As our website went live today, one of the first sites to note our presence was A Progressive Viewpoint.  A look through the site shows that its author, Paul Dennett, shares some common concerns about the Anglican Church.  A recent article about the CofE working group report calling for Christians to ‘apologise’ to Muslims over the Iraq war noted the report’s anti-American tone.  In response to the report’s criticism that the US reserves to itself the right to determine who are its friends and who are its enemies, he comments:

It is truly remarkable how a statement wreathed in academic and quasi-psychological terminology can be so completely facile. If the right to determine America’s friends and enemies does not reside with America, then with whom precisely does it reside?

Of course, we all know that among its many friends is Israel, which in itself is seen as an affront to many in the Arab world and beyond.  The bishops’ report talks about the problem of the Bush administration’s "perceived uncritical support of Israel", as if the warped hatred of Israel should be appeased rather than confronted.

Paul’s concluding comments present the dilemma of many in the Church of England:

I wonder sometimes why I bother with the Church of England. I love the liturgy, I like my local parish church and the people in it. But the infestation of pseudo-liberal politically correct values, the increasing anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that is coming more and more to be representative of the Anglican world view, is as depressing as it is disgusting. The bishops are scathing in their report of the influence of the Christian Right in America, and indeed there is much about the Christian Right which is unattractive from the point of view of traditional Anglican Christianity – but American Christianity is thriving because it manages to challenge rather than seek to passively reflect the society in which it finds itself. The Church of England strains every sinew to be "relevant", but in succumbing to politically correct faux-liberalism it is seeking to impress a section of society that isn’t really interested anyway. The result is a national church which is a slowly rotting corpse.

The Church’s posturing on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians is another example of ‘politically correct faux-liberalism’.  Will it ever learn?