Jewish Influence and the Church of England

By Andrew Joyce for the Occidental Observer

“Wrong theology in this area has been bound up with wrong action, giving legitimation for Christian support for persecution and discrimination of Jewish communities and eroding the recognition of Jewish people as neighbours whom Christians are bound to love … Christian communities may wish to consider whether there could be suitable opportunities in their public worship to focus and express repentance for Christian involvement in fostering antisemitism.”
“God’s Unfailing Word,” Church of England Faith and Order Commission, 2019

If it can be said that Europeans are today largely blind to Jewish aggressions, then Christians are among those fumbling around in deepest darkness. Historian Jonas Alexis once remarked that, contrary to older Christian anger at depictions of Jesus and Christianity in the Talmud, no such reactions are evident in relation to the modern Jewish comedy in which “Jesus, Christians and the cross are routinely mocked, even obscenely treated.”[1]

Jewish aggression against Christianity is, of course, nothing new. In the fifth century, edicts had to be pronounced banning Jews from burning and desecrating crosses, and Socrates Scholasticus reported in Historia Ecclesiastica that Jews had taken a Christian boy during Purim and crucified him.[2] In his Princeton-published Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (2006), Elliott Horowitz pointed out multiple cases of Jews urinating on, and otherwise exposing their genitals to, crosses from 12th-century Germany and 13th-century England.[3] Even today, Daniel Rossing, a former advisor on Christian affairs to Israel’s religious Affairs Ministry, has commented on anti-Christian violence in Israel, which peaks during Purim. “I know Christians who lock themselves indoors during the entire Purim holiday,” he says. And yet, while Christians are spat upon and assaulted in Israel, and mocked and obscenely treated in the Diaspora, the majority of Christians remain among the most guilt-ridden and philosemitic of Europeans, applauding Zionist wars that kill their sons, and lauding a people that has done more than any other to overturn traditional Christian moral values. It is one of the most glaring contradictions in this age of contradictions.

The latest chapter in this sorry state of affairs is that the Church of England has, in its latest official treatise, decided to announce formal repentance to the Jews for centuries of putative injustices, as well as the Church’s unconditional adoption of Zionism. The Guardian explains:

Christians must repent for centuries of antisemitism which ultimately led to the Holocaust, the Church of England has said in a document that seeks to promote a new Christian-Jewish relationship. … The document, God’s Unfailing Word, is the first authoritative statement by the C of E on the part played by Christians in the stereotyping and persecution of Jews. Attitudes towards Judaism over centuries had provided a “fertile seed-bed for murderous antisemitism”, it said. Theological teachings had helped spread antisemitism, and Anglicans and other Christians must not only repent for the “sins of the past” but actively challenge such attitudes or stereotypes.

I must confess to an overwhelming fatigue when reading statements like this. They blend a profound historical ignorance with the most septic obsequiousness. The first instinct is simply to protest, and then to try to provide a litany of factual correctives. But I have carried out this Sisyphean task so many times, and in so many prior articles. I now find myself asking only why we should even offer explanations or responses to such accusations as “the part played by Christians in the stereotyping and persecution of Jews.” We owe nothing to the Jews. Any Christian intellectually and morally weak enough to be convinced that he does, probably isn’t worth the effort of convincing otherwise.

But how is it that yet another major Western institution has collapsed into White Guilt, in the process rendering itself pathetically pliable to Jewish manipulations? Having read God’s Unfailing Word, I argue that total Jewish dominance in the academic production of histories of the Jews and anti-Semitism has played a major role in shifting opinion in philosemitic directions. This has been amplified by Jewish activity in so-called “interfaith” dialogue, which has been ongoing internationally for over a century and has served Jewish interests exclusively while undermining Christian theology, especially those elements that made Christianity beneficial to Europeans in the past. This poisonous combination possesses lethal power because the Church of England is already in its death throes.

