{"id":452185,"date":"2025-09-26T06:32:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T06:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/452185\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T06:32:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T06:32:10","slug":"the-church-of-england-is-wrong-to-condemn-migration-protests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/452185\/","title":{"rendered":"The Church of England is wrong to condemn migration protests"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesus Christ was famously not choosy about the company he kept. Despised tax collectors, women of easy virtue, lepers: he would eat and drink and be merry with all of them. Famously, this did not make him popular with the religious authorities and purists of his day. The Pharisees asked Christ\u2019s followers, on seeing him dining with some such undesirables: \u201cWhy eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?\u201d Jesus had no respect for existing status distinctions or ideas of ritual purity, and it shocked them.<\/p>\n

Who are the sinners and publicans of today? The liberal establishment of the Church of England would unambiguously answer that the most despised and lowly are the refugees languishing in migrant hotels \u2014 and they wouldn\u2019t be entirely wrong. However, it is also increasingly clear who, in the Church\u2019s view, are the villains, the sneering Pharisees or baying crowds shouting \u201ccrucify him!\u201d: the \u201cfar-Right\u201d protestors who are behind this month\u2019s \u201cUnite the Kingdom\u201d<\/a> rallies.<\/p>\n

A statement<\/a> this week from the presidents of Churches Together in England condemned the rallies and stated that \u201cthe Cross and the Gospel of Christ must never be co-opted to support the messages that breed hostility towards others.\u201d The statement referred to the fact that some of those rallies used Christian imagery to promote their anti-immigration message, and was signed by many Anglican bishops, leading Baptists, Methodists, and representatives of other denominations.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no doubt that some of those involved with these marches were genuinely racist and \u201cfar-Right\u201d. However, the tone and emphasis of such statements invariably point to condemnation not just of actual racists, but of broad swathes of provincial opinion that dissents from the shibboleths of the progressive elite. As a result, Christian leaders \u2014 and particularly the Church of England \u2014 are in danger of making very clear their distance from precisely the despised and low-status \u201choi polloi\u201d with whom Jesus was so keen to engage.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of our political, state and cultural establishment \u2014 and that includes Anglican bishops \u2014 can barely hide their fear at best, and contempt at worst, for what they see as an undifferentiated mass of poorly educated bigots who populate much of the country outside of the big cities. The instinctive distaste of the Anglican leadership for the provincial working classes and lower middle classes, with their low-status opinions and \u201cnativism\u201d, is conveyed pretty clearly, even when their statements are carefully caveated with bromides about \u201clegitimate debate\u201d. And the provincial populists, the Red Wallers and nascent Reform UK voters, are not stupid. They sense that distaste very clearly.<\/p>\n

Bishops and liberal Christian leaders would do well to remember that Christianity is the religion of illiterate fishermen and provincials as well as the religion of the Guardian readers who inhabit episcopal palaces and vicarages across the country. Many of Christ\u2019s own followers believed that he would be a nationalist leader who would militarily redeem Israel from Roman rule right up until the Cross. If anyone looks like the Pharisees sneering at Christ for communing with low-status \u201cdeplorables\u201d, it\u2019s the bishops and other Christian leaders who signed this week\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n

Where Reform voters are not racists but simply people frightened by rapid and destabilising social change, Christian leaders should be listening to them and moderating their simplistic reading of the gospel and its applicability to a messy political reality with another Christian virtue: prudence. Where the protesters are actually racists, they should remember what Jesus said after the Pharisees condemned him for eating with \u201cpublicans and sinners\u201d: \u201cThey that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jesus Christ was famously not choosy about the company he kept. Despised tax collectors, women of easy virtue,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5008],"tags":[748,21586,15350,6509,393,7208,4884,6657,11187,980,16,144106,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-452185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-england","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-christ","10":"tag-christianity","11":"tag-church-of-england","12":"tag-england","13":"tag-faith","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-migration","16":"tag-non-classifiu00e9e","17":"tag-optional","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-unite-the-kingdom","20":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115269202396232539","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}