not too much

In thinking about the way some African church leaders were quoted recently as "disowning" the CofE, Andrew Brown (Church Times, 5 Aug) ponders the dangers of too much information -- always a challenge for not too much!

The attribution of the quotes to serious church leaders rather than some random vituperating blowhard on the internet is something that might be missed by a non-specialist. You couldn't discern it from the language used. They all talk the same way.

The idiots on the internet sound as if they could decide the fate of modern Christianity; the Primates' opinions have the weightless freedom of email.

Perhaps this is the way people have always talked in private and off the record. But with old technology, you needed professional journalists to collect opinions and news, and carry them from one camp to another where they would do most harm. This professional function may not have been entirely abolished by the new media, but it is certainly less important. Anyone nowadays can have opinions on any religious development anywhere in the world, and these are likely to be well-informed and constantly inflamed by fresh news.

After spending a fortnight without newspapers or the internet, this seems to me an unequivocally bad thing. We'd all be so much happier if we knew less. At least, at a time when almost everything about religion in the newspapers is calculated to frighten, anger, or demoralise the reader, the travails of the Anglican Communion suggest that God had some other purpose in mind when he thought up this particular organisation: he wanted to remind us that religion can be an occasion for laughing at ourselves.