First the Pope; now even the Church of England is fighting back. The Sunday Telegraph reported today that a confidential Church report has attacked the attempt to turn Britain into a multi-faith society:

It claims that divisions between communities have been deepened by the Government’s ‘schizophrenic’ approach to tackling multiculturalism. While trying to encourage interfaith relations, it has actually given ‘privileged attention’ to the Islamic faith and Muslim communities. Written by Guy Wilkinson, the interfaith adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, the paper says that the Church of England has been sidelined. Instead, ‘preferential’ treatment has been afforded to the Muslim community despite the fact that it makes up only three per cent of the population. Britain remains overwhelmingly a Christian country at heart and moves to label it as a multi-faith society suggest a hidden agenda, it says…

The report lists a number of moves made by the Government since the London bombings in July last year to win favour with Muslim communities. These include ‘using public funds’ to fly Muslim scholars to Britain, shelving legislation on forced marriage and encouraging financial arrangements to comply with Islamic requirements. These efforts have undermined its interfaith agenda and produced no ‘noticeable positive impact on community cohesion’, the Church document says. ‘Indeed, one might argue that disaffection and separation is now greater than ever, with Muslim communities withdrawing further into a sense of victimhood, and other faith communities seriously concerned that the Government has given signals that appear to encourage the notion of a privileged relationship with sections of the Muslim community.

Insiders at the House of Bishops meeting last week, where the briefing paper was ‘well received’, say it marks a radical departure from the Church’s usually diplomatic relations with the Government on the multi-faith issue. One bishop said it was the first time the Church had launched such a defence of the country’s Christian heritage.

Indeed! This is a seismic reversal, in a Church that for decades has been on its inter-faith knees before multiculturalism and abandoned the defence of Britain’s Christian identity. Can it be that Christianity is at last starting to defend western civilisation? Britain will only be saved from disaster if Christianity reasserts itself and defends what it was so instrumental in creating. Much more has to happen before we know whether this is just a flash in the communion cup; the story may be a way of testing reaction, or may represent a struggle within the Church, to be followed by a tactical retreat into the comforting and familiar oblivion of religious surrender. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable development.

But just look at what the Church is up against. The government has set up a fatuous ‘Commission on Cohesion and Integration’. The Telegraph notes:

It can also be revealed that the archbishop met Miss Kelly, the Communities Secretary, last month to discuss how the Church of England could contribute. Bishops are dismayed that no Christian denomination is represented on the commission

(my emphasis).

The British government itself, which is supposed to be fighting to defend the west, has not even seen fit to include the founding religion of the country on an official commission to promote community cohesion and integration. Astounding. For its part, the Church of England has a very long way to go before it takes its place on the right side of history. But along with the debate that has now started over multiculturalism, there is a sense that at this eleventh hour something in Britain is slowly — if fitfully — starting to shift in the right direction.