Leaked documents last week revealed how Winchester Cathedral apparently now plans to remodify its choral foundation in line with its new-found main priorities not of worshipping God, but of instead increasing “reach and access” and “diversity and inclusion”. It turns out the only sins Christ truly died on his cross to redeem were those of white, Western, cisheteronormativity. Cathedral authorities hope to achieve this holy aim by replacing the current choristers with a “variety of singers from other parts of the regional demographic”. Goodbye plainsong, hello nasheeds?
At least Winchester didn’t go as far as Sheffield Cathedral, which in 2020 decided to disband its choir entirely, the better to serve its “mixed urban community”. In the twisted world of DEI, rather than have an unacceptably white choir, far better to have no choir at all. (At least temporarily – Sheffield does seem to have a choir of some sort now, no doubt doing a nice line in raps like this: just wait until you see what the elderly white pastor in question innocently rhymes ‘bigger’ with when describing Jesus’s own admirably racially diverse urban status.)
According to a statement subsequently released by Winchester Cathedral once its leaked plan started getting criticism in the newspapers, what was really meant by increasing “diversity and inclusion” here was actually just spending more money on their girls’ choir, whilst simultaneously maintaining current funding levels for their boys’ one. Having said that, “for the wellbeing and protection of all our clergy and staff, it is Cathedral policy not to comment on confidential HR matters”, added the press release, so who knows?
The very issue of mixed choirs itself is a controversial one, however, with many objecting to the Church of England’s increasing obsession with replacing traditional all-male choirs with ones filled with girls as well. Protests are not limited to the mere ‘It’s political correctness gone mad!’ kind, but are informed by the simple fact that boys’ and girls’ vocal chords enjoy innate physical differences, so the gender composition of a choir makes a genuine difference to the sound of the subsequent music. But then, most high-ups in the CofE don’t seem terribly interested in publicly admitting the existence of biological differences between the two sexes any more, do they? One day, will Carols From King’s be replaced instead with a nice little ditty from Carol, a queen?
Preaching to the Queer Choir
What songs might the CofE’s admirably intersex choirs of tomorrow actually sing? Sympathy For the Devil, obviously. And maybe also Lola by The Kinks. Besides that, 1980s Mancunian misery-guts The Smiths once had a humorous song named Vicar in a Tutu, about a cross-dressing CofE vicar who spent his days secretly donning girly gear and sliding giggling down the banister inside his private vicarage. What stood as a mere joke back in 1986, however, has since come true for real.
Brett Murphy was until lately an Anglican vicar of perfectly normal mainstream Christian opinions which he broadcast to his 14,000 followers on YouTube. One such opinion was that the aptly-named Reverend Rachel Mann, an adult human male who had been appointed the CofE’s first-ever transgender Archdeacon in June 2023, was “biologically a bloke”, or, in single-word terms, a “fella”.
Any simple anatomical examination of Reverend Mann beneath his vestments could have confirmed this fact immediately but, whilst stubbornly continuing to reject the original Catholic position of the Transubstantiation of the Host, it appears the CofE does now accept the rival doctrine of the Transubstantiation of the Zygotes.
“I’m self-evidently a woman, but I’m glad I was once a man,” Mr. Mann once delusionally told the Daily Telegraph; he also equally delusionally self-IDs as “a lesbian”. For any readers who are confused at this point, the actual translation of the word ‘lesbian’ in this context is ‘straight man in a dress’. Trans-substantiation indeed.
From Hymn to Her?
The above blatantly non-scriptural words of Mann’s were not deemed worthy of official CofE censure, but Reverend Murphy’s certainly were. What specific charges – known as CDMs, or actions under the Clergy Disciplinary Measure – were actually brought against the wicked Reverend? Four were registered against him simultaneously, an all-time record.
- Firstly, he had supposedly ‘misgendered’ Mr. Mann by referring to him as a man, which is what he is. Instead of being a ‘woman’, said Murphy, Mann was actually “a radical rainbow activist” being installed “in a position of high authority” which, Murphy guessed, was simply the early part of a wider plot of “positioning” Mann to one day be appointed the CofE’s first transgender bishop.
- Secondly, Murphy had expressed concern over the increasingly gay way human sexuality was increasingly now being taught in CofE schools. No wonder, when official CofE guidance on such issues in Church-maintained schools specifically states small boys should not in any way be discouraged from dressing up in “tutu, tiara and heels”, just like in The Smiths’ old 1980s joke-song.
- Thirdly, a complaint had been made that Vicar Murphy had cruelly neglected to visit a sick parishioner in his hospital bed – possibly because nobody had ever told Murphy this individual was ill in the first place.
