No Future For You!

If you haven't watched Does Christianity Have a Future? then you really must, before it drops off the bottom of the iPlayer. It's hilarious. Ann Widdicombe is jaw-droppingly terrible in her attempt to be a serious documentary maker, unable to differentiate between the question of the church's place in modern British society and her own Heathrow airport-sized personal baggage on the issue. Johann Hari is able to sidestep with ease her attempt to paint atheists as moral-free monsters for whom anything goes but she refuses to accept that her church has ever done anything wrong. She can perhaps be forgiven for talking about the Pope's visit to London last year without mentioning the demonstrations against it but she certainly goes in to an interview with Rowan Williams straight away attacking the CofE and Anglicanism as being 'woolly' without admitting that she crossed the aisle to the Catholics because she felt the Church of England wasn't being beastly enough toward women (it would be interesting to know whether, if Catholics started having female or openly gay priests whether that would make Widdicombe convert to Islam). She has some success with Evan Harris as he obligingly ties himself up in knots about 'socially conservative bishops' in the House of Lords rather than just attacking them as part of an unelected clique but then sits nodding while one of these bishops talk about how they a tiny minority in the Lords that they couldn't possibly do anyone any harm and they are really nice old men once you get to know them. He even tries to claim they were the first people to believe the War in Iraq was wrong.

Hilariously, at the start of the show she gives the impression that she is going to go talk to teenagers in estates for their views of religion, when we actually come to that part of the show it turns out she's actually talking to good middle-class university students in their early twenties. I say 'she's talking', there's no indication that she was there when they were filmed. When she asks university students for their views she is forced to admit they aren't interested in God, but still manages to find them expressing vague feelings of 'is there anything more to life than this' which she tries to twist into being Christian in all but name.

Rabid Christians are carefully kept away from the screen, when various church leaders are 'challenged' by her on controversial topics like abortion or homosexuality they are allowed to give their media-friendly answer, dressing up their hatred in fluffy language. As Widdicombe doesn't like those sorts of people either she's not going to challenge the church fathers on that.

So after fifty minutes of bad news what does Ann decide? The Church of England is screwed but barely counts as real Christianity anyway so everyone else is alright. Christianity will survive because people have declared it was dying before and were wrong then. I don't know which particular type of fallacy that is but she likes to lay them about her. All in all, you'd probably get a better show about religion out of Richard Dawkins than Ann Widdicombe.