Irony in England

The morning started out with me reading a brilliant piece in “First Things” by my friend Dr. Carl Trueman, entitled What is the Church of England For? Dr. Trueman was in England and he couldn’t help but notice a church noticeboard as he wandered back to his hotel from a bookshop.  It advertised not merely events for the inevitable Pride Month but a whole year of Pride-affirming events.  One was a Q & A with “the next generation of queer priests” in March (tickets for the fun were priced cheap at a mere five pounds), a queer movie night in April, and an evening of LGBTQ questions for clergy in May.  December featured a queer Christmas Carol Service where the public was invited to join the congregation to “celebrate the Nativity through song, blending its beauty with iconic queer anthems from Cher to Ariana, Bowie to Gaga, for a truly unforgettable night”.  Unforgettable maybe but certainly predictable.  

         My own personal sojourn in Anglicanism is long over but one doesn’t need to have been an Anglican to lament the current state of the Church of England and its Canterbury children.  My homecoming to Orthodoxy has led me to revise my sunny opinion of such men as Wycliffe, Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley but not my abiding appreciation for later Anglicans.  Even a cradle Orthodox can discern the value of such men as John Stott, Gregory Dix, and C. S. Lewis, including their ecumenical commonalities with Orthodoxy.  And it is thinking about such men that now makes me sad because the current state of their own cradle church must have them spinning in their English graves.  Much that was good and godly in Anglicanism is now lost and, more than that, is being trampled upon.  Darkness is being redefined as light and light as darkness (Isaiah 5:20).

         The iron captivity of the Church of England to the current secular heretical fad celebrating sexual perversion is all the more ironic when seen against what else is happening in England and other parts of the United Kingdom. 

I refer, of course, to the riots provoked by the crimes of some of its Muslim immigrants, including attempted beheading in Belfast and the violent gang rape and trafficking of about 250,000 young girls in England. The riots were provoked by the steadfast refusal of the governments to admit that there was a problem created by such open immigration policies and their refusal to prosecute the offenders for fear of being called names like “racist” or “Islamophobic”.  Evidently the government has never heard the child’s wisdom which informs us that sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.

Much debate swirls around the issue.  What is not debatable, however, is Islam’s historical and lethal hostility to homosexuals which sees homosexual men even now being targeted and killed in Islamic countries such as Iran.

The irony is that England is allowing itself to be infiltrated and (arguably) taken over by Muslims advocating for Sharia law and if Islam succeeds in the cultural takeover of Britain, such cultural institutions such as Pride Month with its rainbow flags will be banned.  (Way back in 2015 in faraway America, a city council with a Muslim majority in Michigan banned the rainbow flag.)  More ominously and importantly, the physical safety and lives of homosexuals will be threatened in such an Islamic culture.

The purpose of these reflections is not to pour more gasoline on the fires of controversy, much less to excite hostility.  My purpose is theological, not political.  Prophets like Ezekiel were charged by God with warning the people of God of the clear and present danger found in their sinful actions and this charge is given to teachers in the Church as well since they are the watchmen upon the ecclesiastical walls.  My concern is with churchmen, not politicians.

And the warning to the Church is this: we must remain faithful to God in upholding the truths we have been given.  I suggest that the crisis Britain is now facing is rooted in the national apostasy of their state church.  If the Church of England had remained faithful to the inheritance it once received and done its evangelistic job, such apostasy among the populace would not have occurred and, with the apostasy, a vacuum to be filled by a foreign faith.  Bluntly put, the rise of Islam in Britain is the fault of Britain’s state church.

Looking back into history to find the origins of Britain’s glorious Christian heritage makes one all the sadder.  One thinks of St. Gregory the Great (aka “the Dialogist”) sending Augustine of Canterbury to the southern coast and of the missionaries arriving with icons in a procession.  One thinks of St. Aidan of Lindisfarne and St. Cuthbert.  One thinks of the Venerable Bede in his monastery at Jarrow, the father of English history.  One thinks of Alfred the Great and his struggle against the armed invaders of his land.  Such a glorious history, such an illustrious inheritance!  All squandered and left behind in the rush to embrace the latest virtue signal.

The place of the Reformation in the long destruction of this inheritance may be debated.  Less debatable is the downward spiral itself.  Recent Church of England history records such events as the publication of Honest to God by liberal bishop John A. T. Robinson in 1963, the episcopal tenure of the liberal David Jenkins as bishop of Durham in 1983, and the 2023 decision of their general synod to approve of blessings for same-sex couples following their civil marriage.  Such escalating liberalism caused C. S. Lewis to warn his beloved Church of England as early as 1959 (in his talk “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism”) that if missionary work were not done to convert the church’s clergy away from their liberalism soon “the future history of the Church of England is likely to be short”.  It is doubtful that the current fulfillment of his prophecy would offer him much comfort.

This all means that a church has a responsibility before God for the fate of the nation in which it sojourns according to the amount of influence it has with that nation.  As St. Paul wrote, God is not mocked (Galatians 6:7), either by individuals or by nations.  If a nation departs from God and from the truth on which it was founded, God will send judgment upon them.  In the case of the northern kingdom of Israel departing from God, the judgment came in the form of invading Assyrians.  In the case of the southern kingdom of Judah, the judgment came in the form of invading Babylonians.  In the case of Britain, the country of the missionaries Augustine, Aidan, and Cuthbert, it is coming in the form of lawful immigration from Islamic countries.

It is not my place here to opine what governments should do.  But it is my job to speak to fellow Christians in the Church.  We must beware taking little steps that lead down the proverbial slippery slope.  Liberal voices will decry such warnings as unnecessary and alarmist.  But Britain proves that there is proper cause for alarm.  If the line had been drawn in the theological and ecclesiastical sand in 1963 and Bishop Robinson’s liberalism effectively dealt with, perhaps further decline might have been avoided. 

One thing anyway is clear: Bishop Robinson’s views proved to be but one step on the downward path and we are not yet at the bottom.  Today it is celebrating the Nativity through iconic queer anthems for a truly unforgettable night.  Tomorrow—who knows?  But it might end not with a queer Christmas.  It might end with Christmas’ abolition and the muezzin’s cry ringing out over the land once sanctified by the deeds of the saints.