This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Can I have some more?
On Good Friday my Scottish Episcopal church followed the recipe for thin gruel that Marcus Walker identifies in today’s average Anglican sermon [SOUNDING BOARD, MAY].
Over the course of three hours of devotions, “every bien-pensant soft-left cause found in the Guardian” included the suggestion that Hamas has no power (never mind the hostages) and of the importance of watching Adolescence.
Also relevant to Christ’s Passion: the world is dominated by unjust immigration officials, and the January 6 QAnon shaman was not the Messiah. Never were we invited to identify ourselves with the crowd that shouted “Crucify!” Because apparently, thank heavens, being a Christian means all blame is external.
One preacher was particularly reflective about the criminal crucified alongside Jesus. His retort to this man’s admission, “We have indeed been justly condemned, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds” (Luke 23.41), was “Really? He could have been a runaway slave or wrongly accused.” Because why would Jesus have told him, “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” if the man had done something wrong?
Theology that drops introspection and culpability dilutes any need for salvation. It may stuff the ego, but in the end it starves the soul.
Benjamin Morse
Glasgow
The brutal truth
Michael Henderson’s representation of my work in his reviews of Nicky Campbell’s Radio 4 series on boarding schools is wilfully inaccurate [RADIO, APRIL].
“Renton has spent much of his adult life reheating tales of his blighted schooldays” is not true. I first wrote about boarding schools and the culture of tolerated neglect and abuse therein in 2014, when I was 53. Since then I have published two books on entirely different subjects.
My 2017 book Stiff Upper Lip was not about “brutes with canes” — it was largely about the brutes who sexually abused the children placed in their care, and the brutes in charge who habitually covered up those crimes, putting more children at risk.
Despite claiming to have read that book and listened to Nicky Campbell’s programmes, Henderson does not mention this issue, a dominating feature of both Campbell’s and my school experience — as it was for thousands of others, in state-run boarding schools and private.
The Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), set up by Theresa May in 2014, gathered vast amounts of evidence that attests to all this — the numbers and the cover-ups. Sadly, successive governments have dodged implementation of the Inquiry’s recommendations.
I don’t think children will be safe in the establishments Henderson is so eager to excuse until the very sensible IICSA proposals become law, in full.
Alex Renton
Edinburgh
Real-world thinking
“Bernard Mandeville was amongst the first to argue that we don’t really know ourselves,” says Patrick West’s review of Man-Devil, John Callanan’s book about Mandeville [BOOKS, MAY]. “Morality, and its attendant hypocrisies, was a way of repurposing and legitimising our instincts,” West says of Mandeville’s thinking.
Such study of the evolution of intellectual thinking is legitimate for a philosopher such as Callanan at King’s College, London. Such thinking is inept, inapt and pernicious, however, when projected into the real world.
In reality, we all know about human nature. We all know the desperate need for a reassertion of a socially responsible morality like Christianity in a world where collective social conscience has been poisoned for decades by the careless, do-as-you-please religion of man-centred Materialism. Witness the unprecedented plague of drug-dealing and the mounting tyranny of armed criminal gangs.
Morality exists to counter and channel our instincts, not legitimise them. Society needs an apt, cultivated moral conscience, not the socially corrosive speculations, priorities and prejudices emanating from ivory towers.
Graham R. Catlin
Kergrist-Moëlou, France
Naughty Nags
Stephen Pollard’s piece [TURF ACCOUNT, APRIL] on the naming of horses reminded me of a news item I heard many years ago, possibly as far back as Jack de Manio’s spell on the Today programme. Names for racehorses were, henceforth, to be read out loud before approval. This followed a near miss with “Norfolk And Chance”.
Iain Salisbury
Edgbaston
