CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM
[REDACTED]
Special Attaché for Religion
South Pacific Intelligence
British High Commission, Singapore
[REDACTED]
Permanent Under-Secretary of State
Postcolonial Oversight Division
FCDO, London 17 October 2025
Sir,
Subject: Regional Influence and Reach of the Anglican Church
Congratulations on inheriting both title and thankless task. I was sorry to see your predecessor retire, given his pivotal role as incumbent appointee in the FCO. Those early days were crucial for normalizing the presence of British expats around the globe in the postcolonial era. Those in the commerce sector mine our finest nuggets of intel; there is little point in cultivating academics, who are nearly always unsympathetic, and more often than not opposed to our work. You are no doubt well apprised of the imperative to keep a low profile. Advertising our existence would be most unwise.
As it is, I understand your request for a briefing from the regions to better determine the ongoing relevance of monitoring the temperature of religiosity overseas, especially after the uproar in conservative dioceses following Sarah Mullally’s appointment. Given Whitehall’s cuts, it can be challenging to appreciate how something as seemingly nebulous as religious sentiment in far-flung lands can influence our affairs. In the interest of space I have selected a few events to foreground the zeitgeist of the region. Should a more extensive report be required, I am happy to follow up with specific in-country briefings. With Number 10 presently embroiled in populist anti-immigration rhetoric, the PMO may overlook the impact of blowback from anti-Western attitudes worldwide, and the rogue actors presenting political and reputational risk to us. We are operating in an age where the highest levels of discretion are necessary.
It is a schoolboy mistake to underestimate the C of E’s influence in maintaining the essence of Englishness, this vital cultural capital we trade on. English cathedrals attract millions of visitors a year. At the close of Petertide past, a new generation of priests (including some originating from our former colonies) swore loyalty to the Crown in very public celebrations. At the same time, nothing showcases Anglican ingenuity or institutional absurdity quite like the shadow hierarchy of ‘Provincial Episcopal Visitors’, male bishops operating under a Society (partly named after a 7th-century abbess), swooping in to do the deed whenever a peer is deemed tainted by women’s ordination.Footnote 1 Such clerical plate-spinning can admittedly make it hard to take the Church seriously, crucial as it is to the formation of English national identity.
Englishness and the Global Imagination
Now the Church of England is one of those ‘what it says on the tin’ names, founded by the monarch of England for the benefit of the Crown and associated ruling class elites (whenever I hear ‘elite’ levelled as an insult, I consider it a commendation – proof that one’s standards have survived the acids of envy). The etymological origins of being Anglican derive from its literal meaning – it is to be English. Not British, which one could maintain quite ostensibly as a Sri Lankan, Scot or someone with ‘Global Majority Heritage’ nowadays. English is not just a language, it is an ethnicity; but more than that it is a racialized category that Suella or Kemi would agree with (by the by, I find it easier to think of these allies as ‘WACO’s: Wannabes, Aspirants, Collaborators and Occidentophiles). Colonization of the mind goes to the core: it persuades the colonized to internalize alien norms as truth.Footnote 2 The more useful functionaries are those willing to betray their own for personal profit or aspirations to petty nobility, gaining a step up from the middle class at any rate. As regards the particularities of being English, the semantic range of this word may someday enlarge in popular understanding to mean something closer to being British, but for now, English effectively still means those of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic extraction.
Though Anglicanism is often cast as a British ecclesial export; it is more accurate to note that its imperial character was overwhelmingly shaped by the English establishment. The Chinsealacht sharply illustrates this logic: though a minority, Anglican elites dominated Ireland for over a century, governing in alignment with English authority well into the 19th century. The classic playbook used against non-conforming Irish Catholics is instructive: bans on marriage, voting, public office, participation in education and property ownership – a monopolizing spirit that imposed socio-economic controls to reshape society.Footnote 3 We exported this worldwide.
It might be helpful thinking of the C of E as Chaplain of Empire; though from its very founding, the Church was constitutionally enmeshed with the English Crown and establishment, at the height of the Empire’s expansion, Anglicanism was seen as its real strength. Symbiotically, imperial Anglicanism reinvigorated the Church with renewed purpose as it sent missionaries to the colonies.Footnote 4
HM Henry VIII’s wishes were ambitious, but simple: divorce (annulments), dynasty (male heirs) and dispossession of opposing power (the Catholics). One commentator called it ‘a fig leaf covering the English aristocracy’s theft of church property’, echoing the open secret that Anglicanism has from the very outset been the ideological voice of England’s ruling class.Footnote 5 Besides breaking away from papal authority, the originating rationale was to make law, secure biopolitical control and amass wealth for the Crown. This we did, thanks to the Church’s influence. From Tudor emergence to its 21st-century Communion, the C of E has been more than a spiritual arm; it functions as cultural bloodstream of a people, our people. Domestically its liturgy, music, architecture and parish ideals have lent English life her distinctive cadence. Overseas, the Church travelled with empire as a missionary of our civilization, offering colonial subjects an imagined community of Englishness into which some chosen few might be adopted. To trace those twin trajectories is to understand why Anglican worship continues to signal a proud, self-conscious English identity at home and abroad.
The definitive artefact of Anglican culture is the Book of Common Prayer, with a grip on the vernacular marking out national identity.Footnote 6 Because every parish was once required by law to own a copy, the collects helped to shape speech from village school to royal court. It is one of the engines of the English language and literature. Devotion and diction, in other words, became inseparable foundations of national memory. Choral evensong – still sung nightly at least three times a week in cathedrals from Westminster to Wells – keep alive Tudor and Jacobean settings by Tallis, Byrd and Gibbons. The Church’s adherence to tradition while remaining a living tradition makes it unmistakably, quintessentially English, attracting the admiration of tourists and devotees alike.Footnote 7 Architecture reinforces the point; parish churches punctuate townscapes so habitually that Pevsner could describe them as a primary feature of England’s village skylines.Footnote 8 Pair that with the parish system, organize civic society around it,Footnote 9 and one sees why the national Church could shore up loyalty to a political theology that reinforced order and obedience.Footnote 10
Empire exported these cultural codes. By the 18th century, and in the face of competition from other European powers, Anglicans reconfigured the colonies into a providential arena where English religion and English civilization advanced together.Footnote 11 It made sense as slave-owning fell out of favour with the British public, who had themselves begun to crawl out of the working classes to organize an opposition. Instead of crushing rebel slaves, the Empire could simply make loyal subjects. With backers like the evangelical Anglican Charles Grant, director of the East India Company, missionary societies helped us convert resistance into reverence, seeing their work as a transnational projection of English moral, political and commercial order.Footnote 12 By Victoria’s reign every settler dominion possessed a daughter church that looked to us as mater ecclesia. To sing Te Deum and kneel for the Prayer Book creed was to perform Englishness in public.