The Diseased Church

The publication of God’s Unfailing Word is reflective of the Church of England’s already-established position as the compliant lapdog of a GloboHomo master. The Church of England is one of the most homosexual-friendly denominations on Earth, going so far as to allow “gay clergy” to live with their partners in secular “civil partnerships.” In February 2018, the Church of England’s Education Office even published a policy supporting degenerate sex education among children which includes the statement that “Pupils should be taught that humans express their sexuality differently and that there is diversity in sexual desire.” Newcastle’s Anglican cathedral attracted attention in June, when it was revealed the church would host a weekend-long LGBT festival that included a panel discussion on “Queering the Church.” One of the four panelists was a Church of England curate who identifies as ‘non-binary genderqueer transgender.’ This is a church in the grip of terminal disease, and its policy on LGBT issues is unlikely to change the downward trajectory of its attendance, which has declined 1 percent/year in recent decades.

At the heart of this disease is the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Church of England, Justin Welby, a man who looks like ten minutes of manual labor would actually kill him. He is the definition of all that is wrong in modern Man. Setting aside his uninspiring physical presence, Welby is a literal bastard, his mother Jane Portal having cuckolded her husband, the alcoholic Jew Gavin Welby (born Bernard Weiler) with her boss, Sir Anthony Montague Browne. The result of these chaotic origins is that Archbishop Welby/Weiler/Browne has fled entirely from any sense of meaningful identity, asserting in 2016: “I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ, not in genetics, and my identity in him never changes.” If Welby limited himself to personal genetic oblivion there might not be a problem. A problem does, however, emerge, when Welby uses his position and influence to attack those who do pursue their interests. In 2016, when Nigel Farage told the press that sex attacks by migrants were “the nuclear bomb” of the EU referendum, Welby/Weiler/Browne told MPs in the home affairs select committee that he “utterly condemned” Farage for an “inexcusable pandering to people’s worries and prejudices, that is giving legitimization to racism.”

 

If that wasn’t bad enough, Welby/Weiler/Browne, who has confessed to struggling with his mental health, appears to have an almost Freudian desire to replace the Jewish father he thought he had with the current Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. Welby/Weiler/Browne has taken to accompanying Mirvis on numerous excursions, echoing the Rabbi’s sentiments on almost every subject, and even arranging for Mirvis to provide the Afterword for God’s Unfailing Word. In his own Foreword to the same document, Welby/Weiler/Browne (one might call him Welby/Weiler/Browne/Mirvis) is glowing in his praise of Mirvis, and provides a delusional and ignorant elaboration of the history of Jewish-Christian relations:

In simple terms, the Church is being less than its true self when it refuses the gift of Christian–Jewish encounter. … Given the kindness, wisdom and scholarship of the Chief Rabbi, to count him among my friends is one of my greatest privileges. … Too often in history the Church has been responsible for and colluded in antisemitism and the fact that antisemitic language and attacks are on the rise across the UK and Europe means we cannot be complacent. I reflected on this as I stood alongside other Christian leaders in ankle-deep snow within the camp of Birkenau in 2016, amid the ruins of the gas chambers. … The Chief Rabbi has opened, with characteristic honesty and affection, a challenge upon which we must reflect. We cannot do that reflection honestly until we have felt the cruelty of our history.

Such sickly musings are nothing new. In 2016, the Guardian reported:

The archbishop said Britain had a “shameful record” on antisemitism. “As a nation, we have to recognise that antisemitism has been the root and origin of most racist behaviour going back for the last thousand years in this country,” he said. “We have a shameful record until very recently, historically. It bubbles to the surface very easily indeed. When we see it, it tells us there are strains and stresses in society. It is the canary in the mine.” Welby also said that hate crime against Muslims had increased, fuelled by irrational fear that resulted in a high level of prejudice. Integration of Britain’s diverse population was a huge challenge, he said. “It’s been the biggest failure of the Church of England over the last 40 or 50 years, in terms of how we’ve dealt with integration.” It was a “great cause of shame”, he added.

In September, Welby/Weiler/Browne took his level of shame-promotion to an entirely new level when he prostated himself in front of crowds of amused and bemused Indians, apparently in supplication for a mass shooting by British troops that occurred in the garden of Jallianwala Bagh some 37 years before he was born.

