Spectator letters: St Augustine and Louise Mensch, war votes and flannel

Faith and flexibility

Sir: What a contrast in your two articles on religion last week: one liberal atheist parent (Claire Stevens) concerned about her son’s turn to conservative Islam, and one conservative Catholic (Louise Mensch) determined that her children understand her unbending fidelity to the tradition. 

Ms Mensch’s problem is endemic throughout the western church, Catholic and Protestant alike: greater confidence in human sinfulness than in God’s forgiveness. Mrs Stevens’s problem is the opposite: a lack of confidence in her atheism. Brought up to believe in nothing, one is prone to believe in anything. At least if you bring a child up Christian, he can always choose to reject the faith later, but will do so knowing what he is rejecting, and equipped also to see the flaws of other belief systems.

I suspect that St Augustine’s forbidding doctrine on salvation has a hidden influence on Ms Mensch’s fear of her faith, and Mrs Stevens’s rejection of the same. Happily, he may also offer a solution to both their troubles. In direct opposition to Ms Mensch’s allusion to ‘Jenga blocks’, Augustine says that the faith of the church must not be built such that the removal of one block would cause the whole to tumble. Even the Roman Communion has changed, can change and sometimes should. This means that bishops can quite legitimately reconsider the church’s teaching on Ms Mensch’s communicant status as a divorcee, and offers a rather less rigid alternative to the faith which Mrs Stevens describes. Winners all round. The Revd Dr Thomas Plant Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire

Sir: I read Louise Mensch with interest. As a practising Roman Catholic, I have always believed that the church preaches forgiveness. Even the Bible tells us that ‘My Father’s House has many rooms’.

In our enlightened age there are many divorcees.