Those who quickly grasped this understood well that fellowship with Canterbury offered a route into the symbolic pedigree of the imperial centre. The United States, despite its republican break with Britain, offers the clearest case of elective Anglicization. The post-Revolutionary Episcopal Church preserved the bulk of Anglican liturgy, and by the Gilded Age, sociologists routinely placed Episcopalians at the heart of the ‘WASP’ establishment, a social credential, shorthand for quasi-English identity. Among colonized peoples, the aspiration could not be more explicit. Yoruba linguist and bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther translated the Prayer Book into his mother tongue, donned cassock and surplice and became involved in the Academy, a centre for public enlightenment which our predecessors devised to teach Nigerians about British life. From the East, Indian essayist Nirad Chaudhuri confided that repeated visits to Anglican services at King’s College Chapel were so powerfully felt that they had nearly converted him.Footnote 13 For cosmopolitan Anglophiles like Chaudhuri, something like Anglican worship could distill the larger story of England into an experience available to any who could master its particular cadences.
Eliot, another admirer who naturalized himself into English Anglicanism, declared that ‘it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have been rooted’ and ‘against a background of Christianity…all our thought has significance’.Footnote 14 Even after the Empire’s political dissolution and amid contemporary pluralism, the C of E remains the taproot of English culture – the Prayer Book carving out rhythms of the vernacular, choirs singing the nation’s story, rites crowning her sovereigns, schools forming her children and Communion offering a worldwide fellowship knit together by the dream of England. For non-English admirers, that dream still holds allure. You will see no shortage of wealthy foreign families sending their children to our schools, becoming well versed in our words and our ways. Like it or not, an association with Anglicanism remains a rite of symbolic naturalization, proof that Englishness, especially encountered through the Church, is both intensely particular and globally exportable. In the quiet of evensong or the solemnity of coronation, England yet hears itself speak – and so, remarkably, does the world.
We witness this being played out in the various Anglican dioceses that cling to English roots whilst simultaneously resenting them. The C of E’s institutional fortunes were historically entangled with imperial logic, ‘hitching a ride on the expansion of the British Empire’.Footnote 15 Anglican clergy accompanied administrators and settlers, providing spiritual guidance whilst helping to furnish a moral rationale for colonial occupation. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS) were instruments of empire, reifying enlightenment rationality and imperial paternalism. With some few exceptions, the current system honours these traditions. Colonialism created durable institutional infrastructures that authorized one kind of Christianity as normative, refracted in modern times through re-enactments of moral guardianship by our former territories.
The latter phenomenon threatens our more subtle strategies in the postcolonial era for maintaining Britain’s influence. It is not so much about keeping our former colonies in thrall to the British Empire, but how to remain relevant in the world without religiously enforced demands. The sociologist Boaventura de Sosa Santos and his ilk are swift to recognize such methods, having long proposed an emancipatory ‘epistemologies of the South’ as counterpoints to what they think of as Northern (i.e., Western) worldviews, decrying these standardized values to be totalizing impositions on diverse, non-Western cultures.
Within development literature, the ‘Global North’ signifies states with structural capital surpluses and agenda-setting power; ‘Global South’ denotes economies historically locked into dependency. The distinction is not cartographic but epistemic. Northern knowledge claims universality, assimilating all others into its singular doctrine, whereas Southern epistemologies prize polyphony – multiple, locally grounded voices kept in productive tension.Footnote 16 To be a church that speaks from the South would mean foregrounding plurality, resisting a solitary moral blueprint.
In the Service, we do not need to pay too much attention to ideologies except where possibly employed in regime change, so it is worth noting this language because whilst constructed by socialists, it has become increasing co-opted by their traditional enemies, the ideological conservatives. Cuckoo-ing of the South can be useful for preserving the status quo. However, should the public see through to the fact that ‘the South’ is not really about East versus West cultural difference but an issue of singularly dominant systems versus a more pluralistic epistemology, our entire endeavour would collapse. How could we leverage cultural supremacy for capital, selling the story that there is one way to be morally developed, civilized, Christian, if we were to allow all these diverse cultures to have their say?
A Malaysian Church with an English Vicar
Which brings me to the peculiar case of ‘HTBB’, a church that sprung up in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur circa 2014. Last year HTBB celebrated a decade in Bukit Bintang, a rather glitzy part of the old town which houses luxe hotels and shopping malls (more on this shortly). The city has had an Anglican cathedral since 1895, boasting a dozen parish churches in the capital region alone. Holy Trinity Brompton, or ‘HTB’, the mother church in London as it were, is one of these theologically conservative evangelical, prosperity-focused, celebrity-pastor models with a focus on pietistic sanctimony and respectability. The last ABC emerged from this powerbase,Footnote 17 and with his unseasonable departure, they were rumoured to be stacking the CNC deck to elect a candidate who might overlook their powerplays.
HTB’s decision to christen their outpost ‘HTBB’ is hardly coincidental: the familiar consonants serve as an unmistakable trademark, carrying West London’s upper-middle class identity into a different ecclesial and cultural ecosystem.Footnote 18 Functioning less as missional creativity and more as brand colonialism, it is an export model that transplants homogenized spirituality to local soil.Footnote 19 True to its evangelical nature, it birthed an extensive network of ‘resource churches’, cannibalizing older C of E parishes and expanding globally through its ubiquitous Alpha Course (which is best understood as a franchised conversion programme uncritically swallowed, like quickie microwave meals). The HTB network, with over 60 churches under its control, is an Anglican-lite flavoured mini denomination of its own – an aggressive, autoimmune canker within the C of E itself.
