Bring Back the Devil

There’s no avoiding the Devil, Tim Stanley explains in the Daily Telegraph weblog. The Church of England has had to make its attempt at new vows for the parents and godparents a little more explicit about sin, though not much.

After objections from parishes, the Church hastily rewrote this one anodyne question into two – asking parents and godparents both to “reject evil” and “turn away from sin”. I suspect that this is “sin” not of the “Garden of Evil”, wholly “Original” kind but of the failure-to-separate-paper-from-plastic-when-recycling kind. If you think I’m being disingenuous, consider that the passage in which the congregation joins in urging the family to “fight valiantly … against sin, the world and the Devil” has also been replaced with a polite request to “stand bravely” and “oppose the power of evil”.

The difference between “fighting” and “standing” is enormous. Fighting is an active method of combating sin; standing is a passive form of resistance. Put “stand” next to the adverb “bravely” and the whole thing smacks of defeatism. Whenever the English say that an enterprise is “brave” they really mean that it is hopeless.

Though some people protested the blander, vaguer vows, prompting the slight revision, CofE pastors find asking parents and godparents to make the new vows “much easier.” Stanley writes that “There are only two explanations of why that might be the case”:

a) A worryingly large number of CofE parishioners are in fact practicing Satanists.
b) Parents and godparents are not taking the religious dimension of the baptism service seriously enough and the clergy are not doing an adequate job of explaining it to them.