 

Jewish Influence on God’s Unfailing Word

The Anglican tendency toward navel-gazing self-recrimination, which has assumed pathological proportions under the current Archbishop of Canterbury, has collided with Jewish dominance of the historical narrative. Jewish dominance in the academic production of histories of the Jews and anti-Semitism has played a significant role in shifting opinion in this instance. Notes at the end of God’s Unfailing Word reveal the document to rely heavily on ubiquitous, biased and factually dubious accounts of historical Jewish-Christian relations that have been written by Jewish academic activists (Jules Isaac [who was instrumental in orchestrating the pro-Jewish elements of Vatican II], Yehuda Bauer, Frederick M. Schweitzer, Marc Saperstein etc) or non-Jewish scholars who enjoyed lucrative and celebrated careers for their sympathetic portrayals of Jews (for example, the dreadful Gavin Langmuir).

Looked at objectively, this reliance in itself is maladaptive in the extreme. One struggles to find an equivalent case in history where one of two feuding parties fails to chronicle its own struggles, later adopts the narrative of the opponent, and thereby comes to perceive its entire history through the eyes of the opposing side. By way of explanation, we could suppose that the Church of England’s Faith and Order Commission desired an academic gloss for its theological musings and, since Jews and philosemites dominate the mainstream discussion of Jewish history and anti-Semitism, the Commission was forced to turn to Jewish sources. I don’t think this is a full explanation by any means, but it does provide some insight into the flow of ideas and intellectual influence, and should point to academia as one of the most important areas that must be contested if the West is to survive.

Even without its highly revealing endnotes, Jewish intellectual fingerprints are all over God’s Unfailing Word, where they catastrophically combine with a flamboyant Anglican penchant for weakness and subservience. The primary stated objectives of the document are essentially Jewish, being that of “challenging antisemitism,” and “working together [with Jews] for the common good of our society.” Of course, working with Jews for ‘the common good of our society” invariably means the familiar recipe of “fighting racism,” “rejecting homophobia,” “rooting out anti-Semitism,” and campaigning on behalf of migrants and ethnic minorities. In other words, Christian “tolerance,” always a volatile and deeply problematic virtue, has been weaponized in modernity as a primary engine for self-dispossession, pathological altruism, perverse virtue signaling, and moral self-flagellation.

Irrational shame, of the type exemplified and promoted by Welby/Weiler/Browne, saturates the pages of God’s Unfailing Word. The text, which purports to consist of “Theological and Practical Perspectives on Christian–Jewish Relations,” is remarkably one-sided. You will search in vain for references to the Jewish trade in Christian slaves, or the mass practice of exploitative usury. You won’t see any consideration of the impact of Jewish dissemination of pornography or the general degrading of morals. You will turn from page to page without encountering any mention of Jewish contempt for Christianity, and historical and contemporary violence against Christians. What you will instead find are multiple references to the assumption that “the Christian–Jewish relationship is a gift of God, endless rumination on “the persecution and prejudice experienced by Jewish people through history,” the blunt declaration that “antisemitism is a virus that may appear dormant but can all too easily be reactivated in all kinds of contexts,” and “the Church, which should have offered an antidote, compounded the spread of this virus.” [The concept of anti-Semitism as a virus, now clearly rampant in the Christian churches, is a Jewish contrivance. See here for further discussion.]

God’s Unfailing Word promotes nothing more than nicely packaged Jewish ideas, including the notion that there should be a “recognition on the part of the Church that it bears a considerable measure of responsibility for the spread of antisemitism,” and demands “repentance, for we are rightly reminded of the burden of responsibility the Christian tradition bears for its teaching of contempt over the ages.” Jews are completely absolved of any responsibility for anti-Semitism, and any idea they may have engaged in provocative or antagonistic behaviors, their only role being one of “grave suffering and injustice.” In order to address this assumed state of affairs, God’s Unfailing Word effectively redefines the theological and dogmatic positions of the church in much the same way as the Catholic Church did with the 1965 Second Vatican Council declaration Nostra Aetate.

