The Expulsion of the Holy Ghost

The vast majority of the population of Europe, including the United Kingdom, has severed any material connection with the Christian religion. Thus the immense number of quotations from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer that are used in daily speech have been severed in the public mind from any appreciation of the texts from which they come.

When the Muslim population are speaking English, they virtually always deploy religious phrases in Arabic; which is the language in which they hear them in the mosque; whatever may be the language  used by the preacher in linking the religious phrases with the point that is being made. Thus very few quotations from the Koran have come into everyday secular English usage.

As one of the minority of the population who still does regularly attend church, I am increasingly aware of how few Anglican churches make any use of the King James Bible and of the Book of Common Prayer in their regular worship: thus for many young people who are taken to church the resonance of the 'old' phrases has been lost. In most churches awful, clumsy late twentieth-century versions of the official liturgy are giving way to non-liturgical 'popular' or 'family' events where the clergy simply make up what they think the congregation will find a happy experience. In other cases, the laity are simply encouraged to use the space, lighting and heating of the church to create their own event; with the intent that they shall go home feeling 'better' for the encounter. Traditional, authoritarian preaching is at a huge discount among Christians and Jews; while Islam faces up to the problem that some traditional preaching can easily verge on 'Islamism'.

Among the secularisation and debasement of religion, which is particularly prevalent in the Church of England [where it has driven away the majority of former adherents], to me one of the most interesting changes has been the removal of the 'Holy Ghost' from the usage of the clergy. Almost universally, the phrase 'Holy Spirit' has supplanted the ghost. I can find two reasons for this:
1. In the relatively recent English Language Mass, the Roman Catholic church adopted the 'Spirit';
2. Naive Anglican clerics, whose training includes little reference to [or respect for] traditional usage of any kind, are told that the phrase 'the Holy Ghost' might make people think of spooks, boggarts, zombies and other scary creatures of the human mind.

Such clowns do not seem to realise that 'spirit' can also refer to a powerful intoxicant, and thus their adoption of the term 'Holy Spirit' is simply carried forward. The words of well-known hymns are changed to incorporate this, and other changes of usage that are thought to be more politically correct. The result has been to remove both beauty and character from the Sunday services that become an unwelcome duty for people who can remember better days.

The occasion for writing thus is that I received during the past week the annual Report and Accounts of the Prayer Book Society, and realised that fewer than four thousand people - in the whole wide world - care sufficiently about maintaining some use of the Book of Common Prayer as to contribute to the body that makes efforts to allow all candidates for ordination as ministers of religion to handle, read, think about and - possibly - use the root source of what used to be the strength of the Church of England and it affiliates worldwide.

I have long anticipated a reaction against the shoddy state of the Anglican Church; but there has been no serious sign of it. One could, just possibly, take a sort of comfort from the emergence of radicalism in the Muslim population; in that young people are seeking to express their contempt for the degeneracy of contemporary society: even though that search can lead to jihadist destruction of society and of the perpetrators . It is a very sad fact, that such a search for enlightenment can lead to medieval violence and social oppression. There must be a better way, for the people who could benefit from any of the world's great religions.