- Fourthly, Murphy had spotted a bizarre ‘Prayer of Approach’ published by Reverend Mann online, in which Mann had appeared to claim Jesus was “Our Sister”, who (at least in one possible reading, I’m unsure) had menstruated on the cross, and that God was actually female, before then comparing ‘Her’ to a “chuckling wise woman” (i.e., a practitioner of old-time village witchcraft). In response, Murphy had scandalously re-tweeted Mann’s words, together with implications Mann was engaged in acts of “blasphemous idolatrous theology”.
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Mr. Mann Or Little Miss?
Thankfully, when the CDM complaints tribunal first convened last year, the presiding woke witchfinder, the Bishop of Loughborough, found Reverend Murphy not guilty of all charges – but still sent him a strongly-worded letter of rebuke, warning him of using “intentionally derogatory and disrespectful” language against Mr. Mann by calling a bloke a bloke, deeming such words “not appropriate” to be used by “a clerk in Holy Orders”, unlike, say, Reverend Mann’s own competing highly respectful language arguably acclaiming Jesus as a public menstruator.
Even worse, by using YouTube to give his sermons, the Bishop further accused Murphy of trying to spread his own Good Word to “as wide an audience as possible”. Isn’t that literally what priests are supposed to do?
Feeling the process to be the punishment, Brett Murphy resigned his post, joining the rival schismatic Free Church of England instead (the one the similarly crucified Reverend Calvin Robinson is also now in), decrying the CofE’s abysmal queerness-fuelled “landslide into apostasy”.
Reverend Murphy was wise to seek shelter elsewhere, as, in December last year, the CofE announced that, even though he was no longer one of their vicars, he was having a second CDM re-opened against him for one of these same prior charges anyway – that of ‘insulting’ Mr. Mann by accurately referring to him by his correct birth-sex. In late March this year, it was announced that Murphy was cleared of all charges once again, having “no case to answer”. Indeed not. All he was guilty of was telling the truth.
A Mann on a Mission
Who is the Reverend Rachel Mann? According to Wikipedia, he is a woman, but that particular online encyclopaedia never was well known for being entirely accurate. In Reverend Murphy’s own considered opinion, Reverend Mann was actually little more than a self-righteous queer heretic, or “termite”, hell-bent upon infiltrating the CofE and then rotting it from within.
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Is this really so? Look at some of the evidence and judge for yourself. For one thing, the acclaimed poet and thinker Mann is the proud author of many books of a queer-friendly nature, with titles like Dazzling Darkness: Gender, Sexuality, Illness and God, and Still Standing: A Lent Course Based on Rocketman, a song by noted homosexual pop star Elton ‘The Baptist’ John.
Like so many trans ideologues, Reverend Mann also paradoxically purports to be a committed feminist, as shown by the title of his 2020 novel The Gospel of Eve. I haven’t read it myself, but according to Reverend Murphy’s assessment of Mann’s general message, the author thinks that “not everything was bad about ‘The Fall’ in the Book of Genesis, and that Eve’s rebellion against God was not that bad”. (Wasn’t that the specific opinion of the Serpent who tempted Eve, too?) “To me that is a heresy,” said Reverend Murphy – before then being treated as a heretic by the CofE himself for pointing this out.
Open Wide and Swallow Your Tablet
A sycophantic 2020 interview in leading weekly religious newspaper the Tablet has as its headline a quote from Mann to the effect that “I was only able to find God after I had transitioned”, possibly because the true ‘God’ he worshipped was actually himself. Every night as a child, Mann would pray to God that he would wake up as a girl, but – Hocus Pocus! – the spell never worked. Possibly this was why, as a young philosophy student, Mann temporarily transitioned away from the faith of his childhood to become “a hard-nosed atheist”.
As an adult, however, once he had “become who I am” (a man in a dress), he was finally placed “in a position to allow God to get at me” and detransitioned away from atheism back towards Christianity. Well, they do say Jesus loves a sinner.
The transphilic contemporary media-world certainly do, with Mann being asked to go on Big Brother, an offer he declined, possibly waiting for the show to be re-named Big Sister instead. The CofE loves a sinner nowadays too, allowing Mann to serve on its official Faith and Order Commission, its expert body on questions of doctrine, which the vicar has jokingly compared to the Vatican’s old Spanish Inquisition – hence, perhaps, Reverend Murphy’s later burning at the stake like Giordano Bruno.
A truly innovative theologian, Mann is willing to debate any given element of Church doctrine, with one curious single exception: “I won’t debate my identity. I’m happy to have a conversation about theory and theology and concepts, but not whether I am a woman.”
Mann does, however, appear prepared to debate whether or not Jesus Christ was really a woman. Observe his aptly titled 2023 essay ‘Twisting Words’, which appeared on the website Christian Century (not sure which specific century they mean there, but it’s certainly not this one). The piece aims to deconstruct how the books of the Bible are really “texts of terror” against women, in part because they use words like “women” in an excessively simplistic and literal-minded way (i.e., to refer to women). Apparently, “words and phrases do not carry self-evident meanings”, as so ably demonstrated by the fact that the Reverend Mann chooses to describe himself as “a lesbian”.
