On December 13th, we saw around 2,000 to 5,000 people gather in central London, about 50 meters from 10 Downing Street, to celebrate Christmas (a little too early for my tastes) through traditional carols and readings, to make a statement that Christ was at the centre of Christmas. This public statement of faith was not organised by the Church of England, but by the Unite the Kingdom movement, a group of Patriots, whose ostensible leader is Tommy Robinson. It was heavily policed, not for its protection, but because somehow, it was seen as a threat. In fact, this simple act of Christian worship was protested against by a conglomerate of alt left organisations, and the Church of England its self – lead by alt left radicals sitting within the Church of England, who belong to the Cult of Self, that has captured so much of the Church of England; for the Religion of Humanity. I wanted to write some reflections on the matter of how the Church of England, the Baptist Union, and the United Reformed Church have made a debacle of their response!
The charge against the carol service was that it was not appropriate for Tommy Robinson to use Christian language and symbolism for the ends of his right-wing politics, despite the fact that it was mainly organised by Minister Rikki Doolan, not Tommy Robinson, and that both Rikki and Tommy explicitly made it clear that politics was off the table. The CofE Bishops and ministers of other dying churches, then made a great press circus over how they were ‘better than this’ (I think they meant ‘you’ – but lacked the balls to say that bit out loud); and in a display of double standards that scales the heights of self-conceit, then went on to co-opt Christian language and symbolism to push alt left wing politics; even climbing into bed with anti-Christian socialist and communist groups. This – the Church of England, lecturing people not to co-opt Christianity for personal politics when its Bishops have been doing exactly that for decades. The Church of England has pushed: environmentalism, trans ideology, LGBT ideology, and now alt left open borders politics, big state welfare systems – none of which can be justified in scripture or in those pesky articles of faith that the Bishops of the CofE just love to forget. It is not just what the CofE has politicised in favour of, but also what they have failed to be against! They are in favour and not against abortion, gay marriage, women in the priesthood, multiculturalism, amongst other things. These political stances, combined with wet, limp-wristed leadership, which observably just prostitutes itself to the British Elites at every turn, have meant that no one, not even I, a baptised, confirmed communicant of the Church of England, can take her seriously. The faux outrage of the chattering classes within the CofE is a desperate ploy to grasp at relevance on the hem of Tommy Robinson’s coat. Without him, they would be ignored, as they will surely be in the future. The conversion of Tommy Robinson to Christianity has given them a way to achieve reflected glory through opposition. Take, for instance, the utter hypocrisy of the Christians who gathered outside St. Paul’s Cathedral to protest the carol service at Whitehall. They presented the Holy Family in an illegal migrant dinghy. I bet they thought they were being edgy; GOD bless them. How was that not overly political to try to use the blessed and holy family of our Lord, and their flight into Egypt to support criminal activity and open borders, with all the obvious problems that come with that, such as fleeing criminal elements to the UK (which clearly makes up a number of those coming over). They did this without, it seems, the slightest sense of the irony that they were doing this to protest Tommy Robinson’s co-opting of the faith for his politics. The irony, as it happens, was that the carol service at Whitehall was far less political than anything done outside of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Church allied itself to Anarchists, Trade Unionists, Anti Racists, Pro-Palestine (including Islamists) groups, who have had a record of attacking Churches and Christians across the West and the Middle East! They have allied themselves with an actual anti-Christ coalition. They do not own the custom of carol services, and why, as a new Christian, cannot Tommy Robinson organise or back one and put his personal weight behind it? Other celebrities, such as Bear Grills, Sir Cliff Richard, and others have, so why not Tommy? Since he DID NOT use the carol service to talk on politics, or to push a political narrative (it is hard to be completely neutral, of course), and the CofE has pushed a political narrative in response, it seems they have exactly no grounds to object and are defeated by their own conceited sense of self-importance and virtue signalling faux outrage. Please be clear in your minds about my position: I think the Church should be political, and its politics should emerge from its identity as the Covenant People of GOD, not simply borrow from the left or the right.