While technically situated within the Diocese of West Malaysia, HTBB was envisioned by English clergy, its white Englishman vicar parachuted in from HTB’s key leadership. According to an intelligence report, the good Rev. is also well on his way to garnering a ‘D.Min’ (one of those strange vanity doctorates one can earn for studying a bible study, according to my sources),Footnote 20 exploiting ruminations over his church transplant. Any run-of-the-mill theologian could spot a mile away how the foundational act signals continuity with colonial-era missionary dynamics, where theological knowledge and ecclesial authority are externally sourced and racially coded. In a postcolonial Malay and Muslim-majority nation such a move cannot be viewed as neutral. Certainly, the more politically awakened, historically conscious would see right through it. But niggling unease is a sensation the local Protestants have become accustomed to, and with most already habituated to the flavours of conservative evangelicalism, they are easily led into believing it is Western liberalization they find discomfiting, especially once the gloss of ‘Asian values’ or some other such label is slapped on.
One is tempted to critique the institutional hubris of using near-identical initials, yet from a branding perspective it creates a reassuring corporate continuity for HTB insiders and is far less problematic than one might expect within the local church scene, that has largely inherited their liturgy and ecclesiology from British (Anglican, Brethren) and American (Baptist, United Methodist, Pentecostal) traditions with minimal interrogation of the frameworks transplanted. Its residual colonial logics and aspirational alignment with anything English means that basic curricula in their seminaries centre Euro-American scholarship. With limited attention to indigenous or postcolonial issues, any reflection on race, indigeneity or empire is rare. For now, all this benefits us: transnational capital flows remain undisrupted so long as decolonization is delayed or deferred. Naturally, inculcating a healthy degree of Anglophilia helps steer loyalties in our direction.
Under the old Colonial Office, missionaries were granted access to indigenous communities in exchange for not antagonizing administrators. This legacy carried over into post-independence dynamics. As the state criminalizes proselytization of the Muslim majority, many churches opt for self-censorship, retreating into internal matters. Their cautious complicity results from a deeply ingrained quietism that tilts towards institutional preservation, disengaged from native spirituality (which Christianity subordinates to Western systems, terming it pagan or animist). Faith is depoliticized as a matter of personal piety and individual salvation, reflecting the original impulse to produce obedient subjects for the Empire. English-speaking congregations tend to be affluent, urban and westernized, that is, teeming with WACOs. The ethnic segregation of churches (e.g., ‘Chinese Methodist’, ‘Tamil Methodist’, ‘Iban Anglican’) reproduce colonial models of missionary governance and is rarely interrogated, sometimes even valorized under the guise of cultural preservation. It has been quite a while since sending an expert from the London metropole to the Empire’s old dominions was deemed necessary.
Thus one might wonder why, after Anglicanism arrived on the shores of Penang in 1786, an English church felt compelled to re-found it two centuries later? The implicit answer is that a particular sophistry-laden brand of West London tenor has proven profitable, attracting dazzled WACOs and shoring up nominally ‘Global South’ support in unresolved English culture-wars. Now, it may seem at first that promoting a Western/Northern normative framework of universalizing values could make them useful allies. The name, however, clues us in to their driving ethos – evangelicals live to convert credulous others to their way of being and thinking. Though sometimes shrouded, sometimes overt, their paradigm of power is locked into an unrelenting militancyFootnote 21 regarding conversion, so that they prove just as likely competitors with HMG, especially as factions agitate to break away from the wider C of E’s moderating influence. These projections of power and vestiges of colonial grammars are clear as day, with Western leaders continuing to set the agenda, sometimes by proxy through a suitably groomed local.
Enlisting the Locals Through Education
To shape theological formation is to condition the intellectual and spiritual imagination of the next generation – pastors, cultural leaders, educators, laity.Footnote 22 Moulding colonized people into stewards of an ideologically Anglophone project that is almost the same, but never quite (white),Footnote 23 St Paul’s Theological College was established under the covering of HTB, in affiliation with St Mellitus College, ‘one of the most exciting and innovative places to study theology and train for ministry in the UK’Footnote 24 (evangelicals are nothing if not skilled at self-promotion). St Mellitus, latterly in London and Nottingham, is a newer theological institute f(o)unded under the auspices of financier Paul Marshall who, besides funding the Leave campaign in Brexit, donated half a million pounds during Boris’ tenure. Marshall bankrolls media platforms that launder ideologies of Judeo-Christian, Euro-American moral order. Cross-ownership strategically forms a calculated media machine with a powerful feedback loop for wider audiences: UnHerd peddles contrarian bait, The Spectator cloaks it in intellectual prestige and GB News saturates the public sphere. Quite the unholy trinity of control, which might be beneficial for HMG if only wealthy fundamentalists did not see themselves as above the law.
When Ofcom imposed a £100,000 fine for serial breaches of impartiality rules in October 2024, network hosts indignantly framed the sanction as proof that ‘the establishment fears ordinary Britons’, undercutting regulations as constraints on the vox populi.Footnote 25 A hedge-fund chief turned evangelical media baron, Marshall is board member of the Church Revitalisation TrustFootnote 26 and has poured millions into HTB, which he has attended latterly for nearly 30 years.Footnote 27 Just last year he had to delete hundreds of Twitter likes or retweets which endorse extremist views. One he liked said, ‘a matter of time before civil war starts in Europe. The native European population is losing patience with the fake refugee invaders’ and another which warned: ‘If we want European civilization to survive we need to not just close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately. We don’t stand a chance unless we start that process very soon’.Footnote 28
Exactly the kind of careless language we need to avoid. If Muslim immigrants need to be deported from Great Britain, perhaps 21st-century Europeans and their institutions need to be expelled from Malaysia? Evangelical passion for civilizing people can just as easily be matched by nationalist zeal in this climate, and a surefire way to stoke it is through racial and religiously tinged rhetoric. I know it is not top of Whitehall’s priorities to regulate billionaires’ opinions, but a little discretion goes a long way. In the age of Trump 2.0, surely we can retain some semblance of English restraint over and above the crassness of the Americans. Perhaps the PM can persuade them to do national service with taxesFootnote 29 instead of fuelling conspiracy mouthpieces?
