Bishop undermines his argument

Good disagreement is probably much more difficult to get in an internet age than ever before when incivility and so-called ‘trolling’ are ever more rampant.

In my children’s school there has been an incident of cyber-bullying, which the school principal has had to adjudicate. In a letter to parents he bemoaned the involvement of adults and the presence of ‘trolls’. He also criticised the fact that pupils were on-line ‘at all hours’.

This is all a noticeable change that children and adults are all struggling to come to terms with.

I’ve noticed on church-based sites that the behaviour of those commenting below articles is very bad-tempered. The best advice I have heard is to make sure that the things you say online you would be prepared to say to friends and family.

I wish all church leaders would follow this advice. The Bishop of Buckingham, Alan Wilson, last week used the phrase ‘Nazir-Ali-style fascism’ in a post on Facebook.

This week on Twitter he described the House of Bishops’ guidance as ‘dead, hypocritical Pharisaism’. He later denied that he was implying that any of his fellow bishops were ‘dead, hypocritical Pharisees’. It was an abstract noun, he explained.

Other abstract nouns used by the Bishop of Buckingham include the use of the terms ‘bigotry’ and ‘homophobia’.

The use of such terms damages the kind of ‘good disagreement’ that the Archbishop is calling for.