, she reported breathlessly: ‘‘At least 100 Church of England priests do not believe in an external, supernatural God, it emerged at a conference for the new ‘Christian atheists’.
Elsewhere in the same paper Tim Rayment commented that ‘‘many leading church figures... would concur with much of what Freeman says... even some bishops, off the record’’. And many theological opponents were against the sacking: Keith Ward, for instance, regius professor of divinity at Oxford and a firm critic of non-realism: “‘It’s wrong for someone to get the sack for taking a position, even if he takes it rather crudely. What he’s saying is right in line with Thomas Aquinas. The fact that people don’t understand that just shows the level of theological illiteracy in modern society’’.
While everyone, it seemed, was writing about him, or discussing him on radio and television, Anthony Freeman had till now kept his head down. But he could hardly give reporters and photographers the slip when it was known that he was taking his last service at Staplefield on Sunday July 30. His farewell to his parishioners would take place before a media scrum bigger than his usual congregation. The Independent reported that he chose God moves in a mysterious way to open the service, and answered the question ‘‘Who would you most like to meet?”’ with the answer, ‘‘The bishop willing to employ me’’. The Times, which had finally woken up to the story, reported that the sacked vicar had preached on Jeremiah, the unpopular prophet who was ‘‘banned from the house of the Lord’’ because he had ‘‘struck at the heart of the power structure that enabled God’s spokesman - and traditionally they were always men - to control the hearts and minds of God’s people’’. The Daily Telegraph reported that ‘‘a friend within the Church of England”’ was trying to find him a new post, so far without success.
And they ran a cartoon showing a Job Centre interviewer saying ‘‘Frankly, vicar, if you get another job it’ll be a miracle’’. The Guardian picked up the text of the SoF Conference resolution sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury (see Conference reports), noting that 22 of the 200 who supported it were Anglican priests. Quoting the press release on the resolution, Walter Schwartz said it asked Archbishop Carey to ‘‘act against bigotry’’.
Back in The Independent, columnist Bryan Appleyard did some reflecting. Realist Christianity formed Western culture. But as God was clearly on the way out, what would fill the vacuum? ‘‘We are in the process of abandoning that which made us what we are and we are showing no signs of replacing it with anything equally substantial.... Belief in the literal reality of the faith is scarce and growing scarcer. Perhaps belief in its symbolic truth - the belief of Cupitt and Freeman - is the way out.
Whatever you might think of this faith, at least it shows an awareness of history and tradition that is completely lacking from all the other ideologies around which the West has tried to organise itself.’’
Storm to come
Peter Aspden in the Financial Times noted that ‘‘Cupitt’s philosophy sees no meaningful distinction between a religious view of the world and that of the artist. His regret is that the Cubists, the Dadaists, the abstract expressionists of theology have been so comprehensively marginalised’’. But maybe the Freeman affair marked the beginning of the end of the marginalisation, ‘‘Perhaps they can be eased into the fray by events of the past week; perhaps they will finally be ejected altogether. As England reaches the end of its sweltering spell of thunderous weather, it’s Church’s storm has only just begun.”’ Hugh Dickinson, Dean of Salisbury, took a more jaundiced view in the same paper a few days later.
Freeman was ‘‘a charming and persuasive chap’’ - but he was ‘‘undermining basic doctrines’’ and had to go. A heavier-weight than the Dean plunged in with much the same lesson, Archbishop Habgood of York told The Guardian that he was all in favour of a debate to establish where ‘‘the boundaries’’ of acceptable belief lay - but he had no doubt that Freeman had crossed them and that his bishop was right to sack him. In the correspondence that followed, Hugh Dawes wondered how it was that the archbishop had reached his firm conclusion before the debate he called for had begun.
As the papers turned to other clerical footballs to kick around the field - the vicar who banned ‘‘Dad’’ from tombstones and the one who wanted to burn women priests as witches - Christopher Mordaunt contributed a ‘‘Face to Faith’? column to The Guardian. ‘‘The organisation Sea of Faith does a great service by bringing together - without any dogmas - people with a wide range of ‘non-realistic’ views about God.’’ The variety was just as great on the ‘‘realist’’ side. But ‘‘the difference between the broadly realistic believers on our right and broadly atheistic fellow travellers on our left is obvious.
Evangelical bishops
For those on the right, ‘Jesus is the son of God’ is literally true, while ‘God is love’ is a metaphor. For those on the left it is the other way round.”’ The debate was not confined to the national broadsheets.
It surfaced again and again in local newspapers, church magazines and the international press. Norway’s leading twice-daily ran a front-page feature on Sea of Faith.
America’s Newsweek didn’t give much for Sea of Faith’s chances in a country where, they claimed, ‘‘46 per cent of churchgoers - perhaps 5 million people in all - are evangelicals of one stripe or another’’, and where ‘‘14 of the Church of England’s 44 diocesan bishops are now evangelical, up from only one in 1970’’.
Sea of Faith ‘‘spokesmen’’ - nearly always spokesmen, and clerical-Anglican spokesmen at that - were much in demand on radio and television chat shows. Graham Shaw and Hugh Dawes flew the flag bravely, and Anthony himself made good use of an otherwise insipid Here and Now programme. Several invitations were refused, where the proposed format seemed unlikely to encourage a sensible exchange.
Many of the press pieces opened opportunities for letters, correcting inaccuracies about the Network, or taking issue with its critics. Since some of these letters carried an address, albeit in short form, interested readers knew where they could get in touch with us. Many did, and our membership has climbed steadily as a result.
Inquiry versus dogma
But back to Christopher Mordaunt’s Guardian column for the last word: “*The underlying question which the Anthony Freeman affair brings up is the relative importance of inquiry as against dogma. Is what you believe more or less important than how you got there? Many would say that it is the process that counts. For my money, a priest who shows that he is still passionately interested in these matters and sufficiently concerned about his flock to talk about them is worth 10 who are simply going through the motions.”’