“THE heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of a fool to the left,” according to the book of Ecclesiastes. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury (pictured), might not agree. As the head of the Church of England, the former oilman has championed several causes usually associated with the left. This week the Church held a series of meetings to discuss buying the loan book of Wonga, a lender that recently went into administration, in order to prevent the debts of its borrowers being sold to another high-interest loan firm. The previous week the archbishop had compared socialism to the Christian belief that all men and women are created equally in the image of God.

Archbishop Welby is not unusual among the clergy. If anything, he is seen as a conservative. Rowan Williams, his predecessor, was even more outspoken. Bishop Williams styles himself as a “hairy lefty” and as leader of the Church backed calls for a “Robin Hood tax” on financial transactions. In the 1980s he was marked out as “subversive” for his earlier campus activism as a student at Oxford. Those further down the pecking order also lean leftward. In 2015, 84 bishops signed a letter urging the prime minister to increase the number of refugees admitted to Britain.

The lefty politics of the clergy sometimes rankle with lay Anglicans, who tend to be more right-wing. More than 40% of Anglican Christians believe that immigration has no benefits whatsoever, compared with just 2% of the clergy. Some 52% of the punters in the pews say welfare spending is too high, compared with just 17% of the preachers in the pulpit. Similarly, nearly 70% of lay Anglicans think benefits create dependency; 63% of the ordained take the opposite view. Anglicans disproportionately backed Brexit, despite several bishops coming out for Remain. Nick Spencer of Theos, a think-tank, describes the relationship between vicars and their congregations as resembling “Guardian readers preaching at Daily Mail readers.”