I’m re-reading some of the books on my shelves. This week I’ve returned, yet again, to Peter L. Berger’s A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. It was published in 1969, seven years after Honest to God.
Peter Berger was born in Vienna in 1929. His parents converted to Christianity when he was a child. They fled Austria in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution and eventually settled in British Palestine. He emigrated to the USA in 1946 aged 17, shortly after the end of World War II and became a naturalised citizen in 1952. He was a Protestant theologian and sociologist, a Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Jersey, when he published A Rumour. He died in June 2017 aged 88.
A Rumour of Angels offered a rejoinder to the "God is dead" movement, a strain of radical theology united around the argument that religion had lost its force in modern society. Berger argues that religious belief remains an intellectually valid way of understanding the world. He drew readers’ attention to what he saw as “signals of transcendence,” moments that pointed to an “otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life.”
Fifty-seven years after the publication of Rumour, I believe there is a deep division in contemporary Christian belief in the ideas we hold about the reality or otherwise of God and our belief in and understanding of the supernatural. According to the adherents of a self-proclaimed “traditionalist, orthodox, Biblical faith”, the Bible and God are the ultimate authority; ditto Jesus and the Holy Spirit, prayer and the Christian worship and teaching of “my” church.
I have lived for nearly seventy years dissenting from these convictions about the “ultimate” truth of God. As I’ve recounted before, at the age of eleven I made a conscious decision to trust my personal experience when it came to my sexual identity and desires. I prioritised my intuition over what I knew was held to be God’s disapproval and condemnation of homosexuality and homosexual acts. My decision to trust my intuition has guided my faith for the following seventy years. I have never easily believed in the “old order” whilst maintaining my membership of and involvement with the Church of England.
What sort of God does the Church believe in today? Is God still homophobic? Is God, as I came to learn subsequently, misogynistic, racist, transphobic and in general, prejudiced and abusive? The Church of England and the Anglican Communion are divided in their core beliefs while at the same time desperately trying to maintain an appearance of unity by developing formularies and strategic documents. They paper over the cracks, and do so more effectively for the deeper and more significant cracks and differences between us – what, ultimately, is God like, and what kind of God do we experience and believe in?
Siesta time
I spent the morning writing this much of the blog. I took a break for lunch, having lost confidence in the ultimate conclusion I was trying to reach. I took a post-lunch siesta and then returned to the PC, still feeling insecure. I listened to a Nomad podcast I’d been listening to yesterday, an interview with Christopher Collingwood, retired Canon Chancellor of York Minster. a Zen Master and leader of the Wild Goose Sanga. From there I went to Facebook and a link to a Guardian featured essay by Bill McKibben: Pope Leo has stirred awake a progressive Christianity. It can rise again,
McKibben says the stand Pope Leo has taken against Donald Trump, showing that the far right doesn’t have a monopoly on Christianity. If people of good faith push hard, says McKibben, the future could be redefined. In the essay he names various contemporary Christian categories or traditions or tribes:
Progressive Christians
Post-Vatican 2 liberals
Maga’s regressive form of Christianity
1960s/70s Christianity preserved (Pope Leo)
Right wing megachurch Evangelical (with careless pastoral theology)
A kind of progressive Christianity
Liberal Protestant
Mainline Protestantism
A similar variety of such Christian traditions and tribes can be found in England.
Peter Berger, Pope Leo and Donald Trump were or are all citizens of the United States. Berger’s Christian wisdom was affected by his Jewish roots in Nazi over-run Vienna. Pope Leo, born in 1955, is a post-Vatican 2 Catholic, an Augustinian friar who spent nearly two decades undertaking extensive missionary work in Peru. Donald Trump is a narcissistic right-wing authoritarian capitalist.
But we are British – God save and God help the King in America!
