Andrew Brown offers a tougher take on the Archbisop of Canterbury than the one I sketch out in the entry below.
Here is a excerpt from Brown’s piece in the the Guardian:
The figures you use to justify your belief that a split may be inevitable are the two heroic German Christians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoeller, who left their own church rather than side with the Nazis. At a time when the official church supported Hitler, they set up their own parallel bodies at every level of the Church’s hierarchy. When the war came, they were punished severely. Most of the priests in their movement were sent off to the Eastern Front; Bonhoeffer was jailed, then hanged; Niemoeller spent the war in concentration camps.
Naturally, when secular English people hear you speak of their inspiring example, we imagine you standing up – at last – to thugs like Archbishop Malango of Central Africa, a supporter of Robert Mugabe, or Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria, who has incited pogroms against Muslims, called gay men and women lower than pigs and backed a law that would jail people who even discussed equality for them. In our silly, English way, we suppose that these activities have something in common with the fascism that martyred Bonhoeffer.
Silly English liberals. I fear that what you actually mean by references to anti-Nazi martyrs is that you are on Akinola’s side against the liberals, because that’s where the majority is