by Jim Chimirie on X
On Sunday morning Dame Sarah Mullally, the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, stood in a church in Birzeit in the occupied West Bank and told the congregation she would use her role to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve. It was a specific, named, actionable commitment. A promise from the senior Christian voice in Britain to one community in one conflict.
Search for an equivalent promise made to Nigeria’s Christians and you will not find it.
In 2024 alone, over 4,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria, the majority by Islamist Fulani militia and Boko Haram affiliates. The Open Doors World Watch List, the most comprehensive annual survey of Christian persecution globally, documents severe persecution across more than 50 countries. Iraq’s Christian population has collapsed from 1.5 million before 2003 to fewer than 250,000 today, one of the most complete destructions of an ancient Christian community in recorded history. The Coptic Christians of Egypt face sustained institutional discrimination and periodic massacres. Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing what some researchers describe as a slow motion genocide of Christian communities, conducted largely by Islamist groups, largely in silence.
Dame Sarah has not made a five day pilgrimage to stand with any of them. She has not stood at a pulpit in Kaduna or Cairo or Kirkuk and pledged to use her role to seek the freedom they deserve. The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, used his Christmas Day sermon at York Minster to say that Israel had committed genocidal acts. Neither Archbishop has used that language about the groups killing Christians in their thousands across Africa and the Middle East.
That asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects the ideological framework the Church of England has absorbed so completely that it can no longer see it operating. The same progressive institutional culture documented across British policing, the NHS, the BBC and the Ministry of Justice has captured the Church of England too. Its moral grammar has been rewritten. Suffering that fits the framework gets named, visited and pledged to. Suffering that does not fit the framework gets a footnote in an inaugural address that mentions Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo alongside Ukraine and Russia, carefully balancing the optics without committing to anything specific.