Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger interviews Bishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in a fascinating exchange.
Williams is not like our most visible religious spokesmen, for over here the fringes take over the pulpit of mass media — and media, in turn, go to these people as if they represent all our religious views — while mainstream clergy cower from the bright lights, acting for too long as if masses behind media were below them. (Though some people I know at Auburn Seminary are trying to change that with a program to bring more religious voices and viewpoints from the center into media.) In the UK, the mainstream church is the official church. So though Williams is publicity shy — this is a rare interview — he still has no choice but to act as a spokesman. He wears the cloak awkwardly, as he wades from one tempest to the next — the worldwide controversy and threat of schism over gays in Anglican clergy (neither side can decide where Williams will stand), creationism (he says here that he is against teaching it in schools), the war in Iraq — managing to disappoint both the left and the right.
What’s most interesting to me is Williams’ discussion of his role as a moral leader. He wears this cloak awkwardly as well. In fact, he argues that the church should not be, in Rusbridger’s words, “in the business of moral leadership.”
Was he really so averse to the idea that the Archbishop of Canterbury should offer moral leadership? “Leadership is, to me, a very, very murky and complicated concept,” he begins, sitting in an armchair in his Lambeth Palace office, his minder a watchful presence across the room.“I think the question I always find myself asking of myself is, ‘Will a pronouncement here or a statement there actually move things on, or is it something that makes me feel better and other people feel better, but doesn’t necessarily contribute very much?’” …
“…I think there is a bit of a myth, if you like, that Religious Leaders – ‘capital R capital L’ – are, by their nature, people who make public pronouncements on morals.” Williams parodies this position as, “Why doesn’t the archbishop condemn X, Y, Z? Because that’s what archbishops do, you know, they condemn things. They make statements, usually negative, condemnatory statements.” It’s part of what he terms being “comic vicar to the nation”.
But still, don’t most people look to archbishops for some sort of revelation or guidance on the basis that they are unusually clever or holy or reflective? “I just wonder a bit whether, you know, when an archbishop condemns something, suddenly in, I don’t know, the bedsits of north London, somebody says, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be having premarital sex’, or in the cells of al-Qaida, somebody says, ‘Goodness, terrorism’s wrong, the archbishop says so. I never thought of that.’ I’m not sure that’s how it is.” …
Now isn’t that amazing? Here it’s so easy for anyone — ministers, movie stars, politicians, trumped-up organizations — to use media to claim higher ground. I find it most oxymoronic that politicians believe they are moral leaders — politicians are the last people we think of as moral. Yet there is the Archbishop of Canterbury, of all people, shying away from moral leadership.
Williams talks more like a statesman, a lower-case democrat, than many of our statesmen as he looks for common ground. Or perhaps he sounds like a Congregationalist, talking about the community’s discernment of the truth.
“…I’ve been given a responsibility to try and care for the church as a whole, the health of the church. That health has a lot to do with the proper and free exchange between different cultural and political and theological contexts: the people are actually able to learn from each other. And it’s got a lot to do, therefore, with valuing and nurturing unity, not, as I’ve often said, not as an alternative to truth, but actually as one of the ways we absorb truth.“That means that, structurally speaking, in the church as I believe it to be, it really is wrong for an archbishop to be the leader of a party; in a polarised and deeply divided church it’s particularly important, I think, not to be someone pursuing an agenda that isn’t the agenda of the whole.” …
… “My conviction, my views, my theological reflections … they are things which I have to bring to that common process of discernment. It’s not as if I can say simply, ‘I know this is right, this is where we’ve got to go, come along, whatever the cost.’…”
It’s not as if he seeks unity above all; Anglicans are preparing to pick their sides in a possible worldwide schism over the gay bishop in their church in our country. And it’s not as if he seeks principle above all; it is not clear where he will stand, in the end, on gay clergy.
He could simply be confused or wishy-washy or scared. Or he could be the kind of moral leader we really do need — the kind who is not sure and leads his people to lead.
: LATER: I just posted an export version of this at Comment is Free.
He is a first class, modern, intelligent leader. I live in london and am not all religious but when he comes on the radio I turn it right up because you know what he says is going to be so thoughtful.
i too live in London and honestly cannot remember a comment or an opinion that made me stop and think. Too often he is an apologist for anti-western behaviour. Like so much of the CofE it’s become politically correct and its belief commitment is tissue thin. sorry.
really insightful
So now, leadership, as defined by the millennia, is suddenly about self-doubt, uncertainty, and gay marriage. This is truly pathetic. No wonder the west is powerless against every moral attack – including those from medieval fascists.
Jeff, at he risk of sounding facetious, do you display the same abhorrence of making moral choices when teaching your son the ways of the world? I’m amazed that you would fall for this.
