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Atheist Anglicanism
David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine keeps surprising. Not only has it been publishing articles startlingly critical of current immigration policies; it now features a long piece, by John J. Ray, exposing the leftist, atheist trends in Christianity—particularly in the Anglican communion. That’s not the sort of concern one would once have associated with Horowitz or with Front Page, which previously has never shown any particular interest in religion. Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 04, 2002 12:04 PM | Send Comments
You underestimate David Horowitz. It was not meant at all as a criticism of David Horowitz but as an observation (i.e. I had not seen articles at FrontPage dealing with religion and had the impression that Mr. Horowitz is not interested in the subject—but I may have been wrong about that) combined with praise that he is expanding the areas he publishes articles about. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on October 5, 2002 1:56 AMThe other day, Horowitz had a good piece about racist, anti-white myths by a sometime writer for the American Renaissance. Perhaps he is less far from Jared Taylor than he used to be. Posted by: Marcus Tullius Cicero on October 5, 2002 8:21 PMIt’s hard to fault Dr John Ray’s general observations about the leftward drift in the churches. A few points though. Although it’s true that the more evangelical Anglicans in Australia have succeeded in recruiting young people at a time when mainstream Anglicanism is in sharp decline, the evangelical Anglicans are not particularly conservative. They oppose the ordination of female ministers on biblical grounds, but otherwise are fairly stridently liberal, for instance in calling for higher rates of foreign immigration. Similarly, I found a copy of a new, evangelical magazine last week called “The Australian Christian Woman” and it was full of articles about how to combine a high flying career with motherhood. None of this is surprising since the evangelicals were traditionally thought of as a liberal tendency within the Anglican Church. Secondly, although I’m no expert on Catholic social policy of the nineteenth century, I have always been impressed by the little that I’ve read of the encyclicals. They seemed to me to be conservative critiques of free market capitalism, rather than socialistic ones. Nor did the Catholic Church in Australia succumb in a completely passive way to its social environment. In the 1940s and 50s a Catholic social movement had considerable success in fighting communists for control of the trade unions and in blocking the efforts of communists in the Labor Party. It’s only really been since the 1970s that the Catholic Church in Australia has become moribund and increasingly affected by leftism (especially the nuns and some Jesuits). |