By establishing St Paul’s from a position of external initiative, vision and pedagogy, HTBB and HTB are replicating colonialism with the naïve collaboration of seduced natives, primarily targeting the English-speaking, Malaysian-Chinese middle-to-upper classes on an upwardly-mobile social trajectory. This demographic benefited from colonial economic structures, aligned themselves with Anglophone Christianity and remains deeply embedded in class aspiration. The local bourgeoisie readily serve as instruments of colonial continuity in exchange for influence, respectability or a seat at the global table.Footnote 30 The fact that HTBB and St. Paul’s is located in Lot 10, a high-end shopping complex owned by the YTL Corporation – one of Malaysia’s most powerful conglomerates – raises profound questions about sacred space being entangled with locations where commercial power already resides. Besides English backers like Marshall, Alpha is significantly funded by the powerful Yeoh (of YTL) family, with several members sitting on the Alpha International Board, a UK-registered charity.Footnote 31 Participation in an English-branded charismatic project can offer spiritual virtue and social validation, not to mention adjacency with whiteness to strengthen one’s Anglo-Chinese credentials.
Recognize the economics at work here: patronage systems encourage comprador elites to fund imperial projects, in exchange for cultural capital and socio-spiritual legitimacy, which also links them to larger Christian capitalist networks. Colonial structures survive because coloniality is co-produced by those who benefit from it, these intermediaries between empire and native subjects. Dressed in the language of discipleship, the deeper logic of control and global brand coherence is an epistemic colonization, designed to remake locals in the image of a particular theological empire: evangelical, Anglophone, affluent.
Now, elite alignment with dominant neoliberalism can be advantageous for HMG, with churches functioning like scalable, branded branchesFootnote 32 if a particularly English model is replicated across cities like Kuala Lumpur, Nairobi, São Paulo, etc., using local capital to promote Anglophilic culture. Nothing wrong with that. The difficulty is in recruiting this serpentine group to play ball with us. They hew solely to their own agenda, that is, a theocratic takeover of society.
Prepare for the risks of backlash if ever – perhaps more accurately whenever – our Commonwealth associates wake up to these incursions and impositions. Already, trade partners are skittishly reorganizing dependencies thanks to the Trump tariffs eroding trust within the (actual, not rhetorical) Global South. Domestically, one must consider the negative effects on social cohesion; by essentializing Judeo-Christian faith as the definitive benchmark for societal participation, we risk relegating minority communities to a barely tolerated periphery. This, in turn, provides extremists with fodder for stirring up communal divisions and disrupting the local economy. Now, conversion is never only about belief; it is reconstitution of the world.Footnote 33 While Alpha often presents itself as a ‘decentralized’ movement led by local people, it is simply the old church of empire masquerading in pseudo-ethnic clothing alongside enlisted collaborators. Alpha publicity boasts courses translated into over a hundred languages, running in 175 countries.Footnote 34 Mottos of ‘planting hope’ worldwide dovetail with a sovereigntist, trans-Atlantic echo-chamber. Jordan Peterson’s pro-Western (Northern), green-scepticFootnote 35 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which he co-founded with Marshall and Tory peer Philippa Stroud, illustrate how this nexus of triumphalist Christendom amplifies revivalist myth-making. US conservatives greeted the latest London gathering as ‘the beginning of a worldwide cultural earthquake’, ‘the reawakening of Judeo-Christian values’, and a Strange summons from the British side hailed ARC’s recovery of ‘Judeo-Christian cultural heritage’.Footnote 36 All speak from within wealthy, Western, authoritarian forms of conservative evangelicalism, embodying the public schoolboy, Iwerne camp type of high-flyer, disciplined to rule society.Footnote 37
For all its soft lighting and faux-open questions, this ecclesially-garbed movement is a narcissistic Alpha male that choreographs conformity whilst utterly convinced of its own benevolence. Conservative evangelicals have a history of escalation, especially whenever lacking like-minded allies in authority, showing themselves ever-willing to mobilize around a handful of interrelated strategies in order to seize power: stirring moral histrionics,Footnote 38 apocalyptic invocations,Footnote 39 fear-mongering the collapse of society and fomenting the usual grievance politics of persecution.Footnote 40
The Singapore Spin: Co-opting Global South Labels
Once a transnational group like this establishes footholds, their footfall dramatically increases and allegiances are no longer to Crown or country, but a more mythic metanarrative of ‘kingdom’, that is, the spiritualized version of empire. That they are building an empire of their own can be seen in how the Province of South-East Asia (of which Singapore is metropolitan) declared itself in impaired communion with The Episcopal Church in the United States and Anglican Church in Canada,Footnote 41 formally recognizing the breakaway ACNA. Such declarations function as moral sanctions – tools for disciplining provinces judged theologically errant.
HTBB feathered Malaysia’s cap in gaining prominence amongst evangelicals, but is still eclipsed by its neighbour across the causeway, the latter always keen to outdo the country it was once ejected from. Since 2023, the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) secretariat has been headquartered in Singapore, with Archbishop Titus Chung serving as General Secretary. GSFA’s ‘Economic Empowerment Track’ promises to channel resources from Singapore to allied provinces, an initiative that consolidates the city-diocese’s leading role in the Communion. Singapore thus operates as an ecclesial entrepôt and gatekeeper, projecting power through financial pipelines, reproducing colonial patterns of patronage.
Formed in 1909 on the back of a Bishopric Endowment Fund, the Diocese of Singapore proudly holds to an unequivocally colonial-era heritage.Footnote 42 Development was closely intertwined with the East India Company, who established the Church to support government employees, subsidizing church-building on the island.Footnote 43 Four years after claiming Singapore for the EIC, Stamford Raffles chose the Esplanade, a large green expanse at the heart of the European residential population, to construct St Andrew’s Cathedral (most of it built by Indian prisoners). Today a network of 27 prosperous urban parishes in Singapore underwrites an archdeaconry that exercises jurisdiction over seven countries which are geographically larger but financially dependent. Beyond parish tithes, Diocesan budgets are buoyed by a diversified portfolio of schools, hospitals and social service corporations. Surplus capital flows outward in the form of grants, stipends and building subsidies; influence flows back in the form of doctrinal compliance and deference.
