ARCHBISHOP JUSTIN WELBY, in his Christmas Day address he branded ISIS 'a Herod of today'. He then said that Christianity faced 'elimination' in the Middle East. He is of course right: but all he is capable of doing is warning of the real possibility without suggesting how to prevent it. He, like many Christians, will see it as a fate-accomplice, and in accordance with the Christian precept; they will 'turn the other cheek', as they would if the same horrors were being visited on European Christians by Muslims.
Was it not the archbishop's predecessor, Rowan Williams, who suggested an accommodation with Sharia Law? Those Christians now being brutally murdered by ISIS in so many creatively sadistic ways have to turn the other cheek if they can no longer flee Syria and Iraq – they have little choice. The Anglican Church deserves to go under. The church that stood side by side with the nation when Hitler tried to create his European imperium is no longer with us. The pulpits in this green and pleasant land that once echoed with patriotic sermons of the type would be shouted down today as racist: today any form of nationalism is racist.
Peace and love, the main arteries of Christianity, weaken our nation's opposition to a cruel and bloody enemy like Islamism. Peace on earth and goodwill to all men is an ample message when peace exists: when, however, you are not offered peace but only conflict and war with an enemy that despises you and your faith; then Christian gentility has to show a different face if it wishes to continue its 2015 year journey. In the past Christianity has buttressed the nation's spine, believing that its duty was to the country in which it functioned and stood by it in times of war and conflict.
This is the Christianity I believe in; and if it had never been practiced Christianity would never have survived the previous 2015 years. My brother who is an artist reflected this idea in one of his paintings: the painting was of Christ on the cross, and tucked into his loin cloth was a berretta pistol symbolising the Christian fight back which the modern Anglican Christian church now refuses ever to contemplate; even if it led to the destruction of Christianity itself. So why become a Christian? It lacks any belief in justice that is worth killing to preserve. The modern teaching exemplifies this pacifistic impulse, in an age when Christians are being slaughtered wholesale in the Middle East.
The Anglican archbishop mouths Christian platitudes about peace and love being the true Christian message – well so be it in a wholly Christian world. But we live in no such world and the Anglican Church, if it wishes to survive must stiffen its sinews and learn to accept that if the church wishes to survive it must defend itself. All earlier archbishops and their clergy understood this; but today the Anglican Church is riddled by fear and liberal guilt. There will come a day when the Christian message harvests all humanity to its core values of peace and love; but this is not the time, and until that time is reached the Christian Church must challenge and destroy the enemies of the country they serve – Islam has no love for Christianity. Its tolerance is based purely upon demographics until it gets the upper hand. It has no real Christian value of living together.
Earlier English Anglicans protected their national monopoly from the intrusions of the Catholic Church. Now the whole of Christianity has to protect itself from the intrusions of Islam. Islam (not Islamism) is growing in confidence. There is no redeeming New Testament in the Koran: Islam believes in the kind of proselytising through conquest that the Catholic Church in Spain once did in the Americas in the 17th century. Islam has had no reformation only tribal schism and an everlasting medievalism that is still with it today, centuries after Christianity dispensed with this model.
THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury has nowhere to turn to help his Christian brethren in the Middle East. All he can do is pray that what may be left of the Christian believers in the Middle East after ISIS has finished with them, may create, as the Jews had to do, a Diaspora among Christian countries; and hope that throughout the coming centuries they will not, like the Jews, be persecuted and pulled from pillar to post before they are able return to the Middle East.
It is the feeble and pathetic nature of modern Anglicanism that it cannot, as once it did, rally Christianity toward using violence in order to keep Christianity in one piece. Turning the other cheek may bring forth martyrdom and respect, but it will not save the Christian faith. We are once more at war with Islam. If by saying this you term me a bigot or racist; then given the source from which such charges are laid – it is like water off a duck's back: and I care little. For on either count, I know I am not either bigoted or racist.
The Anglican Church will have to accommodate, like Rowan Williams' overture to sharia law, a fateful compromise, that within a few generations will see Anglicanism dwindle to a sect at a time when secularism and multiculturalism flourish; and just like the Anglican Church, liberal secularism, like liberal Anglicanism, will accommodate its lack of ruthlessness in tackling the advance of Islam and suffer the same consequences.
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