Seldom has there been more of a spiritual vacuum where an archbishop is supposed to be than in the case of Archbishop Justin Portal Welby. Seldom has an organisation that is supposed to represent timeless and immutable values been more comprehensively colonised by the passing fads of the zeitgeist than the current Church of England. Seldom has a church been more comprehensively bullied into cravenly mouthing the shibboleths of the chattering classes. The Church of England is now almost the diametric opposite of what it is supposed to be - a kind of photographic negative of itself.
We never hear from Welby of the offer of salvation from original sin and we never hear an explanation of what original sin is from this man. Instead his time is occupied with interminable synods devoted to discerning what the right attitude is to gay people permanently resonating between condemnation and apology. This is because moral north, in modern times, can only be triangulated from this one, single issue which hasn’t the slightest bearing on the tenets of the religion. In spite of this everybody’s moral complexion is determined in relation to only this. So it’s wall to wall agonising and hand-wringing about gays unless that is, he is occupied with our disgraceful white privilege and our maltreatment of black people. Not content with this, he has now taken his impression of a raving intersectionalist a stage further by comparing the treatment of black people in Britain to that of the Jews in Nazi Germany. All sense of proportion or historical literacy has been jettisoned so that it is hard to distinguish between Welby and David Lammy. Like any tuppenny ha'penny adolescent Marxist Welby can’t tell the difference between Irma Grese, the ‘Hyena of Auschwitz’ and Priti Patel.
Unsurprisingly, as it offers no real sustenance of any useful kind, the Church of England’s attendance levels continue to decline as it chases the spirit of the age in preference to the Holy Spirit. We can only hope, at British Intelligence, that, like a horse with a broken leg, it is soon put out of its misery and that it goes the way of other failed and superseded brands such as Blockbuster and Woolworths. Its absence would do less damage than its continued presence. Perhaps they have kept a post open for this mimsy, chinless, bespectacled excuse for a churchman at Enterprise Oil plc. There’s something so right about his middle name.