Let us be clear, entering the United Kingdom without a passport, and not through the proper channels, is a crime; and that means that every single one of the illegal migrants is a criminal! That is a fact! Now, laws and morals are not the same thing, and actually, you might be a criminal and still be a righteous man or woman. However, there is nothing righteous about ‘asylum shopping’; I do not doubt many of these people are in genuine need and do need help, but that does not mean they have a right to enter the UK contrary to the law. This matter of migration, the who, the when, the why, the where from, and the how of migration, and refugee and asylum policy are matters of prudential wisdom. They are not covered in revelation; rather, our policies are grounded in Christian values and doctrines. In other words, it is a human working of the divine writ, not the divine writ, and so neither the bishops, nor I, nor anyone else, can claim to represent what GOD wants in these matters. We can only do our best to discern GOD’s will by acting sincerely from the faith (something the CofE Bishops gave up a long time ago), praying, and weighing up the circumstances, before arriving at our best decision. I do not believe that open borders work well; I also do not believe North Korean hermit kingdoms are the right answer, nor do I think the answer is some ‘Lambeth Fudge’ between the two. Migration is needed, but we should prefer legal migration to fill economic gaps in the market, rather than rely on our own population to work. It should be limited to numbers that can be assimilated and accompanied by a firm policy of integration and assimilation; those who are legally welcome here should want to integrate and assimilate as part of the deal. Refuge and asylum should be given again in numbers that can be assimilated on a firm and temporary basis, and should give preference to Christians fleeing persecution, or those from Ukraine fleeing from war; the requirement to assimilate being relaxed based on the temporality of the stay here, unless it passes a two-year stay. The real cause of the problem, of course, is that of mass abortion, and until this is tackled and reversed (something the CofE will be against), then migration in large numbers will be needed, unless we choose managed decline! However, all of this can be legitimately challenged and debated by Christians, because it is a prudential matter, and that is the point: the bishops have no grounds at all within the Christian tradition to deny that securing borders, reducing migration, and deporting illegal migrants is somehow unchristian.
However, this was not even the point of the celebration; the carol service had nothing to say on this matter – it was, in its own words, ‘putting Christ back into Christmas.’ The CofE posters said that Christ has always been at the heart of Christmas, or something along those lines, whilst, for Christians, that is always true. However, for a wider culture, it is not. Take, for instance, the utterly commercial tree at Waterloo – advertising Stranger Things, complete with a radio dish on top of the tree, or the ‘holiday trees’ and ‘holiday crackers’ being sold in our supermarkets, or the video camera of children busking in the streets, like Christmas carolers – singing the pop song ‘Last Christmas.’ So, yes, there really does need to be a loud public statement that Christ is the centre of Christmas; something the Church, with all its resources, has never once managed to achieve. Yet, minister Rikki Doolan and Tommy Robinson did so, without anything like the multi-millions at the disposal of the Church of England. We live in a secularised liberal culture, which has disinherited the people of these islands from their Christian heritage and roots. The gathering was one of the biggest – if not the biggest public carol services the country has ever seen, and it made clear that Christmas is about the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. All good Christians we know will celebrate this triumph, and we thank the CofE for amplifying its volume to wider society, but how shameful it is for so-called Christian leaders to oppose such a move, supported by so many of the faithful. Yes, lots of churches will be putting Christ at the centre of Christmas, and yes, some of them will even be Church of England, but that is not what is needed. We need public – on the street carols and services, and worship and processions, assertions of Christian identity in the public sphere, because in this commercialised world, to be seen is to be heard!
There seems to be some confusion about the police’s response to this act of Christian worship. They have tweeted that the organisers described the event to them as a protest, and if this is true, one can charitably forgive them for policing it as such. However, if it is not, and yes, we know from the grooming gang scandals, that the police most certainly do lie, then the policing of a Christian Act of worship as a protest would be institutionalised Christophobia. Whilst it would be easy for me to place this in the ledger of two-tier policing, I can well imagine the organisers using the word ‘protest’ at some point in their coordination with the police. So, on this occasion, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, as it worked out, their presence probably made our event safer.
