The Reverend Kate Bottley, the celebrity vicar who came to fame on Gogglebox, has a message for the nation. ‘The woman who goes skinny-dipping for charity and posts the pictures on social media is far removed from the cultural archetype of the meek and stuffy vicar,’ the Telegraph breathlessly tells us. ‘I don’t know who these stuffy vicars are,’ says Bottley. ‘All my vicar friends watch The Traitors and shout at their kids and have sex – all the normal things that are part of being a human being. Like the rest of society, we’ve moved on quite a lot.’
The information that Anglican vicars are permitted to have sex will be huge surprise to the fuddy duddies out there that somehow missed the news about the Reformation.
The problem is that these people still think they are the rebels. And worse, that their quirky cute is ‘cutting edge’
When you’ve swallowed this initial wave of cringe, the remainder of the interview reveals that Bottley is helping to organise a communal ‘school assembly’ hymn singalong via TikTok. ‘Whatever faith we’ve got or not, those words of hope and love and truth and friendship and kindness are really good words.’ Pardon me. But the faith is surely the entire point? Without the faith, however good the tunes are, the words in fact don’t seem ‘really good’, but rather quite insane.
What are the Rev Kate’s own fave nave raves? There’s:
‘“At the Name of Jesus” – What’s brilliant about that one is it’s got a line in the final verse that goes, “With his angel train”. And obviously, what it means is like a train on a dress. But I taught my congregations that it was a train that goes, “Woo! Woo!” So, whenever we sing that as a family, we always do that.’
There’s also:
‘“Our God Is a Great Big God” – It goes, “He’s higher than a skyscraper and deeper than a submarine/ He’s wider than the universe and beyond my wildest dreams.” But I changed the lyrics to, “He’s higher than the universe and He smells of margarine”. I’m not precious about these things, you know!’
Along with innumerable other funky vicars – like Richard Coles (now thankfully retired to spend more time writing cosy whodunnits) or the Rev Bingo Allison, Liverpool’s first ‘genderqueer’ celestial advocate – Bottley delights in overthrowing our crusty notions about the clergy. Going boldly for full-strength naff, because what went before obviously wasn’t quite enough, she muses about the country’s turn away from God, ‘Maybe it’s our white western privilege’.
Let me put her straight. Nobody is being put off attending church because it’s ‘old fashioned’, or at least not in the way it was old fashioned decades ago. Surely, in fact it is precisely this brand of twee, try-hard progressive naffness that is a deterrent?
I speak as an outsider here. But the same rule applies to any long running enterprise in trouble; you go back to the basics. Surely a big part of Christianity’s appeal lies in its strangeness and seriousness, its remoteness from the trash and twaddle of pop culture? The archaism is a large part of the ‘offer’, connecting as it does the universal human experience beyond the transient trappings of the world. The Sermon on the Mount and the resurrection, to pick just two examples, are audacious and outrageous. A priest is there as a conduit to encounters with the numinous and the unworldly, and a guide through the vicissitudes of life – loss, grief, decay and death.
Bottley is in quite another head space. ‘Oh, come on, a TV vicar presenting Songs of Praise, that’s a bit of a cliché isn’t it?’ she says, though she later relented. (One senses that any TV offer would not be resisted for long.) ‘I want to be doing something a bit more cutting edge.’
But the church is a serious business, or it is nothing. Will anybody really be attracted by this cornball mush marketing – come for the free biscuits and possibly redeem your soul!
So much of the progressive establishment’s discourse is pretending that it’s 50 years ago, which would make them the cool kids. In fact, the stereotype of the funky vicar who’s trying too hard was already going strong then – witness Mel Smith on Not The Nine O’Clock News: ‘I think modern Christians should have a bit less “Get thee behind me Satan” and more “Come in me old mate, have a cup of tea.”’
Strangely enough, funky imams are less of a thing. You will not get a graffiti ‘art’ installation in a mosque. Boney M played Durham Cathedral last month; I doubt that any time soon we’ll be bopping along to ‘Rasputin’ at the Husaini Islamic Centre, Stanmore. It is only Anglicanism that feels this need.
The problem is that these people still think they are the rebels. And worse, that their quirky cute is ‘cutting edge’. This is a twentieth century holdover, woefully inadequate for our serious times.
The hunger for meaning and guidance in our increasingly fraught and rotten times is strong, and will only grow stronger. The Church should be blasting out light, not organising children’s sing songs for adults, or wibbling about ‘white Western privilege’. This weak offering will not do.
Comments