Mission deaneries receive clergy secondments and finance as they adopt Singapore’s templates. Charitable ventures remain nested inside Singapore’s corporatist model, treating inequality as a matter for welfare management. Tone-deaf to perpetuating the very sort of interventionism they purport to oppose, Singapore exhibits a typical conservative custodianship, presenting little hope for us to gain cooperation. They (predictably) obsess over women’s ordination and homosexuality, a familiar story from our shores. Anglican clergy influential in local governance are well placed to curb changes. Remember that during the Chartist demonstrations of the 1830s and 1840s, most clergy chose to preach deference, obedience and providential acceptance of one’s social lot? This is more of the same.
The Church is tightly aligned with the city-state’s technocratic, pro-market ethos. Its public communiqués routinely champion meritocracy, efficiency and nation-building – terms drawn directly from state discourse. Anglican schools feed elite universities, Anglican hospitals operate within quasi-corporate funding models and senior clergy enjoy ready access to political leaders. The result is an ecclesial apparatus that never interrogates the prevailing order. James Vitali, Director of the Conservative History Group, lauded the triumph of Singapore’s economic success, noting favourably that intercessions during his Cathedral visit petitioned God to keep ‘Singapore attractive for foreign investment’ and ensure a ‘flexible’ workforce.Footnote 44
Seated in one of the world’s richest financial hubs, it directs a mission apparatus that extends Northern capital and doctrine into poorer Asian states. This artful manoeuvre trades on the moral cachet of Southern identity while dispensing with the economic and epistemic vulnerability which the term conventionally implies. The result is a starkly instructive case where ‘Northern’ arrangements of capitalist dominion can be defensively cloaked with the veneer of ‘Southern’ assertions. Singapore’s Northern credentials are clear: a high-income economy with GDP per capita top of the global league, a finance hub ranking just behind London and the self-congratulatory ‘First World’ label they have trumpeted since the 1990s. No amount of ecclesiastical costuming alters the material fact that the Southern label is appropriated to spindoctor monologues erasing the plural knowledge of the South. Singapore is a masterclass in how compliant religion proves invaluable for disseminating national narratives. In general, the government is pragmatically focused on getting on with things, but in more recent years has been infiltrated by maverick evangelicals intent on implementing their ‘7 mountains mandate’. Dominionism is actively endorsed within mainstream Christianity by numerous charismatic clusters, including the unapologetically named ‘Gatekeepers’ (formerly a businessmen’s group!), its leaders mentored by Canon James Wong.Footnote 45
Churches in Singapore were precociously infused with American-flavoured, transnational Charismatic revival in 1972, when Bishop Chiu Ban It (prompted by Dennis Bennett’s Nine O’ Clock in the Morning book) claimed a baptism in the Spirit. Together with other Anglican leaders, they ushered in a new wave of crusading,Footnote 46 that also reinforced gendered conservative norms, keeping women out of leadership till present day. A well-known fact here is that Billy Graham bestowed the moniker ‘Antioch of Asia’ on Singapore, a recurrent trope transforming small-state anxieties into beliefs of divine exceptionalism.Footnote 47 American pastors supplied experiential theology, while local theologians reframed it as providential correctives to an overly institutional ecclesiology, rather than recognizing sectarian rupture.Footnote 48 Whenever public discourse signals a shift towards broader perspectives, the Church’s reductionism triggers catastrophizing, self-righteous campaigns, all laced with insinuations of moral decay.
Misunderstanding or Misappropriation?
Christians, more than anyone else in these so-called Global South contexts, are under the influence of the ‘captive mind’, a phenomenon lamented by one of their homegrown sociologists over 50 years ago.Footnote 49 Dominated by Western thought in an imitative and uncritical manner, they are alienated from the major issues of society whilst claiming to be defenders of the same. Singapore’s evangelicals present themselves as champions of a Global South renaissance against alleged Western theological decadence, yet their rhetoric constitutes a sophisticated veneer of doublespeak: deploying anti-Western slogans while intensifying the very colonial logics they claim to reject. It is Northern modernity that creates epistemological monocultures to erase subaltern knowledges (while appearing universal).Footnote 50 Anglicanism in Singapore embodies precisely such a monoculture of Charismatic-tinged, evangelical flavour through the local clergy, who gainedFootnote 51 episcopal control in 1966 and have since turned the Church into a sectarian enclave of moral certitude. Chiu, as the first local bishop ushered in the Charismatic surge; and the vacuum our British churchmen left behind allowed for the seeds of aggressively-marketed American dominionism to take root, disguised in revivalist garb. Singapore was an early leader in the Anglican Realignment movement,Footnote 52 with its then-bishop Moses Tay (together with Rwandan Bishop Kolini) consecrating American bishops in St Andrew’s Cathedral without the consent of the US Episcopal Church. These rogue clergy then reclaimed the name ‘Anglican’ and founded AMiA, a rival faction of socially conservative charismatic evangelicals back in the US.Footnote 53
The anti-activist activism of conservative Christians
The hegemonic instincts of this faction sometimes puncture the equilibrium in Singapore’s depoliticized religious sphere. The ‘AWARE Saga’, an evangelical coup of Singapore’s preeminent women’s-rights NGO illustrates how divisive dynamics can erupt in civil society as the Church elects to police moral boundaries. The arguments deployed very much replicate 19th-century tropes: Christianizing the civic sphere and casting private sexualities as threats to public order. In 1991, Church of Our Saviour (colloquially known as ‘COOS’) imported the Choices programme from an American ex-gay movement called Exodus International (whose leaders later admitted never having seen a successful conversion!). In 2009, six COOS members orchestrated the hostile ‘stealth’ takeover of AWARE, which had a thirty-year history of advocating for gender equality and education. The intervention was deemed crucial to curtail comprehensive sex education being offered as a school programme, with AWARE accused of a so-called ‘pro-gay agenda’ for having mentioned homosexuality.Footnote 54 Canon Derek Hong, a signs-and-wonders seeking priestFootnote 55 who had been sent to COOS by Bishop Chiu, had called on church members to support the takeover effort, with well-reported remarks declaring: ‘God has drawn a line, and we must not let our nation cross it’.Footnote 56 A sociological audit shows how the coup weaponized moral panic to colonize secular civic space,Footnote 57 strategies mirroring US culture-war playbooks. Following public outcry, the National Council of Churches issued a damage control statement, distancing official church bodies from these dreadful optics.
