Repelled by the darkness

Rev Daniel French has a most interesting TCW piece on the difficulties of being an anti-woke vicar.


Thought crimes of an anti-woke vicar

LET me begin with two stories, one of which is true and took place earlier in the summer, the second (sadly) fiction. I pen this as an ordinary English vicar of 25 years, who runs a parish in a stunning seaside town but finds himself increasingly bewildered with the direction of travel of his home denomination.

Submerging Ben, 29, fully into the seawater I sense something malignant leave him, a dark force. It’s difficult to describe, but when a person is under a spiritual oppression you know it. By the third invocation of the Trinity, his baptism complete, he emerges soaking, misty-eyed, panting like a man who’d completed a marathon. ‘It’s all gone, you are free.’ The words come to me unplanned. He nods, grinning and repeating: ‘I know!’


The second story is a fantasy about the ghastly Archbishop of Canterbury showing genuine and entirely non-ghastly leadership during the pandemic debacle. Fat chance, but the whole piece is well worth reading. Even as an atheist, this passage struck a powerful chord with me. Repelled by the darkness - indeed we are.


Young adults like Ben give me hope. He tells me he wants to work unequivocally for Christ and he doesn’t care what the pushback is. He is typical of men and women who say that they have migrated from New Atheism, psychedelics, Wicca, Marxism or whatever and awoken to a post-lockdown world which feels decidedly creepy, evil, a new Dark Age hanging over the West. They mostly come to God not through the light but repelled by the darkness.