Gordon Brown is making a spurious distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, in which the work that mothers do is judged undeserving. “I feel furious, just furious with this government,” said Kim Sparrow, and you can see why.. THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, is fond of saying that the Church of England is “one generation away from extinction”. He made the comment again last week at a conference on evangelism. Inevitably, Dr Carey’s remarks were repeated in the national press, where they appeared puzzling if not defeatist. In what sense does the Archbishop mean his statement to be taken? Even the full text of the speech fails to make this plain Perhaps it is a statement of the obvious.

Many institutions are a generation away from extinction in the sense that if a high standard of service, or excellence in some sense, is not maintained, users, however defined, will drift away and the organisation will die. When The Independent was launched, I strongly felt that it was like setting a clock going which could never be allowed to stop; for ever and a day we would have to wind it up and keep it in good working order. Otherwise it would soon lose time and then fall silent.
Or is Dr Carey making a forecast, predicting that on present trends, the decline in membership will shortly put the viability of the Church of England in doubt? He is certainly gloomy. “We live,” he says, “in a society with something of an allergy to religion” and then adds a curious rider – and “even to serious thought” I cannot help but highlight this last phrase It is such a ridiculous comment There is no evidence for it. It is just petulance.Having got that off his chest, the Archbishop went on to say why he believes we are becoming deaf to the claims of religion.

We live in a society “oppressed, in the main, not by lack, but by surfeit, not by strife, but by ease .. and we have paid a price for such comfort and ease. We are in a situation where the things of ultimate importance are invisible, obscured by the things of transitory glamour. The love that abides for ever cannot easily endure in such a culture.”The assumption here is that if our material wants are satisfied, then our need for spiritual sustenance is thereby abated. Yet all the signs are that our present affluence is being accompanied by an intensification of spiritual longings of one kind or another.

Indeed one of the preparatory papers for the conference notes that we live in times where the language of spirituality is significant and popular. What has changed is that the Christian Church is no longer the sole provider. The market is open and competition is fierce.Dr Carey is thus inviting us to accept that the nation can be allergic to religion while maintaining an interest in spiritual matters – a desert in the midst of green fields, so to speak. He argues that this is happening because Christianity provides a disquieting message for a rich society. The gospel which must be preached to the public is an implicit criticism of many people’s way of life. “They are not going to like it.” The best passage in the Archbishop’s speech is where he rails against treating Christianity as an “add on” faith, alongside two lovely children, two holidays a year, two cars, two televisions, two videos and two microwaves.In support of his thesis, Dr Carey could also cite the latest figures for religious activities in the United Kingdom. Between 1989 and 1997, the proportion of all adults never attending services or meetings connected with their religion increased from 48 per cent to 54 per cent.