By George Conger, Anglican Ink.
An exchange of open letters between a group of 40 Iranian Christians living in Britain and the Bishop of Chelmsford, the Rt. Rev. Guli Francis‑Dehqani, has exposed a sharp disagreement over the US–Israel war against Iran’s regime and raised questions about how Anglican leaders speak for persecuted believers. The letters, published by Article18 and the Diocese of Chelmsford, set one organised group of Iranian Christians in the UK—who describe the war as a possible “means of rescuing the Iranian nation from a repressive regime”—against a single Iranian‑background bishop who has denounced the same war as “unjust and illegal”. Behind their exchange lies a deeper issue: whether church leadership will continue to give priority to international law and just‑war theory, or allow the testimony of those who have lived under the regime to reshape its judgments.
The first letter is signed by 40 Iranian Christians now resident in Britain, many of them converts and refugees, writing in response to Bishop Guli’s public opposition to the war. They root their case in the last four decades of Iran’s history: repeated protest movements, mass arrests and killings, and the imprisonment and execution of dissidents and Christians. They describe the Islamic Republic’s slogans—“Death to Israel” and “Death to America”—as tools of internal control in a system whose main victims are Iranians themselves.
From their vantage point in the UK, they argue that the current US–Israel campaign is aimed at the regime’s instruments of repression, not at the people. They highlight strikes on Revolutionary Guard facilities and other regime infrastructure as attacks on the very organs that have enforced the state’s authority. On that basis, they reject the language of a war “against Iran” and instead describe an external shock that may, for the first time in decades, weaken a security state that has proved immune to internal protest and to years of international diplomacy.