It pains me to have to write this as a Christian who has become steadfast in the faith in the last few years, having been plucked out of a secular lifestyle devoid of religious ideals. I despised religion and repeated the same mantras, primarily targeting Christianity, reciting such cheap lines as, “Religion is a man-made mechanism and its primary function is to control you.”

I am now seeing the Church of England and many other denominations abandoning their responsibility to preach the Gospel, to assist repentant sinners in acknowledging their convictions, and to proclaim the good news of God’s justification and salvation in Jesus Christ. If anything, the Church has spent recent years enthusiastically affirming sin at a political and cultural level.

In John 15:18-19, we read:

If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.

This is one of the most important passages on the need to be willing to reject culture and the world. It emphasises that, since we Christians are called to an order higher than this world, our main task must be to prepare for salvation. There is also the equally important reminder that, no matter how much we seek to appease cultural shifts, either by passively complying or trying to outpace them altogether, we will remain hated. As we are now witnessing in real-time, the Church of England is allowing stronger ideological forces, anathema to the faith, to infiltrate and destroy Christianity from the inside.

The Obsession with ‘Diversity and Equity’

A 2003 Church of England document, self-importantly titled “Called to Act Justly,” has a whole section on “Statistics of Ethnic Origin.” It addresses a presentation by Rev. Lynda Barley, Head of Research and Statistics at the Archbishops’ Council, on the findings of an exercise commissioned by the General Synod in November 1999. Its goal was to collect data on the ethnicity of persons on the electoral roll, churchwardens, and parochial church council members. This exercise took place alongside the comprehensive revision of the electoral register in 2002. The aim was to re-educate congregations and maximise diversity in the Church of England.

In 2007, a follow-up was published titled “Celebrating Diversity in the Church of England, National Parish Congregation Diversity Monitoring.” The study, based on the 2002 diversity monitoring programme, sought to evaluate ‘progress’ towards greater diversity within the Church and to inform future “strategic planning efforts.” The document discusses differences in ethnic representation, age profiles, and church attendance trends, claiming to “highlight the importance of promoting inclusion and representation within religious institutions.”

Why did the Church prioritise demographic research to achieve diversity and equity, rather than focusing on salvation and the Gospel to reach lost souls?

Perhaps the peak of the Church of England’s self-sabotage, the ultimate proof that it has surrendered to the delirums of worldliness, was the ordination of the ‘gender-queer’ Bingo Allison as the first ‘non-binary’ priest. As the imposter in question claimed, “God was guiding me into this new truth about myself.” I believe that Christ fulfilled the official priesthood, which means that in a spiritual sense, we are all priests serving God and providing spiritual offerings such as prayer and gratitude. Whether in the Church of England or the Catholic Church, priesthood highlights the importance of sanctification. If there is no evidence of this in a person’s life, no fruit of the spirit like hatred of sin, then anyone who claims to be sanctified is a liar and a hypocrite. They were never fully justified and their faith is an empty, lifeless gesture.

In Matthew 23:1-13, Jesus outlines the seven woes to the Jewish scribes and Pharisees who sat at the helm of the church government as public teachers and interpreters of the law of Moses:

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honour at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

An adulterous priest who continues in sin, yet still sits in a position of power within the church, would have his title removed. The same must be applied here, not only to avoid contradiction and hypocrisy, but also as an example to true sanctification.

Pathological Altruism

Back in February 2024, The Daily Telegraph published an article reporting that the Church of England now admits, after the case of Abdul Ezedi, that it may have been scammed by asylum seekers. Bogus baptisms and fake conversions, it turns out, are a useful way of dodging deportation back to one’s less developed homeland.

In Shi’ite Islam, the practice known as Taqqiyah is used where a Muslim denies his or her faith when faced with either harassment or persecution. The 28th verse of the third sura says that, out of fear of Allah, believers should not show preference in friendship to unbelievers “unless to safeguard yourselves against them.”

Unsurprisingly, the Church of England hasn’t taken precautions to ensure that the church has seen true conviction in the faith. One way to achieve this would be to use something like Peter Masters’s Seven Certain Signs of True Conversion as a measure: the conviction of sin, understanding scripture, the family bond or fellowship, the practice of prayer, the new heart, the measure of assurance, and the antagonism of Satan.

When I read the headline, “The Church of England has become ‘conveyor belt for asylum seeker fake conversions,’” this neither shocks nor surprises me. On November 2021, Remembrance Sunday, a Mohammedan called Emad Jamil Al Swealmeen attempted to use an improvised explosive device (IED) to blow up a women’s hospital. It was later discovered that the Church of England played a role in its conversion of hundreds of asylum seekers, including this Mohammedan, who later tried to commit this atrocity.

As alluded to earlier, there is also the recent case of chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi, who in February doused an alkaline substance on a woman and her two children aged three and eight before attempting to run them over with a car. Ezedi was previously convicted of sexual offences in 2018, during which he had his asylum application denied twice, before having it approved after professing conversion from Islam to Christianity, fooling authorities into granting him the right to remain in Britain for fear his safety would be jeopardised in Afghanistan.

Another case was that of a Bangladeshi man who, having already served 12 years in prison after he murdered his wife, successfully appealed against attempts by the home office to deport him by claiming he had converted to Christianity and that he would be at risk of persecution at the hands of Mohammedans in Bangladesh if sent back home.

It is the same story over and over again: a merry-go-round of the same problem that can only be described as the church submitting to a type of pathological altruism, which undermines not just the Church and its duty, but inadvertently creates more animosity towards Christianity and distorts understanding in the public mind of what it means to be a Christian. Fellow Christians must be firm and uncompromising—assertively and with grace—in facing down ideologues who give Christianity a bad name. To be blunt, the Church of England has a choice: to reject worldliness, just as the scriptures teach, or to face a self-inflicted extinction.