Justin Welby is rewriting the principles that hold our societies together
by Nick Timothy, Daily Telegraph:
Nobody personifies the madness of our times, and the moral cowardice of our leaders, like the Archbishop of Canterbury.
On Friday, under pressure from precisely nobody, Justin Welby climbed atop his chosen pulpit – an interview on BBC Radio 4 – and announced a review of statues and commemorative names in Anglican churches and buildings. “Some will have to come down,” he said, and “some names will have to change.”
He did not stop there. Comparing figures commemorated by the Church to the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police, he said, “you’ll remember the statues coming down of [Felix] Dzerzhinsky … it’s what people do at times like this, and it’s a good thing.” Unfortunately, the Archbishop did not name who in Britain’s history he thinks resembles the monster responsible for the Red Terror and murder of millions.
Welby seems to believe Britain, and all white people, carry collective sin specific to them. He recently invited us to pray for “white Christians [to] repent of our own prejudices”. On Friday, he said: “For this country and for this country in the world, there’s got to be a generosity … there’s got to be that new life which is always on offer.” Britain, and specifically Britain, he believes, must repent its unique sins to be born again.
When a Black Lives Matter activist called for statues of Jesus to be pulled down because they portrayed Him as a white European, Welby had the chance to draw the line. Jesus is depicted in different ways the world over, the Archbishop explained. He might have gone on to say that the significance of Jesus is spiritual, not political or racial, that Jesus was God made flesh, and that we are all made in God’s own image. Instead, he agreed that the depiction of Christ in Western countries should change and criticised the “sense that God is white”. Jesus was “Middle Eastern, not white,” he later reiterated, studiously avoiding the more accurate description that Jesus was a Jew. But then Middle Eastern Jews, or Israelis as we also call them, are these days an unfashionable minority to defend.
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