An Anglican crusade is under way

Or will be, if the Church listens to its prelates, specifically the Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York, second in the hierarchy of the Anglican confession.

According to him, the Church should be more involved in politics because, says His Grace, “I simply don’t accept a separation between the Church and politics, faith and politics or, for that matter, anything and politics.”

Jesus was much more pliant. He did accept such a separation, making conciliatory statements like “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”.

But the Anglican Church has moved on from such meekness. It’s now more Christian than Christ or, depending on your point of view, less so. It now claims things that are Caesar’s by boldly stepping into politics.

Flashing through my mind is an image of His Grace, his shield decorated with a red cross, leading Knights Templar on a cavalry charge. Bedouins must be quaking in their sandals all over Arabia.

No? Wrong image? Then how about that of Richelieu and Mazarin, cardinals both, who ran French politics throughout most of the 17^th century? Richelieu was also willing to don armour and lead troops in battle against the Protestants…

Oops, sorry. Archbishop Stephen is a Protestant, so that image doesn’t work either. Actually, a closer examination of his political views shows that the kind of politics His Grace preaches have little to do with Christianity at all. In some quarters his views may even be regarded as heretical.

For example, he teaches that Jesus Christ was black. Since no biblical, ecclesiastical or historical source supports this chromatic vision, one has to assume that His Grace denies Jesus’s Jewishness and, by implication, also the Judaic aspect of Christianity.

Instead, processed by His Grace’s religiosity, Jesus emerges as a precursor of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in fact the Archbishop is on record as wishing to celebrate it in church. One wonders what a Black Lives Matter mass will sound like. I can only hope it won’t be the same as Black Mass, and no sacrifice of a virgin will be involved.

“Politics,” laments His Grace, “has shrunk. There is a loss of vision about what the world could be like”. To provide such vision, and to redeem its sins accumulated over centuries, the Anglican Church has set up an anti-racism task force.

In fact, its clerical head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has equated the Church’s treatment of blacks with the Nazi holocaust of Jews. This shows that the prelates’ knowledge of history is as deep as their understanding of theology.

As a mere layman, I’m not aware of the C of E ever having called for the extermination of all black people without distinction, much less trying to put a mass annihilation programme into practice. But I’m sure Anglican prelates are much more erudite in such matters.

And not only those of race: both archbishops and most bishops take time away from their duties to pronounce on housing policy, climate change, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ issues (I bet they all know what this acronym stands for, including the plus sign) and everything else that’s dear to the hearts of woke activists.

Archbishop Stephen even advocates nuclear disarmament, at a pinch of the unilateral type. One has to admire such dedication even if one finds this political posturing despicable.

For the fact that Anglican prelates are so actively involved in left-wing politics suggests that church affairs proper are in such good order that they leave little for Their Graces to occupy themselves. Even those of us who aren’t Anglicans must rejoice in the ongoing triumph of our state church.

Having succeeded in their mission of carrying Christ to the uninitiated, the prelates can now concentrate on worldlier matters. I may regret that the Christ they preach is a woke black activist and Greta Thunberg’s best friend, but if that’s what it takes to put bums on pews, who am I to argue?

If only that were the case. Alas, it isn’t. Over the past 20 years the C of E has suffered a catastrophic decline in attendance, some 40 per cent on average, up to 85 per cent in some areas. Parishes thriving in the past are nearing disappearance, young people especially are fleeing like demons from the cross or, if you’d rather, like Bedouins from the Templars during the First Crusade.

In other words, as the Anglican hierarchs are getting more and more involved in woke causes, their churches are emptying at a rate that suggests extinction within a couple of decades. I can’t help detecting causation here: the pews stand empty partly because the prelates have turned into political activists of the worst kind.

But I agree with Archbishop Stephen on one thing: everything in this world and, apparently, the next, has become thoroughly politicised. Unlike him, however, I think that’s precisely the problem.