In the Anglican Church calendar, March 1st is the day which celebrates the patron saint of Wales: St. David of Caerfai (d. circa 589 AD), from immediately after Arthur and the initial Saxon invasions. But see:
A historical figure from the early medieval period, his life story has since been filtered by Latin traditions. In other words, because there was a centuries-long rivalry between Celtic Catholicism and Roman Catholicism, once Rome prevailed, it ascribed sainthood to clerics who conformed to the Latin traditions. If they did not, then their life stories were reinvented to posthumously create that conformity.
We may bemoan that the Roman Catholics have taken such liberties to rewrite history, but they are not alone.
Charles Spurgeon was a great Baptist preacher and theologian. He smoked cigars. When I attended seminary in Minneapolis a half-century ago, my friend, Randy Thiry, related a strange-looking wall painting of the man in a pose, as if he were putting something in his mouth, but there was nothing in his hand. Upon inquiry, he learned that it had once been a painting of Spurgeon holding his favorite cigar. This offended the piety of our more modern Baptist brethren, so the cigar was carefully painted over to remove it, leaving Spurgeon with a comical appearance.
We may laugh at such examples of censorship, but as the reader will learn from this website, more serious examples of censorship in theology, science, and politics are to be found.
My small church group is called “the Cambrian Church” to declare our heritage in the Celtic Christianity of ancient Wales, before it was Romanized and Anglicized. Old Peshers on the topic can be found here and here. Newer Peshers can be found in the Navigation Bar above.
But a more challenging change is occurring now before our very eyes: Islamification. The most popular birth name currently assigned to boys in Wales is “Mohammed.” Absorbing the implications of that fact should reveal that Wales is gone, as is England. The time will come when our Celtic heritage will be lost in an Islamic culture which glories in its triumph over the Christian West.
Muslims are winning because they believe in fecundity. They also believe in dogma.
The free-spirited West likes to hear both sides of the story. Consequently, our Christian roots in the Biblical narrative is always revisited, always challenged.
There is nothing wrong with that, but somehow, we have lost our way. The answer is not to kick out the Muslims. Many are beautiful people. The answer is to convert them.
We need to restore the family values which they hold dear, not the repressive kind which their religion teaches, but rather the kind which inspires value in the calling of motherhood. I have written on it, here and here.
The other is our doctrinal commitments to the Trinity and the deity of Christ. In many ways, Mohammedism is merely a Christian heresy which rejects the final revelation of God in Christ by interjecting an interloper: Mohammed, the son of Nestorian Christians. We must always remember that Mohammed claimed miraculous divine revelations as the foundation of his beliefs. He claimed to be a prophet. The world must learn to reject prophets.
Until then, the Cambrian Church must carry on as a symbol of a spiritual tradition, just as we might say of “the Jerusalem Church” many centuries removed from its former glory. Wales is gone, but “Welshness” need not be.
— JWS, 3/1/25
