by Jonathan Sacerdoti, Spectator
The Archbishop of Canterbury has given the country a perfect lesson in interfaith engagement – in what it is, rather than what its practitioners imagine it to be – and, like most perfect lessons, she taught it by accident.
Those of us who have sat through a lifetime of clunky ‘interfaith’ initiatives – and I have done so from the Jewish side of the table for at least 20 years – learn to recognise the tell. The harder an event works to demonstrate that two communities get along, the more clearly it announces that somebody doubts it. I have said for decades, usually to sneers, that these choreographed encounters are not coexistence but a performance of it; that the performance tends to prove the opposite of what it intends; and that a stage, once built, attracts performers.
On Friday 11 September, 25 years to the day since the Twin Towers came down, the Archbishop of Canterbury presented an award for interfaith cooperation to a cleric who once proposed making Osama bin Laden the ‘Sword of God’. Six days later, she took it back. But this wasn’t Dame Sarah Mullally’s first rodeo. She has now proved the point twice in a single summer, and we should be grateful: it is the most complete practical course in the subject this country has ever been given. The other was during her Instagram influencer trip to visit Palestinians in the Middle East in June.
Her bumbling voyage through every woke, reactionary cause is providing her flock with a valuable lesson in how such ‘leadership’ only drags them in one direction: towards disaster. And it is all being photographed, press released and shared on Instagram for maximum effect, confirming that this type of fakery’s only value is through performative, enforced visibility. If she is the shepherd and the Church her flock, she seems determined to remind us that the end destination for sheep is always the slaughterhouse.