Similarly, several independent megachurches were birthed from the Anglican charismatic movement in Singapore. Cornerstone Community Church, whose website trumpets a mandate to ‘plant 200 churches in 20 nations’, signalled its reverse-colonization intent by purchasing the defunct Bible College of Wales in 2012.Footnote 58 The irony of ‘post-colonial’ buyer reproducing civilizing-logic is hard to miss, with the college now used to export Pentecostal monoculture, allied with US networks notorious for anti-Muslim rhetoric.Footnote 59 Also established by an ex-Anglican close to Bishop Chiu is the megachurch City Harvest, which proclaimed a ‘Cultural Mandate’ hyped-up believers to ‘take Asia by storm’.Footnote 60 Its reach into entertainment, property and finance stylizes ministry as capitalist venture; but in 2015 six senior leaders were convicted of diverting S$24 million to bankroll the popstar career of the founding pastor’s wife.Footnote 61
Unravelling the palimpsest shows recoil at least as belligerent as the English establishment it rebukes. Singaporean bishops have been active in GFSA,Footnote 62 performing gatekeeping (marketed as postcolonial realignment) under the Global South banner. One might think hijacking the South’s language whilst enforcing standardized normativity is talking out of both sides of one’s mouth but is simply characteristic of leadership here. The latest outcry has been an error-laden denouncement of the new ABC-elect, lambasting her supposed support of gays (homophobia does appear to be their main theme).Footnote 63 The point put across was their unwillingness ‘to recognise her as the “first amongst equals”, both in terms of leadership and influence within the Global Anglican Communion’. Note how the official statement from the Province, headed by Singapore’s bishop, weaponises spiritual verbiage by turning contested interpretative questions into absolutes. Moral outrage is never without motive; those who challenge Canterbury’s primacy have few qualms about pressing theological language into the service of their agenda.
Splinter from the Anglican Communion is virtually unavoidable at this point and is simply a case of the patricidal heirs deposing Canterbury to inaugurate a sterner moral code. One might wryly concede that theirs is indeed a ‘Scripturally inspired’ movement, but after Israel’s most ruinous sons. Rehoboam may yet be patron saint of those shouting ‘biblical’ the loudest: they inherit the kingdom, double the yoke and discard the wisdom of elders, hastening division. The Singapore Diocese – prescriptive, exclusionary, intolerant of dissent – is unafraid to wield its hefty purse-strings in order to promote universalizing ethic as non-negotiable for all Anglicans under its wing.
Divine Dividends Down Under
The Sydney Diocese operates with similar ambitions, albeit within a Reformed doctrinalism. The Diocese’s self-presentation as a theological vanguard masks considerable aspirations to financial power and ecclesial influence,Footnote 64 its methods resembling those of a capitalist enterprise – prioritizing strategic planning and standardized outcomes. Like Singapore, Sydney’s influence often extends through economic patronage and educational interventions, with narrowly construed orthodoxy to de-legitimize alternative expressions. Using its endowments, the Diocese of Sydney funds theological education and global mission networks, particularly those aligned with GAFCON, the fractious ‘global’ rebellion it initiated against Lambeth Palace.Footnote 65 Although GAFCON presents itself as an alliance of the Global South, its origins lie in Sydney’s conservative evangelical networks.
Established in the 19th century during Australia’s colonial era, Sydney has long been embedded in a legacy of power and wealth. In early years, it benefited from substantial land grants and endowments, functioning as a pillar of society and providing religious justification for colonial order. Anglican leaders helped cement English cultural and religious norms in the new colony. Over time, the Diocese developed a distinct identity as a staunchly conservative stronghold within Australian Anglicanism.
Its typical pattern of misogyny and homophobia put Sydney at odds with other dioceses. In the 20th century, Sydney’s evangelical faction organized a formal lobby (the Anglican Church League) specifically to hinder Anglo-Catholic clergy, entrench literalist Biblical teaching and oppose ‘high church’ rituals. This organizing precedent resurfaced in the 1990s, when Sydney-backed legal challenges contested the Diocese of Melbourne’s move to ordain women, highlighting its mania for asserting control beyond its borders, a foreshadowing of later overreaches. Moore Theological College intently produced a surplus of clergy to spread its neo-Calvinist, low-church, hyper-biblicism. From a beneficiary of British colonial Christianity, Sydney’s arc shifted to becoming a centre of power, wielding considerable wealth in service of its agenda.
Evangelicals at war: Leveraging Markets to Buy Influence
As the millennium approached, Sydney transformed its wealth into mission capital, deliberately adopting a business-style expansion model. Church leaders secured approximately A$150 million in bank loans to increase their stock market exposure – a level of financial risk unprecedented among Australian dioceses. Analysts observed this as comparable to a commercial firm’s leveraged growth strategy.Footnote 66 Upon becoming Archbishop in 2001, Peter Jensen unveiled an audacious ‘Mission’ to reach 10% of Sydney’s population with the gospel within a decade. Achieving this goal, however, was not purely a spiritual endeavour – it was explicitly tied to raising and deploying large sums of money. Sydney treated its historic endowment as a war chest for evangelism,Footnote 67 effectively put to work on the stock market. Diocesan investment managers pursued an aggressive strategy, embracing high-risk tactics like leveraging loans to invest heavily in equities. In the mid-2000s, Sydney undertook substantial borrowing to multiply its equity exposure.Footnote 68 Church leaders described this period as a time of remarkably rapid expansion. Initially, the strategy paid off handsomely: returns from investments poured tens of millions into diocesan coffers each year.
Buoyed by booming markets, Sydney’s leaders interpreted this prosperity as a sign of God’s favour. Money was poured into ideological campaigns and millions flowed out to allied churches abroad to combat liberal trends. Critics accused the Diocese of using its capital to ‘spread the Word, interfere in other dioceses, and pursue homosexuals in Africa’.Footnote 69 However, the diocese’s flirtation with high finance proved to be its Achilles heel. The 2008–2009 financial crash brought devastating losses (estimated at more than A$100 million) to the highly leveraged portfolio, diminishing decades of wealth thanks to the absence of internal reviews or accountability processes. By late 2008, the value of the diocesan endowment had plummeted, breaching bank loan covenants and forcing a fire-sale of assets.
