“I never wanted to be a religious affairs correspondent,” begins Simon Stephen Bates in his essay Demob happy. Naturally we expect this to be followed by his aspirations to lumberjacking, but no. Let’s be serious for a minute. “I had always regarded it as a slippers and pipe sort of a job, to be given to ageing hacks in beige cardigans working their way towards retirement. So when the editor of the Guardian asked me to do the job in 2000, on my return from five years as the paper’s European Affairs Editor in Brussels, I thought he was trying to tell me something about the inexorable downward trajectory of a once moderate career.”
And so begins an account of his seven year gig at the Guardian. It’s pretty clear that this is an area in which familiarity breeds contempt, or at least a numbing despair. “What faith I had, I’ve lost, I am afraid – I’ve seen too much, too close.” Eventually…
Faltering in the face of so much theology, I decided to cover church issues politically. As a former lobby correspondent, I felt that the disputes were more explicable in such terms… indeed some conservative evangelicals are using tactics remarkably similar to the old Militant Tendency to infiltrate the Church of England these days.
What now? Bates is moving on to pastures new; meanwhile Paul Sims ((Editor of the New Humanist.)) reports that “his successor at the Guardian, Riazatt Butt, has become the first Muslim to be appointed as religious correspondent by a national newspaper.”
I’ll await his demob report with interest.