The unfathomable darkness of the Church of England
The Synod and Archbishop of Canterbury are channelling an unspeakable ancient calumny
The Church of England is accelerating its descent into a terrible moral and spiritual darkness.
Yesterday, the Synod decided to “hear,” or engage with, a spittle-flecked document that demonises the State of Israel with vicious falsehoods and distortions, tries to rob Jewish people of their historic identity and seeks to destroy Judaism itself as the religion rooted in the land of Israel.
Its very title, A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, perpetrates the wicked lie that Israel is the perpetrator of genocide rather than the target and victim of genocidal attacks perpetrated by the people that this document, and the Church of England, go out of their way to sanitise, excuse and justify.
The document brands Israel a “colonial, settler, and exclusionary entity” (note the term “entity” — the language of genocidal Islamists — rather than “state”, “nation” or country”).
It describes the Palestinian Arabs falsely as the “indigenous people of this land” (it’s the Jews who are the actual indigenous people of the land).
Someone should recommend Sarah read the Bible.
It claims that “the genocidal war on Gaza is the continuation of the Zionist project to seize all of Palestine, emptied of its Palestinian people” (a demonstrable lie that demonises Zionism — and therefore Judaism, whose connection with the land of Israel is existential). And it demands a boycott of dialogue with “Zionists” — which in practice means boycotting as pariahs the majority of Jews.
Every lie that’s been thrown at Israel over its war of self-defence in Gaza — starvation, ethnic cleansing, war crimes — is thrown at it here. While it includes the weaselly caveat that it doesn’t justify civilian killings, it portrays opposition to Israel’s existence and “resistance” — aka the killing of Jews — as an act of religious faith.
It's an act of religious hate. Satanic hate, just like the Holocaust.
It asserts that the Hamas atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023 were “born out of decades of injustice, oppression and displacement since the Nakba of 1948” (the war of extermination waged by the Arabs to destroy Israel at its rebirth in the Jews’ ancestral homeland, but which today’s would-be exterminators falsely describe as a Jewish war of colonial aggression).
Alluding to Israel’s war of self-defence in Gaza, it continues:
The claim of “self-defence” cannot stand. How can a coloniser defend itself against those it has colonised and expelled from their land?
In 2005, Israel expelled all Jews from Gaza, leaving it entirely in the hands of the Arabs who lived there. They had freedom and the possibility of prosperity. But then came Hamas, and their only goal was to drive all Jews from the Holy Land. Which is still their goal. Land, which was in the 19th century almost completely desolate and deserted.
Explicitly justifying Palestinian Arab murderous violence against Jews, it states:
At a time when Palestinian resistance and global solidarity movements are criminalised, we reaffirm the right of all colonised peoples to resist their colonisers.
It casts Zionists — not just Jews, but also Christian Zionists — as utterly diabolical, hell-bent on violence and killing for their own sake. This echoes the blood libels by medieval Christians that incited the mass slaughter of Jews in Europe over many centuries. Yet this document presents accusations of antisemitism primarily as a tool of political manipulation.
This is what I call Satanic reversal - when you accuse your enemy of the very things you do.
Not only does it accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza, the demonstrably ludicrous charge that’s become a hallmark of the west’s current anti-Israel insanity. More sickeningly still, it claims that the very creation of the Jewish state was a genocidal act. It states:
Genocide is a cumulative process – one that began in the minds of the settler-colonial powers of Europe when they denied the image of God in others and legitimised death, domination and slavery. We consider the State of Israel, established in 1948, to be built on racism and the ideology of ethnic or religious superiority.
Racism certainly had something to do with it since no country would take the Jews who were made homeless during WWII; those that survived the holocaust. The Holy Land was not even a country then, and certainly not a people.
This document is monstrous. It stands comparison with some of the most vicious and deranged expressions of Jew-hatred that have been produced over the centuries. Just to to give it serious consideration is itself an act of moral bankruptcy.
Yet the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, told Synod yesterday:
This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people.
What does that reflect about Dame Sarah Mullally? The document is a malevolent, mendacious and unhinged attack on Israel, on Zionism and thus on Judaism, casting Israel and Zionism as demonic forces and regurgitating some of the most infamous tropes of ancient Christian Jew-hatred.
Does Mullally know nothing about this terrible history of the church? Is she really so ignorant of the Middle East that she doesn’t understand the first thing about the never-ending Palestinian Arab war to exterminate Israel and its strategy of demonising Zionism and the Jewish state?
