Likelihood of Success

This was first posted on May 29th:

An Anglican bishop laments the collapse of the English church:

The collapse of Christianity has wrecked British society, a leading Church of England bishop declared yesterday.

It has destroyed family life and left the country defenceless against the rise of radical Islam in a moral and spiritual vacuum.

In a lacerating attack on liberal values, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, said the country was mired in a doctrine of ‘endless self-indulgence’ that had brought an explosion in public violence and binge-drinking.

In a blow to Gordon Brown, he mocked the ‘scramblings and scratchings’ of politicians who try to cast new British values such as respect and tolerance.

The Pakistani-born bishop dated the downfall of Christianity from the ‘social and sexual revolution’ of the 1960s.

(Via Glenn.) Good luck with that one. The fact is, the empty churches of Britain are a culmination of over a century of failure by the Anglican Church to find a way to keep the English in the pews. Founded on reasons of state and lust by Henry VIII, the Church of England ripped the Catholic soul out of British Christianity and mainly flourished to the extent it did at all in the succeeding centuries as a flavoring for confident Jingoism.

With the collapse of the Empire, the COE’s main activity has been keeping up with the Joneses in terms of out-Vatican-II’ing Vatican II in a race to the left. It has lacked either the reactionary equilibration or the charisma — much less the interest and courage on behalf of freedom — of a John Paul II. And it has, in an effort to please leftist elites, tied the United Nations in the contest for foremost legitimatizer of antisemitism in the West.

Can Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali turn the ship of spirituality in England around? Almost certainly not. But if he really wants to try, let him catch up with Vatican II in one way the COE has completely punted: By publicly condemning the entrenched antisemitism, couched cynically as anti-Zionism, of the Anglican Church and English society in general. The Jews or their treatment may not matter so much in England’s big picture, but it is a simple fact that you can weigh the moral merit of any society, and any institution, in no small measure by how it deals with the social and cultural cancer of antisemitism. In the case of the COE, it has historically, and in contemporary times, done a despicable job. There’s no better way to show the world of what he is made, and to demonstrate that there just may just be a good reason to root for Anglican Christianity to survive, than for the Right Reverend Nazir-Ali to address that challenge head on.

UPDATE (December reposting): It hasn’t gotten better. To the contrary.

Comments are open at the original post.