A Redefined Theology

The Church of England now affirms that there has been a “difficult history” involving Jews and Christians, but only in the sense that Christians have contributed to “grave suffering and injustice.” The Church will henceforth teach that Christians “have used Christian doctrine in order to justify and perpetuate Jewish suffering.” Furthermore, they have “fostered attitudes of distrust and hostility among Christians towards their Jewish neighbours, in some cases leading to violent attacks, murder and expulsion.” Christians today must “reject such misuses of Christian doctrine” and engage in “repentance for the sins of the past.” This new theological approach, which raises White Guilt to the position of dogma, is explicitly explained as adapting to “scholarly research, particularly since the Second World War.” This is, of course, refers to the products of Jewish academic activism.

The historical narrative underpinning the new theology is laughable in its naivete. The mass presence of crypto-Jewish networks in 15th-century Spain, for example, which mainstream scholarship has established at one point threatened to overcome and infiltrate even the Jesuit Order, is held up merely as an example of the fact “the Church has never been without Jewish members.” Suspicion of Jews is argued to have been rooted less in the insincerity of Jewish converts than in “the underlying structure of antisemitism.” The authors of God’s Unfailing Word avoid further digression on Jewish behavior, for reasons one can surmise with little effort.

The section of the document concerning anti-Semitism is awful. It begins by pointing out that the Church of England’s College of Bishops accepted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism with its examples in September 2018. The document explains:

The examples highlight the way that antisemitism tends to weave together four interconnected claims, all of which should be vigorously resisted: (a) that there is something inherently wrong with Jews as a people; (b) that Jews always seek to control and influence others; (c) that because there is something inherently wrong with Jews, this influence is inevitably to the detriment of those others; (d) that therefore those with authority have a duty to restrict so far as possible the scope for Jews to exercise any influence over others.

The authors of God’s Unfailing Word insist that although “these pernicious claims appear in secular forms of antisemitism, … it is also clear that theological ideas have been used to support them in church contexts, thereby contributing to the persistent grip of the ‘virus’ of antisemitism.” Christians should mourn that “centuries of Christian government in European history include a long catalogue of anti-Jewish measures, such as legal discrimination and periodic expulsion, alongside bouts of communal violence leading in some cases to the massacre of entire communities.” Martin Luther, without whom the Church of England would not exist, is castigated because he “described [Jews] as demonic and called for the burning of synagogues.” England, meanwhile, is condemned as “the birthplace of what became known as the ‘blood libel.’ … England became the first country to order the entire Jewish community to leave, thereby seeking to be a Christian territory with no Jewish presence.”

The document then explains a total adoption of the perspective of the Jewish historical and activist Jules Isaac who, in 1947, began to wage a campaign designed to promote specific recommendations in Christian churches, mainly the Catholic Church, for the “purification” of Christian teaching regarding the Jews. The Church of England Faith and Order Commission adds:

Jules Isaac, who wrote on Jewish–Christian relations in the aftermath of the Second World War, saw a profound link between historic Christian anti-Judaism and the eruption of antisemitism in the twentieth century. If the first premise of antisemitism is the perception that ‘there is something inherently wrong with the Jews as a people’, then traditional Christian teaching that the Jewish people are collectively responsible throughout time for the death of the divine Christ, and therefore guilty together of deicide, imbues it with a terrible power. Isaac coined the phrase ‘the teaching of contempt’ (enseignement du mépris) to describe what he saw as key features of Christianity’s sustained hostility to Judaism from earliest times.

Christians are now impelled to apologize for this “teaching of contempt,” and engage in “ecclesial repentance for complicity with the evils of antisemitism.” The Church of England insists that “such ideas should have no place in Christian teaching and belief.” Christian communities are urged “to consider whether there could be suitable opportunities in their public worship to focus and express repentance for Christian involvement in fostering antisemitism, for instance in relation to observance of Holocaust Memorial Day.”

