The Church of England’s most senior clergyman has attacked Brexit and told Britons they must welcome mass immigration in an extraordinary political opinion piece.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby made his intervention in the Mail on Sunday, which like Welby backed the Remain campaign during the EU referendum.
“Brexit has divided the country and we now need a new narrative,” he asserted, insisting that “We must heal the divisions caused by the vote” and “accept the dissenting voice” — an oblique reference to people like himself.
Like most Remainers, Welby failed to consider that the country must have been divided before the vote, considering enough people were unhappy with the status quo for it to be overturned at the ballot box.
Being satisfied with the existing situation themselves, Welby and his fellow-travellers simply failed to notice the discontent — only discovering the divide when the referendum put them on the losing side of it.
The Anglican primate made it clear that his “new narrative” did not include a turn away from the unpopular policies of mass migration and state-sponsored multiculturalism, which are and have done much to undermine social cohesion and weaken Christianity in the United Kingdom.
He lectured readers on the importance of “Welcoming strangers to our country”, and told them “We must be generous and allow ourselves to change with the newcomers and create a deeper, richer way of life.”
For his own part, Archbishop Welby has been enthusiastic about adapting his church to suit migrants, creating a new bishop focused on ethnic minorities in the belief that the Church of England is too English.
“We must be a warm, welcoming nation. We must never crush the new diversity and freedoms,” Welby warned.
Welby said that “the most important building blocks of our nation have been undermined” in recent decades — but rather than discuss the degradation of public morals, national identity, and the traditional family, he named those building blocks as “housing that centres on people”, “medical care free at the point of delivery”, and “generous” state benefits, among other social democratic policy matters.
Ordinary Christians do not appear to share the Archbishop’s focus on government welfare and ever-greater “diversity”, with University of Bristol research indicating that some 87.6 percent of Anglicans want to see immigration reduced.
Far from reconsidering their position in light of these findings, however, church elites said they simply demonstrate that they “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.”