Incredibly, it would appear that the leader of the Anglican church is indeed so utterly clueless that she has made both herself and her church into the handmaidens of evil. On her recent five-day visit to the Holy Land, Mulally chose to be pictured with Palestinian Arabs who are allegedly linked to terrorist organisations.
Surely, God has removed His candlestick from Canterbury and left the Church of England in the dark.
In a sermon in a church in the Palestinian Arab town of Birzeit, she spoke about the “freedoms” many locals “do not enjoy”. Jesus, she preached, had also spoken “to a community living in fear: his own people living in an occupied land and under foreign rule”. Thus Mullally slyly equated the Romans — who had persecuted the Jews of Judea of whom Jesus was but one — with today’s Israelis defending themselves against genocidal Palestinian Arab terrorism.
In an open letter written with Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, Mullally spoke of the “immense hardships” and “web of checkpoints” Palestinians faced in the “West Bank,” Gaza and East Jerusalem. The letter said:
In the West Bank, unchecked settler violence, forced displacement, systemic discrimination and expanding checkpoints have left the Palestinian population impoverished, desperate and powerless to enact change.
Powerless? But all the Palestinian Arabs need do to transform their lives for the better is give up the violence against Israeli Jews that they perpetrate every single day in order to further their century-old aim of destroying the Jewish homeland. The only reason for those checkpoints, which Mulally signally failed to note, is to pre-empt even more murderous Palestinian Arab violence against Israeli citizens.
The letter also called for an end to the “occupation” and a “viable two-state solution”, saying the archbishops feared for “the long-term future of the indigenous Christian Palestinian presence in the Holy Land that stretches back to the time when our Lord walked this land”.
What?? Jesus was a Jew who lived in Judea. There were no Christians at that time. There were no “Palestinians”. The claim that there was an “indigenous Christian Palestinian presence in the Holy Land” at the time of Jesus is a breathtaking lie.
Remarkably, in a previous pastoral letter written in 2024 by Archbishop Naoum with Mullally’s predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the two men made exactly the same claim that they feared for “the long-term future of the indigenous Christian Palestinian presence in the Holy Land that stretches back to the time when our Lord walked this land”.
The identical wording is a giveaway. The lie that Palestinian Christians were indigenous to the land, and that Jesus was one of them, is a propaganda line that has been pushed by Palestinian Arab Christians for decades.
The Church of England has itself been pushing this lie for years. Hence the same boilerplate wording. Lambeth Palace just cut and paste. The only thing that’s changed is the identity of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The point is that Mullally’s nonsensical statements have to be viewed in a sinister context that’s almost entirely passed under the radar in Britain.
This is that for decades the church has fully embraced the exterminatory Palestinian Arab narrative against Israel and Zionism. Far worse, this narrative has kick-started the ancient Christian heresy of “replacement theology” or “supersessionism”, the murderous doctrine that lay behind the church’s persecution of the Jews in the Middle Ages.
That doctrine went underground after the Holocaust but has now appallingly been revived through being fused with the Palestinian cause.
Some principled Anglicans are horrified by all this. A few have been speaking out against the document. Dr Ian Paul, Associate Minister at St Nic’s, Nottingham, bravely spoke out at Synod and in this article here; another former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, also spoke against it; and Giles Fraser, vicar of Kew in London (who has an Israeli wife and two Jewish children), wrote here that the Synod debate was a “disgrace” and that the document was “by any reasonable reading a clear and blatant piece of antisemitism, voted on by the Bishops thus: 25 yes, 0 no, 5 abstentions”.
I wrote about this whole issue in 2014 in an article in Commentary magazine. Although the article is extremely long, I am reproducing it below because it remains no less relevant today; and it’s so important that people understand the enormity of what has happened to the Church of England and its significance for wider society.
In post-religious Britain, people assume that the church is irrelevant. It is not. Even among those who are resolutely secular, the assumption remains that priests of the church are a moral lodestar representing integrity, truth and conscience. So when they speak about Israel, people believe them. This has had a devastating effect, because for decades the church has been promulgating incendiary calumnies against Israel with a theological underpinning that casts the Jews as the party of the devil. Its importance in helping create today’s insane levels of Jew-hatred should not be underestimated.
Shockingly, the church has allied itself with evil. To understand how this could have happened, please read my article below.
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‘Jesus Was a Palestinian’: The Return of Christian Antisemitism
Protestants increasingly believe a potted and antisemitic Palestinian narrative of Middle Eastern history
Melanie Phillips, Commentary, June 2014
