The Church of England was once described as ‘the Tory party at prayer’ but this is no longer reflected in the pulpit, a survey by the Times has found, with 60% of priests backing Left-wing parties and just 15% backing Right-wing parties.
Thirty-six per cent of priests back Labour and the Conservatives are in fourth place on 13%, behind the Liberal Democrats and “don’t know”.
The Times poll of almost 1,200 active Church of England clergy also found that 75.4 per cent of respondents backed Remain at the 2016 referendum, compared with 18.8 per cent who voted Leave. This appears to put them at odds with their congregations, after previous surveys found that between 55 and 66 per cent of Anglican worshippers supported Brexit. …
The Times worked closely with academics and polling experts to devise the survey, which was sent to a random sample of 5,000 priests with English addresses from Crockford’s Clerical Directory of Anglican clergy. It received 1,486 responses and results were analysed from the 1,185 in active ministry.
The Times followed the same methodology used by YouGov and the University of Lancaster for the last survey of Church of England priests in 2014 and received a similar number of responses. The age and sex of our respondents tallied extremely closely with the overall breakdown for the church’s entire body of active priests.
Asked who they would back if there were a general election tomorrow, 36.1% of respondents said Labour, 17.9% the Lib Dems, 16.8% did not know, and 13.2% said the Tories. A further 6.4% said Green and 1.3% Reform.
The survey found that more than 80% of priests opposed the Government’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, with 65.7% strongly opposing and 15.1% “tending to oppose” it versus 2.9% who strongly support and 11.9% who tend to support it.
Among respondents 89.2% deemed it appropriate for the Archbishop of Canterbury to publicly criticise government policies, versus 7.6% who found it inappropriate.
No wonder the C of E is so often afflicted by progressive-liberal groupthink and fails to recognise when it is alienating half the country. Its ranks are dominated by Lefties.
Worth reading in full.
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