The Rev Matthew Firth has previously spoken of a “conveyor belt” of baptisms of asylum seekers
Some asylum seekers see baptisms “as a ticket to something” and most baptism requests were when they were appealing an asylum claim, a vicar has told MPs.
Rev Matthew Firth told the Home Affairs select committee he was brought groups of asylum seekers looking to convert.
MPs are hearing evidence after it was claimed Clapham attacker Abdul Shokoor Ezedi got asylum on the grounds of his conversion to Christianity.
The Bishop of Chelmsford told MPs she queried Rev Firth’s claims.
“The figures don’t quite add up to me,” the Right Reverend Guli Francis-Dehqani said.
She added: “I have spoken to clergy who have turned people down [for baptism] because they did not feel they met the criteria.”
Rev Firth, who was a priest at St Cuthbert’s church in Darlington, left the Church of England in 2020, and is now a vicar for the Free Church of England.
He previously wrote in the Telegraph that there was a “conveyor belt” system of baptisms of asylum seekers hoping to obtain leave to remain in the UK on religious grounds.
He told MPs that when he came to St Cuthbert’s in 2018 he found there was a “surprising number” of baptisms going forward for asylum seekers.
He honoured the ones that were already in process but then “started to look into it a bit further”.
He said: “After those baptisms, week-in, week-out, significant groups of mainly Iranian and Syrian young male asylum seekers were being brought to me in sizeable cohorts.”
Rev Firth told MPs that cohorts of “six or seven” people were brought to him “every two or three weeks”.
Asked who brought the asylum seekers to him, Rev Firth said: “There was a particular individual who I think had received right to remain in the UK through the asylum application system.
“But I think this particular individual didn’t want baptism but was bringing lots of people who this individual said need to be baptised.”
The Diocese of Durham has strongly rejected Rev Firth’s claims.
It says there had been 15 baptisms in the area of potential asylum seekers since 2014, seven of which were performed by Rev Firth.
Asked about these figures by the committee, Rev Firth said that he did not have access to the parish registers, so was not familiar with those figures.
He told committee members that a lot of people who came to him for baptisms “had already failed in their asylum claim”.
He said: “I spotted that dynamic going on and pressed pause in a reasonable way.”
Asked by MP Tim Loughton what happened when he pressed pause, he said they “melted away”, saying: “People would, fairly quickly, stop coming to that morning service… they weren’t coming along to church after that.”
He later added: “I think some of them are in very difficult situations and they are seeing baptism as a ticket to something whether that it’s true or not.”
The cleric told the committee there are some worship centres positioning themselves to be centres of legal help and support and advice for people who have had their applications refused.
There is bit of a grey area developing there, he suggested.
Image source, PA Media
Little is known of Abdul Shokoor Ezedi but a church witness said he believed that Ezedi had converted to Christianity
Asked if there was guidance to clergy on baptisms for asylum seekers, Rev Canon Christopher Thomas, senior priest in the Catholic Church, replied: “No, there is not.”
He told the committee that the process for someone seeking baptism generally took around nine months and involved a team of catechists who engaged with applicants on a weekly basis, and a welcome by the local bishop before a baptism ceremony.
The Right Rev Francis-Dehqani told MPs that the baptism process in the Church of England typically takes 10 to 12 weeks, while Rev Steve Tinning added that in the Baptist Church it is about six weeks.
The Church of England and other faith institutions have issued guidelines to the clergy on how to engage with the Home Office when it comes to providing references for asylum seekers – a process in which priests are called to participate by the Home Office whenever an asylum claim is based on conversion.
Rev Firth said he found the guidance to the clergy “quite political”.
Home Office minister Tom Pursglove told MPs that Christian conversion was “not a determinative factor” in the decision-making process, and that this “is weighed within the decision making, with credibility associated to that – testing of credibility amongst a range of other factors, relevant to each individual case”.
The discussion of asylum seekers converting to Christianity has arisen following the case of Ezedi, who was the suspect in a corrosive substance attack on a woman and her two girls near Clapham Common and whose body was later found by police.
He was an Afghan refugee who came to the UK in a lorry in 2016.
He was convicted of sexual assault and exposure in 2018 and had had his asylum claim rejected twice before he successfully claimed asylum after claiming he had converted to Christianity.
Additional reporting by Sara Monetta.
