Antisemitism, interfaith and the Church of England: a Bishop speaks

When 20,000 people gathered for the “Standing Strong: Extinguish Antisemitism” rally on Whitehall in May, they may not have been expecting to be hearing from a senior Church of England official. But Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy, Lead Bishop for interfaith engagement, gave a stirring and impassioned speech on the dangers of Jew-hate and where they can lead.

“Antisemitism possesses a particular persistence and ubiquity that demands moral clarity”, he told the crowd.

“It mutates. It survives. It appears across the political spectrum and feeds on fear, grievance, and division. And perhaps most dangerously of all, it grows when public voices choose outrage over responsibility; when influence is used not to strengthen the social fabric, but to tear it apart; when platforms capable of shaping culture become instruments for scapegoating, mockery, and suspicion.”

He went on to say that “when public figures trade in conspiracy, humiliation, and division, they do not merely inflame opinion; they corrode the moral foundations of a nation. Leadership that profits from division is not courage. It is recklessness. And rhetoric that dehumanises any community ultimately threatens every community.

“History teaches us with terrifying consistency that when antisemitism rises unchecked, democracy itself begins to decay.”

Two months later, the Church held its annual Synod, at which a specific motion, on the plight of Palestinian Christians, was scheduled for a vote. The motion included a document known as Kairos II, which among other things, claims Zionism is a settler-colonial movement built on “Jewish supremacy” and with genocidal intent, and urges Christians worldwide to refrain from any dialogue with “Zionists” –precluding any discussion with a significant majority of Jews.

Despite warnings from British Jewish religious and lay leadership, the Synod voted overwhelmingly in favour, albeit with a decision to “hear” it rather than to “receive” it – a difference widely viewed among British Jews as mere semantics. Chief Rabbi Mirvis referred to the vote as “shameful”, and “a sad day for Jewish-Christian relations.”

Bishop Lusa, who moved from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Belgium as a child, later entering the priesthood, was not at the Synod himself – he is not a member – but he was watching closely. He noted that a Synod vote about Palestinians had been “delayed for a number of years” and felt that the Church had therefore been “trying to do a multiplicity of things at once…I think personally that it was unfortunate that the Kairos II document was included in that motion.”

He elaborated further, describing the document as “problematic”.

“The Church wanted to express solidarity with Palestinian Christians, but I think [Kairos II] lends itself to the fostering of particular tropes towards Israel or Jewish identity that in certain ways could enable antisemitic rhetoric or antisemitic discourse.”

He described recognising that Kairos II had been written “within a particular geopolitical context, and that its theological action holds particular stuff that doesn’t necessarily speak with urgency and pertinence to our British context.

“Therefore there’s a piece of translation that needs to happen that I’m not sure we were able to do as effectively at Synod. I do think that the critical engagement certainly needs to take place, partly because we don’t simply want to assume as given some of the statements made in Kairos II, that could be potentially dangerous.”

He described wondering whether the Synod motion fallout was “an opportunity for us to revisit our commitments in the past and to test our understanding of what we mean by antisemitism, what we understand by the mechanism by which antisemitism so easily set itself within systems, within our structures, within our discourse as well, recognizing that particularly in the Western context, in Europe, in Western Christianity, the threads of antisemitism are never too far below the surface, and there’s something in our institutional muscle memory that needs to unlearn those patterns and constantly become alive to the seduction of those discourses and narratives, even when they are projected or advertised as a compulsion towards justice.

“I’m not suggesting that the Palestinian question is not one that that calls for justice deservedly, and I wouldn’t want to create a hierarchy of worth in assigning the need to attend to issues of justice, but perhaps we must be mindful of the fact that if we’re not attentive to our own history and legacy, to our own institutional muscle memory, we might very easily be taken into places where ultimately our words may sound hollow, and our actions may fail to carry the weight they’re intended to hold.”

However, the charge some have levelled, that the Church of England focuses on Palestinian Christians but ignores the plight of co-religionists elsewhere, is one which he politely and diplomatically rejects.

“The Church of England does care a great deal about the plight of Christians near and far, and that is manifested through the various partnerships and links that exist between Anglican Church of England dioceses with dioceses across the Anglican Communion”, he responds.

“Now, it probably is fair to say that not all of those questions would hit the headlines in quite the same way as the Palestinian question does, because as we would probably all concede, there’s a sense in which the Palestinian question becomes a point of crystallization, not just in the intersection between Christian and Jewish relations, but also Jewish-Muslim and Christian and Muslim relations as well; inevitably what happens in that part of the world seems to get more of the spotlight.”

Having served as bishop of Willesden since 2022, he recently attended Brondesbury Synagogue for a pidyon haben – Phil Rosenberg, President of the Board of Deputies, was redeeming his firstborn son, which Nsenga-Ngoy described as “a fascinating ceremony to attend and to witness.” He also recently visited Poland on a trip with the Council of Christians and Jews, having previously been with March of the Living. But it was his presence at the May rally against antisemitism when many in the Jewish community met him for the first time.

“Antisemitism ultimately is not a Jewish issue”, he says. “It is an issue for those of us who aren’t Jews, and often the perversity of the struggle against antisemitism is that we expect those who are the artisans of it to somehow be excused from the responsibility of dealing with it.

“I felt really privileged to be given a platform to speak.”

While he was technically speaking in a personal capacity, he recognised that “as a bishop, I can never really assume that I am a private citizen and only speak as a private actor, and so I was carrying, perhaps implicitly, something of the hope and the commitment that we as a Church have in relation to responding to antisemitism and our commitment to tackle it and engage with headfirst.”

A particularly problematic issue which has raised its head in recent years, I suggest, is the attempt to effectively retrofit Jesus into being described as a Palestinian.

“First, I have to be honest and acknowledge that until fairly recently, I used that language myself. ‘Jesus was Palestinian.’ It felt like solidarity, and I said it without examining it closely enough”, he responds.

“But I’ve come to think it’s a problem. Not just because it’s anachronistic, there was no ‘Palestinian’ people in that sense in the first century, but because of what that anachronism can quietly do. It can make Jesus’s Jewishness incidental. And once you do that, you’re not just getting history wrong. You’re erasing something a living people still claim continuity with; a land, a text, and a story.

“A phrase meant to honour one people’s suffering ends up, unintentionally, dispossessing another people’s memory. That’s the thing I watch for now; language that sounds like compassion but carries antisemitism underneath it, unexamined.”

He points out, however, that when some Palestinians describe Jesus as Palestinian, or black people describe Jesus as black, they are continuing a longstanding theological tradition in which groups of Christians suffering identified themselves with Jesus, whom they see as the embodiment of someone who suffered.

“So, I believe that we should hold the claim that Jesus was a Jew; full stop, non-negotiable, and any language that loosens that anchor should worry us. And in the same vein, we should be able to confidently acknowledge the fact that Jesus is claimed, rightly, by suffering Palestinian Christians today, in that same confessional key that’s let every oppressed people recognise itself in this story.

“That’s not a contradiction I need to resolve. It’s the same paradox the incarnation has always held for Christians; particular enough to be a Jewish man from Nazareth, universal enough to be found wherever people are still being oppressed.”