My kind of people

Today's sermon is on the loss of religious faith among contemporary Church leaders

Where do we get our religious leadership today? Is there something more to religion than endless talk of social deprivation? Increasingly it is our Muslim leaders rather than our Cardinals Popes or Bishops who attempt to answer the difficult and pressing question of whether there is a God.

For me, as an agnostic, this is unsettling. Many Christians I know feel trapped inside a politically correct Church that only adapts itself to the interests of the State. Because it is state ‘welfare’ that now dominates our politics, it is the ideology of ‘social justice’ that dominates our morals – or lack of them.

It might seem strange that there are signs in Christianity of an increasingly aggressive secularism that borders on a hatred of religion. Our Church leaders appear far more concerned with the politics of envy than with belief in Christ's role as redeemer. This was revealed most starkly through attitudes to the Goldman Sachs Christmas bonuses.

So why are some of our Christian leaders so hostile to faith? Perhaps it is an example of classic Freudian displacement activity, as an increasingly unloved and unattended Church turns its impotence and ire on the belief in God. If the surrender of our bishops to the nostrums of collectivism denies them moral purpose, they will attack those who are prepared to stand with traditional Christian beliefs.

As the lifeblood of traditional belief drips from our body religious, it leaves a small pumping heart of non-Christians prepared to defend old-fashioned religious values. I don't care if they are Muslim, libertarian, anarchist or South Park Republican - if they preach the cause of civil liberty, and the right to reject the il-liberal/technocrat consensus, then they are my kind of people.

We live in a society of smug complacency. All too often it is only right wing bloggers who puncture the anaesthetised contentment of our left wing hacks and other mainstream media apparatchiks. Left wing ideology, packaged as “art” and “education”, has replaced religion as the opiate of the masses.

With apologies to Neal Lawson and The Guardian.