A well-known conservative U.K. political commentator who has been training for ordination in the priesthood for two years at prestigious Oxford University claims his new career is at a standstill because the Church of England is more about woke than worship.
Calvin Robinson suggests that he was essentially canceled because he doesn’t abide by divisive critical race theory ideology and other aspects of the politically correct, left-wing agenda that have gained currency throughout the church, if not completely captured it, from senior officials on down.
“It is a case of wokeness taking over the church,” Robinson claims.
“Sitting in an ornate study in the Old Deanery – a 17th Century mansion house opposite St Paul’s Cathedral – the Bishop of London put her hand on my arm and quietly said something that left me astounded. ‘Calvin, as a white woman I can tell you that the Church IS institutionally racist,’ the Rt Rev Sarah Mullally told me,” Calvin Robinson recalled in the Daily Mail.
“The Bishop could not understand that as a black man, I simply did not share her – and the Church hierarchy’s – view on this contentious issue,” he added.
“Church leaders in London appeared to have had deep misgivings about my ordination from the very beginning of my training” because of politically conservative views, he explained in an article for the news outlet. “I did not expect everyone to agree with me, but what I did expect is the right to express my own opinions. I had always been taught that the Church of England was a broad church.”
Robinson’s position in a central London parish was set to be part-time so that he could serve in a parish as well as continue his media work.
The pundit didn’t miss the irony in the situation.
“These people are claiming they are institutionally racist, yet they are disregarding the opinion of an ethnic minority because it is not fitting their narrative,” he separately observed.
“I have experienced plenty of racism in my life, but it has always been down to a minority of malicious individuals. I do not think the claim that either the Church, or wider society, is institutionally racist has ever been supported by robust evidence,” Robinson insisted.
Last month, Robinson told London-based GB News, where he regularly appears, that all the other trainees “have been sent into a parish to be an assistant priest or curate… My assignment was taken away at the last minute, and I haven’t been given one…I found out that they decided months ago that they weren’t going to give me anything because it would be too ‘problematic,’ because people would complain about my conservative views, things like — and this is the bishops talking — and internally I’ve got all the evidence of this, ‘Calvin doesn’t believe that the country is institutionally racist…”
Watch:
He went on to say that “all of the bishops are very much on the same wavelength on this. They are gatekeepers, and if you’re not one of them, they don’t want you part of what is now a club. It shouldn’t be a club; it should be about serving the people, about serving Christ, and spreading the gospel.”
Robinson asserted that his political views track closely with his Christian views.
Robinson’s GB News bio reads, in part, “I try to put Christian values at the forefront of everything I do, including my media work.”
On Twitter, Robinson recently announced that he has reached the difficult decision to make a clean break from the Church of England and join the orthodox Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON).
It has become clear that there is no place for theologically or politically conservative views in the Church of England.
It is with a heavy heart that I have decided to leave the increasingly woke CofE and join the orthodox Anglican community of GAFCON.✝️https://t.co/jWF38Q2Ly7 pic.twitter.com/OKZftYE4JU
— Calvin (@calvinrobinson) May 22, 2022
“And it’s not just issues of race and gender. It seems the Church will affirm any liberal progressive secular view, but clamp down on conservative views, either political or theological,” Robinson wrote in the aforementioned Daily Mail column. “If you defend family values, the sanctity of marriage, all human life being sacred, or the fact that God made us male and female, you’ll face opprobrium…Since my ordination was blocked, I’ve been contacted by clergymen and lay people up and down the country who have been sharing their stories of how they’ve been silenced by the Church for holding conservative views.”
The Daily Mail separately claimed that it has obtained emails exchanged by senior clergy that expressed “mounting alarm” over Robinson’s conservative views.
Robinson noted that the leader of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, “has proclaimed that the Church of England is ‘deeply institutionally racist’ and called for ‘radical and decisive’ action.'”
If this scenario is an accurate portrayal of what occurred (and note that there is a statement from the Church of England at the end of the GB News discussion), it appears to be yet another example, whether in the U.S. or overseas of when so-called anti-racists engage in bigotry or diversity advocates participate in exclusion.
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Robert Jonathan is a staff writer for BizPac Review. He is a longtime writer/editor for news aggregation websites and has also developed content in the legal and financial publishing sectors as well as for online education. He earned a Juris Doctorate from the University of Connecticut School of Law, “a law school the basketball teams can be proud of.”
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