The Top 40

I concur. The church has been drifting left for quite a long time, in large part due to the larger voice of women, just like the country. Government growth coincides with women's sufferage. Church decline is evidenced by the abundance of women and old people who tend to populate and govern it.

Left politics are feminine.

Long ago I came to the conclusion that the Episcopal Church had ceased to be a religion and had become a left wing socio-political pressure group.

It seems Mr. Mead thinks the same thing.

Why I left the Episcopal church of my family upbringing, and seminary training. We go to a Protestant evangelical church now that left the UCC (because the latter was too PC).

But I don't agree that an abundance of women and old people are to blame. The problem is the training of priests and lay ministers which is overwhelmingly liberal now. Pressure groups have a disproportionate influence on church polity and doctrine now. As in secular government. Plenty of conservative men and women still worship in the Episcopal church, but they can't get ordained because of a PC hierarchy, and they are viewed with suspicion as lay leaders because of their political views.

I miss the Mass, and beautiful liturgy and the Anglican repertoire of church music, but I don't miss the rotten sermons, unctuous clergy who suck up to rich people and insult decent, traditional, conservative parishioner, and endless politics preached instead of the Gospel.

My Uncle -a former social justice rabble-rousing Anglican priest who still clings to his belief that the BBC represents the cutting edge of centrist thought- left for the Catholic Church years ago. Before it was even cool.

His former Church had so jumped the shark on so many things -even for a clergyman of his proto-marxist sensibilities- that he just couldn't take it anymore.

RE my own experience of the fall of the Anglican/Episcopal brand: I attended a local Episcopal K-12 school and well remember the beginning of the decline as the church backed away bit by bit from including religion in the curriculum.

Our resident Priest was called away never to be replaces and within a couple/few years after I'd graduated, the Church powers that be then took the step of hiring a former public school administrator as the headmistress...Local community activists began preaching speechifying their community dialectic at student graduations and shortly thereafter, in a final leap over the cliff of secular relevance, the school shuttered its doors for good.

Splat..Taking with them the only affordable choice local working parents had to a failed public school system that consistently hovers near the bottom nationally whilst at the same time spending near the top.

The other private alternatives cost in excess of ten grand a year for kindergartners. Of course all the politicians send their kids to those schools even as they yap about caring for the children. One of their favorite re-election slogans is some variation of; "Deh Chilren dem are ouwah fuchah"

Thankfully, in the years since the Episcopalian demise, a dynamic Baptist school has stepped in to offer hope and a good education to students whose parents aren't raking in government salaries.

The school's name? Free Will Baptist School. Seems fitting.

I was amused that you wenedrod what on earth to say to the Pope. I understand that he is unused to discussing anything; it is not the style of a pope. I gather that you just listen to pontifications and dogma, but maybe I am being uncharitable for Benedict came across as a warm and human man, unlike his portrayal by the RC Church and the Vatican. I asked a well-known RC friend why he just accepted all the dogma. He replied that he was a busy man and it suited him to just accept the RC religion as a package, without having to question it or debate it. Other RC friends of mine in Glasgow I find, do want to listen to other viewpoints but are loathe to debate even say the Liturgy.