We should spare a thought for the depiction of the Holy Family as fleeing in a dinghy – that capturing of this image for a left-wing open border policy touched on earlier, and the oft-made statement that the Christ child and His precious family were refugees. The first issue with this is that people did not think of the category of refugee in those days, and so this is Eisegesis (reading into the text, things not there). It is not in and of itself wrong, due to the use of analogous thought, a permitted use of Scripture. However, the Holy Family could also be accurately depicted, using this logic, as an example of returning to your homeland when the danger had passed. So, they could just as well be used by the right as the perfect ‘returnees’ if we are going to go down this road. The image of the holy family in a dinghy runs dangerously close to legitimising (by the CofE, who used the image) the support of illegal human trafficking. However, we can point out all the ways that the Church of England has failed to use this image when perhaps it should. Like, as a reason to campaign for adoption rather than abortion, of sticking with your marriage rather than leaving, of the family as being made up primarily as a unit containing a man and women and their children; all these political machinations of the image of the Holy Family are not used by the Church of England – because the Christian themes to tarry with the concerns of the cult of self. There is one image which is pertinent, more pertinent than them fleeing as refugees, which would be historically wrong, even had the category existed in those times, because the Holy Family simply moved between one part of the Roman Empire and another! The image that is more pertinent is that of state persecution of the Holy Family and having to flee state persecution. Consider that we have had Christians arrested and tried for thinking inside their own heads, preaching on the street, meeting for church during Covid, sacked from state schools, hospitals, as well as private companies, prosecuted or sacked from them for expressing Christian views. We have had Christians who have left Islam, only to be internally displaced within the UK, due to the intolerance of members of the Muslim community. Yet, the Church of England has been completely silent about these matters, even silently agreeing or simply shrugging its shoulders nonchalantly! I put it to all the clergy of the Church of England, that this would be a more appropriate use of the image of the Holy Family; a much more pertinent topic to speak about as the national Church of England. Why has the Church of England not mobilised itself to honour the confessors of England in modern times, who are suffering for the faith, such as Christian Hacking, Nissar Hussien, Hatun Tash, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, to name a few of the growing list? They should now be celebrated by the Church for standing up for the truth in the face of evil, including those being persecuted by the state, such as Tommy Robinson, who, if he is arrested for expressions of his faith, would earn the title confessor of the faith. However, the Church of England hierarchy does not follow the Christian faith, but a cult of self, the spiritualisation in Christian garb of the progressive political project. They are the equivalent of the ‘German Christian’ movement, and I have no doubt in my mind that had they been leading a Church in Nazi Germany, they would have gone along with Nazism, dressing that also in the garb of Christianity. I would take the Church of England more seriously if it actually showed real concern and support for Christians being persecuted both here and abroad, rather than trying to legitimise an illegal human trafficking trade!
All of this means the Church of England will simply miss out on the quiet revival underway right now. Please see the last article on my blog for some thoughts on this. The revival is happening amongst those on the right of the spectrum, and among men more than women. A well-led Church would pivot its missionary activity accordingly, but we are past the point of crying about how badly the national church is led. This revival will simply pass the faux moral virtue signalling Church of England by and will fall to the Christians of these Churches to scoop up the Confessing Church of England, the Anglican Mission in England, The Global Anglican Future Conference Churches, independent Evangelical Churches, Roman Catholic Latin rite churches, all Orthodox Eastern and Coptic Churches, Pentecostal Churches. Those who are looking for grounding in their traditional values and a sense of traditional identity will find spiritual succour. The Church of England has sent out the message – ‘we are better than you.’ The down-the-nose approach to evangelism will find itself quite fruitless, as it will spurn the people who are most open to the faith, whilst not drawing in those who are the hardest towards it; that being Liberal Progressives who have the same values of the CofE but despise its claimed metaphysics. It is interesting to note, again, that the Church of England finds itself now in bed with groups that openly oppose the Christian faith, whilst scorning groups who want the Christian faith to do well, but that is the sheer impoverished state of the Church of England.
The protest against the Christian act of public worship held at the bottom of Whitehall/Westminster demonstrates the deep-rooted and poisonous Christophobia of the left categorically. This conglomerate of left-wing movements has never, ever, organised a protest against Islamists (not Muslims, to be clear – but Islamists). These people, some of whom have interrupted Church services, have never ever interrupted a mosque ‘service’. Those who mock the Christian faith and Christians would never dream of doing the same with Muslims and Islam. Could they not be motivated to oppose any of the following: slavery, abortion, polygamy, cousin marriage, child marriage, domestic abuse, apostacy laws, religious and gender apartheid? They give all these things a soft pass because they refuse to engage with their reality as being part of Islamic law. I remember, earlier this year, returning from the pro-life march held in London, (which the CofE was largely absent) where a pro-Palestinian was harassing my friends and me; self-entitled, white middle class lefty; who then made the foolish mistake of trying to intimidate us, thinking we were the soy Christians presented to him on the BBC, a perception of which he soon found corrected. The point is, it is the left, not the right, that is the enemy of the Christian faith. The right needs correcting for sure, and sifting – to stop entryism by ethno-nationalists – for sure, but it is open to the faith, sympathetic to the faith. It is the left that will literally attack Churches, mock Christianity, and obfuscate on Christian persecution in the Islamic world and other places. They do all this – whilst having the sheer audacity to try and lecture us on inclusion, tolerance, and respect, values they neither have nor practice. No one at all should take any lectures from these hypocrites, nor their wolf in sheep’s clothing allies amongst the bishops of the Church of England. On the contrary, we must all double down on our Christian faith; grow in it, claim it from the cultish followers of the religion of self within the CofE, and stand in proud defiance of the hate-filled left, the captured progressive state, and the cultic leadership of the Church of England! Be Christian, be proud to be Christian, be even more Christian!
