Who knew? We'd say he's clueless about a great many things. But he is vexed, very vexed, about an English movie chain that won't show a CofE advertizement featuring people saying the Lord's Prayer. Does he not understand how apostsy in Anglican ranks has helped to fuel this?
An Anglican priest I know comments, and shows that the battle lines between Christian culture and secularist culture are now clearly drawn:
I understand the point that +Welby is making, but I think that he does the Christian faith no service by presenting it as inoffensive. As for carol services and church services on Christmas Day? Consider this. In Luke's narrative of the nativity of Jesus, an angel announces to shepherds, "To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord." This announcement isn't just about the arrival of some inoffensive religious figure who'll go about the country spouting platitudes about how to live a better life or how to create a better society. It is an announcement that the Kurios, the Lord - the Greek word that translates the Hebrew word Adonai in the Septuagint, the Hebrew word that stands in for the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, the Name of God - has just been born in a stable in the podunk town of Bethlehem. And that he is both Kurios and Soter (Savior) - two titles to which the same Augustus Caesar who ordered the census that sent Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem in the first place laid claim. Jesus, not Caesar - in other words, not any political system nor political ideology - is Lord.
Carols services and church services on Christmas Day are dangerous to Caesar's regime and deeply offensive to a world who thinks either that belief doesn't really matter, or that religion is just about making you a good person, or that all beliefs lead to God. That angelic announcement, like Mary's Magnificat and Zechariah's Benedictus, says that belief does matter, that religion is precisely not about making you a good person, and that only one belief - or better, only one Lord and Savior - leads to and is himself God.
Again, I'm not surprised by the advert ban. The "secularists" get it, and they want nothing to do with threats to their fragile and dissolving notions of society.