The cathedrals of Norwich and Lincoln have for centuries displayed stained glass windows depicting the boy martyrs William of Norwich and Hugh of Lincoln, both found murdered, and both determined by contemporary investigators to have been murdered by one or more Jews. The authors of God’s Unfailing Word now take some pride in pointing out that supplementary notifications have been placed near these windows, explaining them as:

a shameful example of religious and racial hatred, which, continuing down through the ages, violently divides many people in the present day. Let us unite, here, in a prayer for an end to bigotry, prejudice and persecution. Peace be with you: Shalom.

From here, the Church of England moves to retreat from any theological claim that Christians might be God’s “chosen people.” For fear of placing Jews outside salvation, the Anglican Church now insists on a bizarre ‘acknowledgement of mystery regarding the claims of Jewish people,” which is a vague and cowardly method of asserting that “Jewish people since the coming of Christ nonetheless remain recipients of God’s promises.” Of course, this is necessarily a theology that makes the coming of Christ utterly redundant, since God’s promise can be fulfilled without a Messiah. The only explanation offered for this wholesale abandonment of Christian doctrine is that Christianity “carries a heavy burden of responsibility for antisemitism and its lethal consequences,” and “it has to accept that there is a mystery here that transcends its understanding in history, though its meaning will be revealed at the end of time.” This is perhaps the greatest ever example of “kicking the can down the road.”

Christian teaching is to be adapted in several areas in order to avoid insulting or stereotyping Jews. For example, there is a clear retreat from the position that the Old Testament serves as an obvious prophecy of the coming of Christ:

Those who teach and preach in the Church of England should avoid implying that the meaning of Old Testament prophecy points to Christ in such a direct and obvious way that anyone who denies it must be refusing to pay attention to the text or be somehow defective in their understanding. Such implications feed directly into the negative stereotyping of Jewish people that forms the fundamental structure of antisemitism.

As part of the Church of England’s fundamental revision of theology, God’s Unfailing Word also articulates a new orientation in relation to Israel. This new orientation is profoundly Zionist, even going so far as to insist that “the approaches and language used by pro-Palestinian advocates are indeed reminiscent of what could be called traditional antisemitism, including its Christian forms.”

Conclusion

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of God’s Chosen Word is that it isn’t good enough for the Chief Rabbi, who ruminates on the putative blameless nature of his ancestors in his Afterword:

As for my ancestors, their interaction with Christianity meant being faced with the brutality of the Crusades; it meant being forced to choose between converting to Christianity or certain death; it meant false accusations of sacrificing Christian children at Passover to obtain blood for matzah in what became the cruel Blood Libel; it meant requiring the great Rabbinic leaders, including a figure no less than the Ramban (Nachmanides, 11941270), to publicly defend their faith against prominent priests as part of the ignominy of the Disputations, resulting in censorship, violence and slaughter.

Mirvis acknowledges and celebrates “the document’s honest appraisal of the destructive nature and origins of Christian perceptions of the Jewish people,” but he expresses a “substantial misgiving … , despite the progress it undeniably represents and articulates. Namely, that it does not reject the efforts of those Christians, however many they may number, who, as part of their faithful mission, dedicate themselves to the purposeful and specific targeting of Jews for conversion to Christianity.”

In other words, the meaning of so-called “inter-faith dialogue” is the same as that of multiculturalism—Whites/Christians must forever make room for Jews and others. They must engage in endless groveling apologies. And they must never try to convert others or attempt to imply that they should acculturate to their norms. In short, the best position for Whites, in the eyes of Rabbi Mirvis, is crawling on their bellies like his good friend Mr. Welby.

That’s not my style. I think I’ll stick with the historical reality of Christian-Jewish interactions over the centuries, a reality that leads naturally to the teaching of contempt.


[1] J. E. Alexis Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism: Surprising Differences, Conflicting Visions, and Worldview Implications – From the Early Church to Our Modern Time, Volume 1 (Bloomington: WestBow, 2012), 300.

[2] D. Chapman Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions of Crucifixion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 238.

[3] E. Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006),169.

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