the Evil Line

I'm really glad that Sholto Byrnes, in his profile of Bishop N.T. Wright, helped us poor helpless readers see that Wright is a far right-wing neoconservative nut, by pointing out that he "declares war on militant atheists and liberals", that he "would like to see nothing less than an end to the Enlightenment split between religion and politics", that his "views come across as hardline, explicit and specific, verging on the fundamentalist". I especially needed the unsourced assessment from "a senior lay Catholic" saying "He is mad, you know". If some random Catholic said it, it must be true.

You see, if Byrnes hadn't pointed all that out in his commentary, Wright's words and actions from the article might have given me a different impression. Things like this:

A year and a half ago a group of evangelical leaders threatened the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, with a revolt unless he created a parallel structure so their churches could bypass the authority of liberal bishops. The rebels included the pugnacious Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, but not Tom Wright. He condemned their demands as "arrogant and self-serving", "unbiblical" and "a covenant with chaos".

And this:

When we continue to talk about the Eighties and I suggest the left-wing view of Margaret Thatcher's policies was not just that they were wrong, but that they were immoral, he cuts in. "They were wicked. Yup."

And this:

Wright identifies global debt as "the dirty enormous scandal of glitzy, glossy western capitalism" that must be corrected. To those who think that "taking the Bible seriously meant being conservative politically as well as theologically", he says: "The truth is very different."

And this:

Wright's belief in the Resurrection also provides an injunction to be green; it is this earth, after all, that is going to be remade. "If it is true that the whole world is now God's holy land, we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced," he writes. "This is not an 'extra' to the Church's mission. It is central."

And finally, this:

"Public discourse needs to catch up with the fact," he sighs, "that doing God in public is not about someone kneeling down and saying their prayers, and God saying, 'Go and bomb Iraq.'"

Seriously, did Byrnes even read his own article?