Critics were quick to highlight the hypocrisy in this episode. For years, Sydney’s Synod had praised its financial stewards as faithful servants doing God’s work. When the bubble burst, what manifested clearly was that the Church had behaved like a greedy investor, borrowing to invest on the share market. One clergyman described a prevailing ‘culture of fear’ within the Diocese and suggested leaders ‘find it difficult to deal with people with different points of view’.Footnote 70 In secular organizations, such debacles might prompt resignations. Instead, Jensen’s full-blown denialism absolved the Diocese of responsibility as he addressed the Synod in 2009, blaming God’s ‘secret will’ instead of owning up to the predictable result of risky behaviour. The Synod passed a motion continuing to thank God as ‘no man’s debtor’,Footnote 71 shielding decision-makers under a rhetoric of divine providence and underscoring the double standard at play: a Diocese fiercely moralistic about private lives but strikingly permissive towards its own embrace of Mammon.
Market-driven mentality diverted resources from charitable work to fund evangelistic ventures, where Sydney’s leadership effectively ‘ransack[ed] the coffers of Anglican social welfare organisations to fund the rapid expansion of…missionary resources.’ Footnote 72 Because of these gambles,Footnote 73 the church’s welfare arm (Anglicare) reportedly came under financial strain as money was siphoned to support church plants and recruit hundreds of staff for outreach programmes. Sydney’s response to child sexual abuse claims also involved decentralizing its governance structures, allowing it to avoid direct legal liability by shifting responsibility into the taxpayer-funded care arm.Footnote 74 Advocacy groups have compared Sydney’s eagerness to throw money at political campaigns (e.g., donating AU$1 million to oppose same-sex marriage)Footnote 75 with reluctance to assume accountability for institutional abuses. Archbishop Davies’ defence of these expenditures as a matter of ‘social justice’ expose the irrationality behind such fevered dogma.Footnote 76
Perhaps the most far-reaching aspect is its aggressive international involvement in Anglican affairs, especially across the Global South. Sydney’s leaders have not confined themselves to their own jurisdiction and has become a powerbroker in the worldwide Anglican Communion, leveraging wealth and ideology to shape the direction of churches in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Such deliberate fragmentation accelerate divisions already apparent through doctrinal disagreements, undermining the ABC’s role and weakening the diplomatic leverage traditionally held by the C of E as a cultural asset.
A turning point came in the late-1990s. Leading up to the 1998 Lambeth Conference, Sydney’s leaders joined forces with conservative Americans, drawing African and Asian conservatives into a coalition aimed at defeating progressive proposals. The success of this effort was dramatic: a bloc of so-called ‘Global South’ bishops, encouraged by Western conservatives, pushed through Resolution 1.10 which declared homosexual practice ‘incompatible with Scripture’. Hailed as a major victory for the conservative camp where African bishops served as the public champions of the traditionalist stance, the money powering the campaign came largely from the US and Australia. Behind the scenes it was apparent the initiative was not from the grassroots but a new form of neocolonial manipulation wherein Sydney stage-managed a revolt of the ‘colonies’.
Buoyed by the Lambeth outcome, Jensen became a leading architect and founding General Secretary of GAFCON, with Sydney housing the original secretariat. Moore College’s doctrine was exported to multiple countries to train clergy, recruiting and training ultra-conservative ministers. In this way, Sydney acted as HQ and hub, disseminating ideology in a manner not unlike Alpha and the old missionary societies.
Diocese money comes with an unabated agenda, engineering parallel structures that swear fealty to its doctrine. In some cases, Sydney has been accused of outright infringement on other provinces: offering affiliation to breakaway congregations outside its diocese and endorsing the planting of new churches in other regions. Missionaries and churches have appeared in dioceses across Australia (and even in other countries) without the local bishop’s blessing, mirroring the actions of rogue Anglicans in the United States, where dissident parishes were ‘reassigned’ to conservatives overseas.
By manipulating the evolution to ensure their ideology prevails, GAFCON’s official leadership is dominated by African and Asian bishops even as its intellectual and financial impetus traces back to Western sources, re-colonizing the Global South in their image. Using media rhetoric and capitalist money rather than gunboats, they shape the agenda of local communities.
In April 2023, at a GAFCON/‘Global South’ conference in Kigali, the gathered bishops issued a declaration that they ‘no longer recognise the Archbishop of Canterbury’ as leader of the global Communion.Footnote 77 In creating a rival to Canterbury and claiming to speak for 85% of the world’s Anglicans, their severance of ties dramatically schisms the Church of England whilst Rome looks on with wryly.
The unprecedented wresting of power (partly orchestrated by figures like Bishop Stead of South Sydney, who chaired the statement committee)Footnote 78 advances Sydney’s quest to supplant Canterbury for spiritual headship, being the true power behind the throne of GAFCON. Demanding obeisance from others, this hypocritical prison colony, ever eager to castigate others for progress, innovate when it suits them, even pushing lay presidency at communion against Anglican canon law and tradition, arguing a special case for itself.
Defiant of Canterbury, these conservative evangelicals deal deftly in the currencies of power – money, media and the malleable marginalized, with such calculated expediency enabling them to tear away at the fabric of Anglican unity. The C of E is now seen in large swathes of the Anglican world as a compromised, declining institution that has ‘strayed’ from biblical faith.Footnote 79 British Anglican leaders are depicted as capitulating to secular culture, figureheaded by clueless ‘Global South’ bishops and puppeteered by the least Anglican of Anglican Dioceses.
The future of the C of E and Anglicanism
Whilst some liberals prove most adept at performative talk about commitments without doing anything (an asset at keeping the status quo unchanged), their authoritarian GAFCON counterparts salivate desperately at the possibility of usurping power as fissures widen in the Anglican Communion. From its inception, the Global Anglican Future Conference gave assurances that it was ‘not designed to take the place of Lambeth’,Footnote 80 but its true premeditations have now been realised, as it self-righteously crows, ‘The Future is Here’, over its successful sundering of the Church.Footnote 81 In a spectacular act of ecclesiastical amnesia, GAFCON has enthroned itself the Global Anglican Communion, declaring Canterbury and the old Instruments of Communion redundant. The schismatic movement now insists that it alone embodies and uniquely guards the Communion, instructing provinces to cut financial and constitutional ties with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Lambeth system altogether. Having begun as a narrow, reactionary movement, GAFCON has completed its metamorphosis into a parallel church structure, complete with its own ABC-equivalent. The entire project is a showpiece in identity politics and theological doublespeak: from professed renewal to a long-plotted institutional coup, all masked by the hollow spiritual alibi of ‘defending tradition.’
