While Robert Runcie and Rowan Williams generated and still generate headlines and ruffle politicians’ feathers, George Carey was largely overshadowed during his 11 years as head of the Anglican communion by internal church battles, notably over the ordination of women. Some even came to regard him as a wee bit dull and mealy-mouthed. If so, then he has more than made up for it since he stepped down in 2002.
In the past few months alone, he has publicly criticised both the cathedral authorities at St Paul’s over the Occupy protest camp, and the Lords Spiritual for leading the opposition to the Government’s benefit cuts in the Upper Chamber of Parliament, where Lord Carey of Clifton now sits as a life peer. “I have been mildly upset to be told to shut up by my fellow Anglican bishops.” But his usually sober face spreads into a grin as he says it. “I have felt freer to speak my mind as my own man, but I am always conscious of not wanting to get in Rowan’s way”.
This new George Carey has rather abandoned the careful diplomatic language he used as an archbishop to keep different church factions in the same pews, in favour of something more earthy and apocalyptic, reflecting his own evangelical background. “There are deep forces at work in Western society, hollowing out the values of Christianity and driving them to the margins”.
Among these forces, he has the judiciary firmly in his sights following a spate of recent rulings, which, he claims, have allowed equality to “trump” the freedom of the individual in matters of belief. “Judges,” he contends, “say that the law has no obligation to the Christian faith, but I say 'rubbish’ to that. Historically there has been a great interlocking of Christianity with our laws in this country.”
We were talking before Mr Justice Ouseley found for Clive Bone, an atheist former member of Bideford town council in Devon, who contends that the saying of prayers before its meetings is unlawful under the European Convention on Human Rights. But the case is one of many quoted in Carey’s new book, We Don’t Do God, written with his journalist son Andrew, as evidence that Britain’s Christian traditions are being destroyed in what the former Anglican leader labels a “crusade” against religious belief. In response to this “deep malaise”, the book is intended as “a call to arms” to uphold Christian values.
What has angered Lord Carey in particular is what he describes as “homosexual rights trumping religious rights”. He decided to write the book, he recalls, after Lord Justice Laws’s April 2010 ruling against Gary McFarlane, an evangelical Christian who had been dismissed as a counsellor with Relate because he refused to work with same-sex couples on the grounds that his faith did not regard them as the equal of heterosexual partners.
“I made a submission in that case,” recalls Lord Carey, “which seemed to me a sensible one, that there should be a body of lawyers established with expertise in religion who could give specialist advice in such cases, just as we have specialist lawyers in family or industrial law. But Lord Justice Laws described my suggestion as creating a theocracy. That is nonsense”.
Recently diagnosed as a diabetic, 76-year-old Lord Carey may be picking his food carefully at our breakfast meeting, but does not mince his words. “This inability to find a way to accommodate the sincerely held beliefs of someone like Gary McFarlane creates a tyranny”.
Lord Carey also quotes the Christians who refused to allow a homosexual couple to share a room in their B & B because it went against their religious beliefs. While the law sees the guests turned away as victims of discrimination, Lord Carey prefers to attach the same tag to the B&B owners. “I want to protect their freedom to take that line.”.
So would he have done the same in their shoes? “Well, as it happens, 30 years ago when I was in parish ministry in Durham, we did open our house to bed and breakfast guests. And if you open your home to the public, you have to respect homosexual couples and make no exceptions.”
I’m unclear, then, what his point is. He seems to be saying the B&B owners were wrong. “But it is not my views on homosexuality that matter,” he explains. Those who object to gay relationships on Christian grounds that are well-rooted in the theology of what remains the Established Church in this country, he insists, should not be discriminated against.
It is a viewpoint that puts him out of step with prevailing opinion, but Lord Carey is unabashed. He may be advocating accommodation, but that doesn’t stretch to playing down his own beliefs. He is dressed today, for example, in clerical collar and large silver pectoral cross – the sort of distinctive clerical garb that many priests today eschew in daily life so as to blend in. And he is unafraid, too, of initiating a public debate on questions where too many Christians, he believes, prefer to hide their lights under a bushel for fear of incurring the wrath of militant secularists such as the “ill-tempered and ill-informed” Richard Dawkins.
For all the seriousness with which he regards the erosion of Christianity in Britain, he is clearly enjoying his new outspokenness. Other aspects of his retirement, though, have been more painful. His book is dedicated to his grandson, Simon, who died last year at the age of 24 from a suspected drug overdose.
The former archbishop wells up with tears when he talks about him. “He had his whole life to live,” he says, “and he was doing so well in fighting his addiction. He had just completed a six-week programme at a Christian-run therapy centre, getting his body free of the drugs, and then he walked out.” He pauses, lost for a moment for words. “As a Christian, even if you don’t understand, you have to accept. These tragedies are happening in many families, whether you are an archbishop or not.”
Lord Carey is opposed to the call, by Sir Richard Branson, to decriminalise drugs. “For many who start using soft drugs, there is a slippery slope and in Simon’s case that slippery slope led to his death.”
He seems eager to switch the conversation back to his campaign. Might he be hastening the very marginalisation of Christianity that he wants to halt by taking up positions in opposition to Anglican colleagues? “We do, as a Church, tend to wash our dirty linen noisily and in public,” he says robustly, “and that has good and bad aspects.”
Bad, presumably, if you are Archbishop of Canterbury and attempting to hold together a divided worldwide communion of 80 million souls, but good, once you’re retired, and you’ve developed an appetite for speaking your mind fearlessly.
We Don’t Do God by George Carey (Monarch Publications) published on Feb 17, 2012