By most accounts, Rowan Williams, a donnish, somewhat otherworldly man, only reluctantly agreed to become the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. It is not hard to see why.He leads a Church of England that is chaotic, divided and shrinking.
His attempt to forge a compromise between liberals and traditionalists over the ordination of women bishops at this week’s General Synod in York was swept aside, in an atmosphere already poisoned by a press leak that a gay clergyman might become the Bishop of Southwark.
After years of bitter debate and threatened schism in the Anglican communion, the church has taken a decisive step towards women bishops, with a final Synod vote due in 2012.
Dr Williams’ dogged attempt to secure an Anglican roof over Anglo-Catholics and conservative evangelicals seems to have failed, while alienating progressive Anglicans, who accuse him of sacrificing them on the altar of an impossible unity between African bigots and grandstanding American liberals.
Since his enthronement in 2003, the Archbishop has often seemed a holy man fallen among factions, demanding of him the skills of a power politician rather than a pastor.
Dr Williams has to manage an ostensibly global brand that evokes antagonistic feelings between, say, American Episcopalians happy to welcome gay bishops and African clerics who abominate them. With so many of the church’s 77m faithful now to be found in the developing world, this is a problem.
Addressing the General Synod in February, he vented his frustration with both sides, castigating “the zero sum, self-congratulating mode that some seem to be content with”. Yet his crafted compromises, in defiance of his own liberal instincts, have been stretched to snapping point. The primate of England has moral authority.
But he is no Pope.
The Vatican would never use the qualified language Dr Williams deployed in February in a desperate attempt to head off a split.
“It may be that the covenant creates a situation in which there are different levels of relationship between those claiming the name of Anglican. I don’t at all want or relish this, but suspect that, without a major change of heart all round, it may be an unavoidable aspect of limiting the damage we are already doing to ourselves.”
But Christianity, even in the relatively malleable form of Anglicanism, is ultimately about faith and belief, not agreeing to disagree.
Part of the Archbishop’s problem is having the Vatican’s tanks parked on his Canterbury lawn, offering the high church an escape corridor to Rome. Indeed, some reports say Anglo-Catholic clergy – always something of a church-within-a-church, with deep roots the English Reformation never quite reached – were meeting Catholic bishops even as the General Synod voted.
That would not be the first time the Vatican has wrongfooted Dr Williams. When Pope Benedict issued an all-but-unilateral Apostolic Constitution to bring high church Anglicans into full communion with Rome last October, the Archbishop was given next to no warning.
“I was informed of the planned announcement at a very late stage,” he apologetically told the Anglican faithful.
That episode was widely portrayed as a fiasco for a gaffe-prone prelate of diminishing authority.
That is unfair.
Dr Williams is one of the most thoughtful men in British public life, a public intellectual whose thinking is highly nuanced yet seems to attract bombardment with bumper-sticker slogans.
In a richly reflective lecture on Islam in English law two years ago, he asked whether small, culturally and religiously intimate matters of mainly family law might not be delegated to Muslim religious courts.
“What a Burkha,” the Sun newspaper boomed in the turbo-frothed furore that followed.
Another gift for the tabloids came when he wrote that Marx was (partly) right about capitalism.
Amid the clotted argument were sentences of striking clarity – “the biggest challenge in the present crisis is whether we can recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality” – and a gentle wit in challenging atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to tear down the “idolatry” of the market rather than banging on with their variety of God-bothering.
Born into a Welsh-speaking family in the small town of Ystradgynlais 60 years ago, Rowan Williams is a formidable linguist and theologian, a biographer of Dostoevsky, a published poet, a bridge-builder who is no less prone to say what he thinks.
He can be bitingly acerbic.
“Tony Blair is very strong on God, but very weak on irony” he once observed.
With his snowy beard and eyebrows that seem to be making a rhetorical point, he has a vivid sense of the public’s perception of churchmen, telling the FT last November: “People think vicars are silly, ineffectual figures who bumble around the edges of situation comedies.”
Yet, what most seems to preoccupy the Archbishop is the absence of a spiritual dimension to public life.
“How does the state properly expose itself to argument about its collective moral status?” he asked in a 2007 lecture. Paradoxically, for an established church, the state doesn’t really do religion.
In an era of celebrity-worship, religious questions tend to be aired only if someone such as Prince Charles asks them.
Religiosity rather than religion was the undercurrent of the great swell of public grief that greeted Princess Diana’s death.
Religious debate is as likely to be about the sale of church property as the existence of God. When Dr Williams looks, by contrast, at Islam, probably he sees first the ease with which its message reaches the public square.
The bigger idea embedded in the dense argument of his “Sharia UK” lecture was his belief and dismay that religion had been driven out of public life into the private realm of individual choice.
That is hard for a church under state patronage, harder still, it seems, for a man who grew up in the disestablished Welsh church.
Some of his colleagues were appalled when he raised the issue of disestablishment 18 months ago.
This would give in “to a widespread and ignorant view that the Christian faith has nothing to contribute to public life”, fulminated Michael Scott-Joynt, Bishop of Winchester.
Yet, might it be that separating church and state is a route back to the public square?
SIC: FT