The Church apologises for anti-Semitism
To The Times
In criticising the Church of England’s report on anti-Semitism, Clare Foges does not comprehend what the Christian Church is for: it is not a glorified social services agency, but a conversation with God that started more than 2,000 years ago. Christians, Anglicans included, have to be alert to the times in the past when they misunderstood the conversation; this report is a necessary reassessment of the history that created the misunderstanding.
Christianity started as a heretical movement within Judaism; its four gospels contain unmistakable elements of hostility to what was then the Jewish establishment, including shifting blame for Jesus’s death from the Romans to Jewish authorities. By an accident of history, Christians then gained established status in the Roman Empire. Powerful Christianity could now use earlier rhetoric against the Jews to marginalise them, particularly when Judaism became the only other religion in medieval southern, central and western Europe. What the Anglican report absolutely gets is that the atrocities of the 20th century are squarely down to Christian heritage. The Nazis might have been hostile to established Christianity, but all the anti-Semitic tropes and vocabulary, all the monstrous shapes in people’s minds, had been put there by Christianity. Since 1945, Churches have gradually faced up to that brute fact; and that is to be applauded. If we ignore the past we distort our own times.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor emeritus of the history of the Church, University of Oxford
To The Times
Clare Foges speaks for many when she despairs of the Church of England’s pursuit of self-flagellation and ingratiation. Apologising for events in 1260 (before the C of E existed), as the Church does in this report on anti-Semitism, seems vacuous.
Bishop Bell’s confrontation of the antiSemitism of the Right in the 1930s offers an inspiring example. In that spirit, the Church should defend the faithful and brave Jews who have been harassed by the Left and have been driven out of the Labour Party. The Church would risk opprobrium by pointing out why. The cause is that the Labour Party is courting an Islamic vote that is predicated on a blind anti-Semitism that fails to distinguish between a not unreasonable criticism of Israel’s political strategies and a hateful anti-Semitism.
A Church that is unwilling to offend cannot defend our Jewish neighbours. Such courage will provoke the inevitable charge of Islamophobia when the Church invites Islam, as well as the political Left, to renounce their anti-Semitism.
Apologising for the past offers no excuse for failing to tell and confront the truth of the present.
The Right Rev Dr Gavin Ashenden, Christian Episcopal Church