The Naïve World of Dame Sarah Mullally, Archbishop of Canterbury

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org   | September 17, 2026

By any measure, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Dame Sarah Mullally, is the most naïve Christian figure in the world today — unless you count the Patriarch of Moscow, who has blessed Russia’s legions to retake Ukraine.

Her utterances on Islam and her recent pilgrimage to Israel and the West Bank reveal a depth of ignorance unmatched in contemporary Anglican history. Boko Haram and Fulani militants have been kidnapping and killing Christians, lay and clerical alike, by the hundred across Nigeria and the Sahel. The secular media would sooner ignore the slaughter and fix its gaze on allegations of genocide by Israel inside Gaza.

The Slaughter She Ignores

Nigerian Christians are being butchered by Islamist terrorists — more believers are killed there than in any other country on earth — and it is a slaughter she has ignored. Across the globe, Christians are being gunned down by Islamist militants and slowly pushed out of the Middle East. Arab states such as Saudi Arabia refuse to permit churches for the few Christians within their borders. Try being a public Christian in Iran, and you will be arrested — and may well be killed — in short order.

It is profoundly ironic that Iran is home to one of the fastest-growing churches on earth, while the Church of England is among the fastest dying. On any given Sunday the Church of England can barely muster 700,000 worshippers. In Iran, credible 2025–2026 estimates converge on a visible Christian population of 250,000 to 370,000 — atop a vast underground convert movement, put by many at well over a million, and by some at several million, meeting clandestinely in homes.

A Pilgrimage of Grievance

The archbishop’s recent visit to Israel was a public embarrassment. From June 20 to 24 she undertook what Lambeth Palace styled a “pilgrimage of prayer and solidarity,” travelling with Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, through East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israel. She became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to set foot in the Palestinian Christian town of Birzeit, where she preached on June 21, pledging to use her office to win for Palestinians “the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”

There is no record of her meeting Israel’s political leaders. She preferred the company of Palestinian Christian clergy and activists, and closed the trip with a joint pastoral letter that accused Israel of annexing the West Bank “in all but name” and catalogued “unchecked settler violence, forced displacement, systemic discrimination and expanding checkpoints” — the familiar liturgy of grievance, with scarcely a word for the Israeli dead of October 7.

Judea and Samaria: A History She Forgets

Her grasp of Jewish history is beyond naïve. Does she not know that before the West Bank was ever called the West Bank it was Judea and Samaria — the historic heartland of the Jewish people for centuries?

Mullally is happy enough to hold forth on slavery and reparations, but her command of Jewish history is as thin as that of the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, whose own visit to the region produced comments Jews found equally offensive. Returning from the West Bank and East Jerusalem in November 2025, Cottrell accused Israel of “genocidal acts,” “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing,” and lent his voice to divestment. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, condemned the language as “incendiary and morally inverted.”

Today Jews in England live in fear. Muslim gangs hold sway over streets in a number of cities, and British Jews — a people lauded only a few years ago for their learning and their contribution to national life — now look over their shoulders. Benjamin Disraeli, of Jewish birth, was Britain’s first Prime Minister of Jewish descent, a fact the modern public has all but forgotten. Nor should Arthur Balfour’s 1917 declaration favoring a Jewish national home — or Winston Churchill’s own lifelong support for Zionism — be allowed to slip from memory.

Jesus Lifted the Veil; Islam Slaps It Back On

Now she is seen entertaining a Muslim leader whose wife appears in full hijab. The visual contrast — a Christian woman in authority beside a fully veiled Muslim woman — is stark. What “harmony” can there be with a tradition that treats a woman’s face as something to be hidden and, in its harder expressions, holds women to be innately subordinate, “deficient in intellect and religion”?

Abraham treated women with real affection and loyalty, though within a patriarchal frame that granted men overwhelming authority. His bond with Sarah was one of love, partnership and pain: he heeded her counsel — “Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her” (Genesis 21:12) — and he mourned her death, securing her burial place with great care (Genesis 23).

Jesus would have none of the veil. He treated a Samaritan woman — despised by the Jews of his day — with startling respect. Jesus, as it were, lifted the veil; Islam slaps it back on. Mullally, apparently, sees no contradiction.

The Muslim leader she honored, Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, chairman of the Pakistan Ulema Council, received the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation at Lambeth Palace on September 11 — cited for decades of work in religious diplomacy, interfaith harmony, minority rights and counter-extremism. Minority rights, note well — but not a syllable about the rights of women.

Ashrafi hails from Pakistan, a land where Christians face episodic violence: mob attacks triggered by blasphemy accusations, church bombings by extremist groups (Peshawar, 2013), the forced conversion of Christian girls in some rural districts, and the daily harassment of believers in workplaces and neighborhoods.

Name the War

The journalist Peter Mullen rightly observes that the gravest peril facing the West is that our political establishments will not even admit the peril exists. Church leaders like Mullally have erected an everlasting interfaith talking-shop with moderate Muslims. It is futile, for it is not the moderates who pose the threat but the militants — and the moderates too often become the fellow-travelers and useful idiots who do as the militants bid.

There is a war going on, and the responsible thing is to name it. It is not merely the United States and Israel against Iran; it is simmering across the planet, and nowhere more fiercely than in Europe. We should say so. So should Sarah Mullally.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.