Miliband is Britain’s first blogging Minister
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have our first UK government minister’s blog. David Miliband, Minister of Communities (although probably not strictly online communities?) and Local Government, and apparently an Arsenal season ticket holder, has launched a blog within the confines of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s website.”
http://simondickson.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/miliband-is-britains-first-blogging-minister/
He sounds like he’s more comfortable kicking a discussion of Kant at Cambridge than preaching Protestant precepts from his pulpit in Canterbury. If the head of the Anglican Church isn’t sure it’s his place to speak to and teach his flock what their faith requires of them, morally, based on the tenets and dogma handed down since the Church of England’s founding, why did he take the top job in the first place? Better off sticking to a local parish where the questions he’d face wouldn’t carry much weight when he delivered his answers.
I mean, doesn’t the title “Archbishop” presuppose the idea that, yes, you are the go-to guy when it comes to what morality means in the C of E’s grand scheme, and your mission is to spread that message to every ear willing to hear?
Gee, guys, i’m a fairly conservative Protestant pastor in central Ohio, who would make a terrible Episcopalian, but i don’t read Rowan Williams the way you’re reacting at all. The idea that a Christian leader has to press for social change towards the norms of the church is a relatively recent development that is not terribly Biblical at best.
I won’t be a follower of Williams’ communion in this country because i think these norms can and should be affirmed for church leadership, which isn’t where the weight of ECUSA (the American branch of the Anglican Communion) is leaning. But i wouldn’t have a problem with hearing these words from my own leadership, in an American context or the British one to which he is specifically speaking.
And read his theological work “Resurrection” before you write him off as a squishy liberal muddlehead. He and Tom Wright would be my top choices for the dinner of a lifetime, and i’d ask Rowan to say grace!
I by no means write him off! I do not think he’s a muddlehead. I just wrote a different version of this for comment is free and concluded: “it could be that I’m just jealous, for I don’t open newspapers or turn on TV in the U.S. and hear clergy talking like this, clergy embracing doubt over doctrine
I prefer the old rugged cross. Church is a place to preach and hear the truth.
Too often clerics prefer good pay to the good book.
But if the church will not take positions, why does it exist, particularly as a state institution?
Like its positions or not, the Catholic Church is not afraid to take moral positions and back them up with intellectual and philosophical arguments.
If it were not the church of the state, would there be a CofE now? Will, after 500 years, the Catholic Church be able to look at the schism with the Anglican church as a short-run unfortunate political event, when the CofE withers into irrelevance, afraid to make any pronounce that might offend?
Calvin, eh?
First, i didn’t hear our bloghost writing off ++Rowan (as protocol has it in print), but too many of us commenters qua lurkers.
Second, i don’t get the point of a state church, either, which is hwy i’m neither for one nor a member of one. It may yet be instructive to see where the good Cantuar leads his flock, relationship-wise: not on the same sex issue as much as in the “Established Church” subject.
If the Archbishop of Canterbury bids the monarch counsel that she is better served by a disestablished Anglican Communion, what then? Stay tuned, because that will be the real lasting legacy of this tenure in Lambeth Palace.
Thirdly, i repeat, the idea that the point of the Christian faith is to lecture society on moral behavior doesn’t hold up to reading Paul, let alone Mr. Williams’ interview. We have enough trials to bear and temptations to avoid amongst our own congregation and within our divided hearts; the stray preaching of what the Gospel might bring to a more ordered, discipled (not to say disciplined) life is evangelistic, but not our main stock in trade.
Like i said, if you don’t believe me, start at Romans and read forward ’til you hit Revelation. And read “Resurrection.” Rowan Williams is sound in many ways.
Lenten blessing to y’all,
Jeff (Gill, that is)
Oh, and may i note that, if ++Rowan supports disestablishment for the CofE, and a faction arises to resist such a move, we would once again have a use for the bar bet word “Antidisestablishmentarianism”!
[...] – BUZZMACHINE: “Uneasy lies the bishop who wears the cloth” … (buzzmachine) [...]
Those of us in or sort of in the Anglican world who have been following the Anglican story closely know that it is never a good idea to try to interpret what Rowan Williams means when he says things. He’s an academic for one thing, and he’s been known to contradict himself, sometimes rather radically, from one statement to the next.
Besides, he heads a religious tradition that is basically at war with itself and will probably split into two after ECUSA apostatizes again this June. So Dr. Williams cannot say anything particularly definite one way or the other. If he goes with his personal convictions about homosexual clergy, orthodox Anglicans, who constitute the majority of the Communion, will walk away, Anglican vigor will leave with them and my gracious lord of Canterbury will preside over a feeble western European/North American debating society. If Dr. Williams sides with the traditionalists, he loses his liberal street cred, the Anglican left walks away and he is forced to share a church with people with whom he shares little or nothing.