Jesus Wept – Like a Little Girl
Mann is not crude enough to say Jesus has a vagina (he left that to a different stupid CofE cleric). Instead, as far as I can understand Mann’s sophisticated exegesis, it is claimed the famous Son of God actually acts as some gender-fluid, gender-subverting agent of “liberative theology”, whose crucifixion acted to save humanity not from eternal damnation and sin, but instead to sow “the seeds of our liberation from toxic patriarchal conceptions of identity that ruin and limit us”. How so?
Jesus models a way of being fully human that subverts a key problem which has damaging effects not just for women and girls but for boys and men: toxic masculinity. Consider Jesus’s death on a cross. It would have been coded in Roman imperial culture as shameful. Why? Because it reduced a man to a passive, humiliating death suitable only for a woman… On the cross, Jesus also shows abiding solidarity with women, those to whom violence and exploitation is most likely to happen [e.g., when you let male rapists into female prisons]… When Jesus says, from the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” I think he cries out to the god who needs to die: the patriarchal god who only values power and power-over [other people], the god of macho force and action… Is it any surprise, then, that the first witnesses to Christ’s resurrection are women?
I apologise if I have misunderstood any of Mann’s ideas above, of course – but then, the precise semantic meanings of even incredibly common words like ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘complete and utter sacrilegious bollocks’ are very fluid these days, aren’t they, so I hope he won’t mind too much if I have failed in this area.
Apologia Pro Vita Sewer
According to one online profile, “Rachel has a tattoo on her arm in Latin, translating as ‘know yourself’, which is something fundamental to her religion and trans identity.”
He can’t be that self-aware, though as, besides agreeing to be interviewed by the Tablet, Mann has also done a teen-mag-style ‘Quick Quiz’ interview with OutNorthWest, the Greater Manchester area’s leading homosexual lifestyle periodical, answering such severe theological posers as “If you were a biscuit, which one would you be?” My first guess would have been “A chocolate finger” (although as he can’t have periods, “Jammy Dodger” would also have sufficed), but instead Mann answers, “A custard cream – comforting, satisfying and not very grown up.”
Asked to “Tell us a secret about yourself”, meanwhile, I would have expected him to answer “I have a penis”, but instead Mann confides that “I wrote a very bad and silly sub-Twilight vampire romance five years ago, centring on the life of a lesbian vampire vicar and her partner. It got very close to being published. I’m kind of glad it didn’t now!” So am I.
Finally, when asked to complete the Shania Twain-like sentence “The best thing about being a woman is…” Mann commendably answered “I wouldn’t know”. Only joking! He actually replied, “I’d say it’s always being right.” Personally, I think what Mann most likes about ‘being’ a woman is quite simply the attention.
Examine a 2013 profile of Mann the theologian in cultural journal The Quietus, where Manchester Cathedral’s one-time Poet-in-Residence reprints a verse about “my own weak tight male arse” and how, when a 24-year-old ladyboy just starting out in the world of semi-professional cross-dressing, he used to walk down the street “flicking” it out “far and wide, side to side” at passers-by like a cartoon harlot of the Jessica Rabbit kind, hoping to thereby “grow it fat and round as an orange”. Was the main attraction of the Anglican priesthood to Reverend Mann really only that it allowed him a platform to swan around proudly wearing a big white dress in public?
In an accompanying interview, Mann echoes leading gender-theorist fraud Judith Butler by proclaiming that “there is a huge performative dimension to who we are”. So much so that, when young, Mann was invited to join the National Youth Theatre, as “like so many acting types, I’ve always been inclined to see the world as a kind of stage with me as the central actor who should be offered the best parts in all circumstances”. You don’t say. How long before Mann ends up being offered the “best part” or “central actor” role of the CofE’s first transgender Bishop, then, as predicted by the sadly martyred Reverend Brett Murphy?
With those of Mann’s blinkered mindset very firmly ensconced within positions of power and moral authority inside all of our major institutions these days, even the supposed Christian churches, I’m not entirely sure the findings of the recent highly sceptical Cass Review into trans matters, no matter how commendable or logically irrefutable, will suddenly just help dismantle the gender cult at all, as many delighted observers hoped when the review was released last month.
How much, do you think, someone with the unassailably solipsistic personality and outlook upon life of the Reverend Mann will care about petty little trifles like evidence, rational argument and medical reality? A true post-modernist, Mann doesn’t even think words possess stable shared meanings to them – very possibly he could read the entire review and conclude it was all really very ‘positive’, in some obscure and twisted semantic fashion?
As Brett Murphy has found, thanks to such Foucauldian linguistic Hocus Pocus, you can’t even call a Mann a man anymore. Ironically, in today’s CofE, it is people like Rachel Mann who now very much wear the trousers.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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