Twitter kills thoughtful reflection, says Welby: Archbishop insists big questions cannot be answered in '140 characters'

• Most Reverend Justin Welby made comments in major Westminster speech
• He warned politicians including Cameron and Miliband of social media
• 'Instant reaction' has replaced 'reflective comment', he said

The Daily Mail (UK) | 17 June 2014

The popularity of Twitter and other social media has killed off thoughtful reflection, the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned.

‘Instant reaction’ has replaced  ‘reflective comment’ in a 21st century revolution of communications, said the Most Reverend Justin Welby.

He told an audience including David Cameron and Ed Miliband of the dangers of squeezing sophisticated arguments into a tweet. 

Warning: The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby warned MPs not to put too much faith in social media such as Twitter, where comments which once took months to take root now explode in seconds

‘The comments that even 20 years ago took months to reach the far corners of the Earth, now, as we know, take seconds,’ he said. ‘The best answer to a complex issue is not always given in 140 characters. 

‘The Church of this century must be a generous Church because of that communications revolution, because of technology, because we are face to face with everyone everywhere always, in a way we never have been in history.’

His remarks came as he addressed a meeting of 700 MPs, peers, church and charity representatives at the National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast in Westminster.

He said technology means we are ‘face to face with everyone everywhere always, in a way we never have been in history’. 

The Archbishop also used his speech in Westminster yesterday to defend church schools in the wake of the ‘Trojan Horse’ allegations of a takeover plot in Birmingham schools by hardline Muslims.

‘In this country alone we educate nearly a million children in the Church of England, another half a million through the Roman Catholic schools, and, let me say, no recent problems were in one of the church schools,’ he said. 

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‘It is the church schools that stand for tolerance, acceptance, reception, generosity, open-handedness. Education is something which the Church has done for centuries, which it held in its monasteries when the rest of the world had given up on it in western Europe, and we do it today.’ 

Christians, who are ‘generous and hospitable’, should be ‘utterly at home’ in a multi-faith world, he argued.

‘The church is not an NGO with lots of old buildings – it is the Church of God, rejoicing in the realities of cultural diversity in a way never known before,’ he said.

The Archbishop also warned that it was ‘easy’ to be cynical about politics - but he praised the government’s commitment to maintain international aid at 0.7 per cent of GDP and the introduction of the Modern Slavery Bill.

He said: ‘Those aren’t cynical vote-winners, from any politician in this room, but they arise from a spirit of generosity, which is right and proper.’