Welby has no business peddling political and economic fallacies

The Archbishop of Canterbury occupies a unique position in public life. Leader of the Church of England and symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican communion, he has the opportunity to apply biblical wisdom to the challenges of the modern world and to speak up for Christ in a society too often consumed by secular demands.

How depressing it is, then, that Justin Welby uses his position to espouse the standard Left-leaning political prescriptions we can hear any day of the week not only from Jeremy Corbyn but from nearly all Labour, Green, and Lib Dem politicians. It has become so predictable. At least since the Eighties, when in response to inner city riots the Church published Faith in the City – described by one Cabinet member at the time as “pure Marxist theology” – whenever an Anglican leader has chosen to intervene in politics, his demands have been for higher taxes, more state intervention and more redistribution.

In Welby’s case, by participating in a commission on “economic justice”, the archbishop has been unapologetic in expressing a tax-and-spend worldview. He demands that Government should increase taxes on personal wealth and multinationals and force businesses to pay higher wages.

Such policies have been tested under past Labour governments and have proved ineffective. Under the current Tory Government, meanwhile, employment is at an all-time high, income inequality has fallen and the wealthiest people pay a higher proportion of all income tax than at any time under Labour.

But setting aside the economic fallacies in the Archbishop’s proposals, the problem many Christians will have is the political nature of Welby’s interventions. With a background in the evangelical wing of the Church, it might have been expected that this archbishop would seize every opportunity to explain how Bible teaching can be applied to modern social challenges. Take the rising cost of care for the elderly: it might be apt for the archbishop to remind us of the commandment to honour our fathers and mothers by taking responsibility for their care, instead of always assuming that the state will step in.

Earlier this year, Welby attracted ridicule by claiming that the EU was “the greatest dream realised for human beings since the fall of the Western Roman Empire”. His boldness in attaching himself to Remain shows that he is not afraid to court political controversy. But many of his flock would prefer that he showed similar boldness in speaking out for Christianity, instead of calling on the state to solve all our social ills.