In the name of the Father
Christianity will inevitably outlive the Anglican Church, it’s just a surprising state of affairs in which the Church has outlived its own Christianity.
‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’
Matthew 28:19 KJV
Throughout the centuries, those who practice the Christian faith have been fed to the lions, butchered by the Communists, and chased out of their ancestral homeland by invading Muslim armies. Upon the European plain, apocalyptic sectarian violence has shed far too much innocent blood in the name of paper-thin theological disagreements.
Now, in the year of our Lord 2023, the Christian faith is packing up its suitcase and departing from these shores (according to the latest census at least). The institution that provided its flock with community and friendship, the rock on which the nation’s morals, virtues, and meaning were forged, the very heart and soul of British civilisation, is slipping through our very fingertips. The nation’s own Church of England, rather than the last line of defence standing tall against a tidal wave of atheism and disbelief, has seemingly waved the white flag of surrender already.
What a Christian must remember is this: the world is the work of God, His Church, however, is under the care of man, and man is a fallen creature. Ever since the night of Pentecost, the bastion of faith which St. Peter and the rest of the Apostles help to grow like farmers tending to a garden, was bound to be riddled with naked self-interest, politics, and corruption. One need only gaze upon a recent scandal that swept through Catholicism like an inferno, revealing the rotten skeletons in the closet which the Vatican covered-up for generations.
The Church of England, while having faced its own fair share of paedophilia accusations, is suffering from a complete crisis of faith. Rather unsurprisingly given the Church was established by Henry VIII purely to satisfy his own sexual desires and political ambitions, the 21st Century has witnessed Anglicanism descend into the domain of ‘fashionable’ ideas.
The Christian doctrine must be moulded like clay around the pseudo-ideological crusades that have hijacked much of Western Civilisation. This is why the Archbishop himself Justin Welby has a very strong opinion on Brexit, the deportation of illegal immigrants, the Covid vaccine, and of course gay marriage.
Once you begin a sharp descent, gravity often takes over, and the deep dive increases in speed and severity. Now, the Church founded by one of England’s most masculine monarchs, is now considering (priming the public) to term God Himself as gender neutral.
If this had happened five hundred years ago, every nation from Lisbon to Moscow would have declared war out of principle. However, we live in much more pacifist times (locations vary) where Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian - that beloved bastion of Christian conservatism - boldly proclaims that ‘God should just tell us their pronouns’.
Well, this is your lucky day, because there’s this book called the Bible, which describes God as the Father, with an explicit use of He/Him pronouns. Jesus, likewise, is referred to as the Son (also He/Him). Isn’t Religious Education now compulsory in British schools? Evidently not (well, perhaps for certain other kinds of religion).
As can be seen, the Almighty Himself must bend to the whims of the social justice lexicon, and the Messiah may soon follow. Celebrating the birth of a baby boy every December may soon turn the Clergy’s feet as cold as ice. They may toy with scribbling out any male pronouns of the Father and the Son from hymns, songs, and perhaps scripture itself. Christianity will inevitably outlive the Anglican Church, it’s just a surprising state of affairs in which the Church has outlived its own Christianity.