Progressive Christianity and the Supernatural
I don’t believe in the ‘existence’ in a separate ‘realm’ of a supernatural God. I do experience forces and events that cannot be explained by science. In his Introduction, Berger says he has not yet found the heresy into which his theological views would comfortably fit. In the opening sentence of chapter 1 he says commentators on the contemporary situation of religion agree that “the supernatural has departed from the modern world”. Berger says:
“The term ‘supernatural has been justly criticised on a number of grounds. The term suggests the division of reality into a closed system of rationally comprehensible ‘nature’ and a mysterious world somehow beyond it, a peculiarly modern conception.”
I think Trump believes (if he believes anything in depth) in a dualistic model of creation and good and evil, winners and losers. I hope the Pope doesn’t. I don’t. My concern now is about Christian belief in England what reality and what kind of God people believe in. Those who don’t come to church and those who abandon church probably don’t believe in a ‘supernatural’ God who exists somewhere outside the solar system/universe/cosmos. I think many who do come to church do believe in this God.
I think the reconstruction of Christian belief that has been going on in my lifetime and in the decades and centuries prior to my birth) hasn’t yet begun to take root, let alone become mainstream, in the belief in God held in 2026 by the majority of those who come to church and is especially absent from those who hold to rigid the prejudices and beliefs that underpin widespread prejudice and abuse in certain systemic Christian categories and tribal traditions.
I believe the Church of England has become dangerously infected by these tribal systems.
The Contemporary Church of England – a personal view - April 2026
Contemporary Christianity as practiced in the Church of England is vulnerable to various forms of literalism, fundamentalism, dualism and ideas about what God is like that are dependent on these traits. They are responsible for the current dogmas, doctrines, beliefs and practices that underpin the abusive, prejudiced, unhealthy culture, spiritually, emotionally and theologically, that have become more dominant in the Church (other, healthier practices can be found, if you know where to look).
I don’t have a degree, let alone a theological degree or a Masters or a doctorate. I’m not an academic. I scraped a Diploma in Architecture from what was then Kingston Polytechnic and added, ten years later, a Cambridge Diploma in Theology. I undertook ten years of onsite, practical, experiential training as an archaeologist, curate, parish priest and hospital chaplain, ten years in therapy and three years training in massage and body-centred psychotherapy, fifty years training as a contemplative and well over thirty years as an activist and campaigner for equality and justice plus seventy-seven years from kindergarten Sunday School as a dissenting Christian.
The culture of the Church of England
The culture of the Church of England in 2026 is impoverished, binary, unhealthy, abusive and inadequately aware of how ideas about God can be explored in worship, teaching, preaching and the fundamentals of parish and congregational life. Complex global challenges, political, economic, theological, philosophical, social, religious and spiritual, confront the faith of the Church of England.
The Archbishops’ Council’s over-dependence on the culture of Holy Trinity Brompton, the HTB networks and plants, the Church Revitalisation Trust, the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) and the Alliance plus its reliance of the combined wealth of these conservative charismatic evangelical tribes is disastrous. A dominant monoculture has developed across the Church of England, a culture that consumes money and on which the C of E is now pinning its hopes for growth and ultimately, it’s survival as the National Church.
We live in a complex global Christian matrix in a complex global multi-faith world on a fragile planet undergoing a global climate crisis. In the capitalist West the increasing dominance of right-wing authoritarian leaders and governments, dominated by Donald Trump’s second term as President of the USA, has become disastrously destructive. Pope Leo’s stand against Donald Trump is vital, but the reimagining of the commonplace dualistic belief in a God of good and evil who exists answering prayer in heaven somewhere is urgently required. But the signs of are not propitious.
The old order’s desperate decline and decay into decadence and confusion continues.
I'm raising funds to expand the resources available to inspire transformation in the Church of England for all those committed to changing our theology and awareness of the "reality" of God. If you value the Unadulterated Love blog and would like my work to continue and develop, please respond to my GoFundMe appeal.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/colin-coward-mbe-changing-attitude-and-unadulterated-love