Disobedient ultra-conservatives who insist on retaining ‘Anglicanism’ present a dangerous, humourless competitor for the soft-power emblematically entwined with the Church. It would be best if they dispensed with the label, but retaining ownership of the ‘Anglican’ brand name is invaluable. The enthusiasts at GAFCON or its cousin, GFSA do not seem likely to restyle themselves even if they successfully split the Anglican Communion with its rather disingenuous strategems. You will note the fondness evangelicals have for tacking ‘global’ onto their entities too, a testament to their propensity to declare an assumed universal appeal.
They have latterly resorted to claiming the term ‘orthodoxy’ as an appeal to historicity, but with little understanding for how those traditions or even Christianity itself has developed. One only has to look at historically orthodox evangelical arms like the SPG and SPCK, which enslaved the predecessors of these traditionalists and wonder how it is that they oppose reforms. It is quite puzzling, the process with which the religiously-minded compartmentalize and rehome their prejudices as tradition. In its moral absolutism and hostility, GAFCON revives the spirit of England’s 17th-century Puritans – those ‘hotter sort of Protestants’ who generated continuous conflict within the Church and state.Footnote 82 The same fanatical impulse that helped drive the Civil War now fractures anew the Anglican concord. Although the Jerusalem Declaration professes fidelity to ‘the teachings of the ancient Fathers’, it deftly ignores the warning of St John Chrysostom that ‘nothing so provokes God’s anger as the division of the Church,’ with his invocation that such should ‘suffer punishment no sore less than they who mangled His body.’Footnote 83
Most oddly and unlike their puritanical predecessors, the African and Asian churches in these networks, which are entirely driven by the need to protect male-only priesthood and heteronormativity,Footnote 84 wish to remain ‘Anglican’! Ask the counter-hegemonists who coined the concepts of Southern ontologies and epistemologies, and they would say it is about negotiating parity amongst a myriad existence rather than insisting on one superior modality. One might think the diversity of the Anglican Communion might do the job, albeit rather messily, but the very act of supplanting Canterbury and on the basis of a neat, narrow dogmatism – reveals the subterfuge.
If it seems strange that conservatives scrabble to retain the Anglican name whilst claiming to be a ‘Global’ church or espousing African or Asian values, remember what the associated prestige means to them. In the United States, those who broke away renamed themselves The Anglican Church in North America, whilst their liberal cousins shrugged off the label in the wake of revolution to become mere Episcopalians since 1789. They recognized, at least, that to be Anglican is to be quintessentially English in designation, identity and character. Married by historic liturgy to the enduring prestige of the Crown, the Anglican brand name remains inseparable from imagination of Britain: the ecclesiastical flag signalling our civilizational claim to rule, sustaining the narrative of English cultural pre-eminence. Provinces in Africa, Asia and Latin America that now repudiate Canterbury nevertheless enjoy the centripetal pull and prestige of possessing such a strategic asset. If they one is not proud to be English, why do they wish to be Anglican?
It is, of course, patently humiliating for our greatest cultural asset to be weaponized against us, who invented the very notion of Anglicanism. These upstarts have declared themselves opposed to the supposed revisionism coming from the English-speaking world (never mind that the entire Anglican enterprise is founded upon revisionist ecclesiology). And in mimicry of how the SPG marked their plantation slaves, their erroneous, insistent retention of the name is an irony-laden self-branding exercise, with Englishness forever marked on them.
The Anglicanism that once conveyed the moderate, civilizing influence of English authority across the world is repudiated for a strident fundamentalism, disfiguring the tradition that reflected the poise and humanity of our created Commonwealth. For some time, we had thought these agitators best ignored, but with the global rise of religious authoritarianism, the likelihood of these manoeuvres negatively impacting British interests has increased. What I fear is that having coagulated into a united front raging against queers and women in powerFootnote 85 these jockeying schismatics shall soon find a new enemy to demonize once the Church is overrun with their pernicious politics of disgust. This new Other is likely to be HMG and other ‘liberal’ democracies which have grown to allow space for dialogue, diversity, and some semblance of democracy.
With the age of imperialism behind us, the only sustainable path to Britain’s continued success now rests upon the credibility of its liberal democratic institutions – the rule of law, open markets, and individual freedoms that attract capital, talent, and innovation from the globe.Footnote 86 With enduringly embarrassing stains like Turing’s persecution to haunt us locally, we are still regularly castigated by equality activists for the spread of anti-gay laws thanks to that Penal Code our predecessors wrote for the colonies. It is untenable to divert energy into renovating the image of English culture as broad-minded, civilized, and rational, all whilst trying to hush the clamour of theocratic populists determined to undo that very image. History offers ample witness to the ease with which religious power blocs manipulate the unwitting to seize power; the C of E’s somnnolent Anglo-Catholic wing might do well to rouse themselves before the evangelical faction, already styling itself rightful arbiter of Anglican, Christian – and by extension even English – orthodoxy, determine the Church’s future direction. What’s more, the far right locals back home, caught up in the frenzies of their indignant nationalism, may well team up with Trumpsters and tyrants around the world in some ill-informed pursuit of spiritual ascendancy. The hubris they invoke helps shore up authoritarian architecture in foreign lands, undermines HMG, and presents significant risk by association (my colleague in the East Africa Division will, no doubt, send the appropriate brief).
Sir, I leave this memo here, trusting it has been helpful for highlighting some considerations for what one might have thought to be mere relics of colonial religion. We cannot fully inoculate HMG from the destabilising effects, but I recommend calibrated containment strategies and engagement with more temperate religionists to steady the dial, lest crusading ardour redraws the map faster than Whitehall can issue awkward apologies or worse, nudge our great nation toward the morass of sectarian theatre that passes for governance elsewhere.
Yours faithfully,
[REDACTED]
