The BBC has attacked Anglicans after a study revealed that nearly nine out of 10 want immigration levels “reduced”, claiming that Christianity demands support for open borders.
In a segment reporting a University of Bristol study which found 87 per cent of Anglicans think there is too much immigration to Britain, BBC Breakfast featured religious leaders who said Christians should be reeducated so that they back mass migration.
“One of the main tenets of Christianity is friendship to your neighbour,” presenter Dan Walker proclaimed on Sunday, before raising his eyebrows and adding in worried tones: “But new analysis seen by the BBC suggests that the vast majority of [Anglicans] are opposed to immigration!”
While neglecting to explain what welcoming one’s neighbour has to do with embracing uncontrolled mass migration from across the globe, the publicly-funded media organ implied throughout its segment that supporting border controls is incompatible with Christianity.
Claiming that the figures show “Church leaders have a lot of work to do” convincing Anglicans to embrace mass migration, the BBC spoke to Loughborough’s liberal woman bishop, Guli Francis-Dehqani.
The Iranian refugee chided both Britain and the Church of England for “not having a great history” in terms of supporting immigration — despite receiving sanctuary and being made a bishop herself — and told BBC Breakfast: “We still have a long way to go in order to enable, to help, to educate congregations to be able to express a fuller welcome to those who both enter our churches and come to our country.”
Reporting from the Church of the Martyrs, a hub of the ‘sanctuary’ movement in Leicester which aims to make the city “welcoming” to illegal migrants, BBC Breakfast said “only” 66 per cent of people “who call themselves Christian and go to church every week” want to see immigration reduced, compared to 87.6 per cent of people “who say they’re Christian but don’t”.
But UKIP London Assembly Member David Kurten suggested that the survey says more about an increasingly politicised church that has been hijacked by liberals than it does about tenets of the faith.
Remarking that some congregations “feel like a branch of [hard-left Labour faction] Momentum”, the committed Christian said that he stopped attending church each week around the time of the EU referendum, when the vicar “actually started using the pulpit to preach against Brexit”.
Mr Kurten told the BBC that, for conservatives like himself, “you think it’s not so much that I’ve left the Church, it’s that the Church has left me”.
Interestingly, the open borders interpretation of the commandment to “love thy neighbour as thyself” was recently challenged by Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán. He observed that those who argue for it “forget the second part of the commandment”, which enjoins us “to love ourselves”.
He explained: “Loving ourselves also means taking and protecting all that we are and who we are. To love ourselves means that we love our country, our nation, our family, our culture and European civilization.”
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