Rowan's Rule on Newsnight

I was not that surprised by the interview of Dr Rowan Williams, former Archbishop, on BBC2 Newsnight a few nights ago because it seemed so hallowed and predictable. Our  self-confessed 'Guardian reading' grand prelate spoke in quiet tones and was barely given the sort of roasting that most get on that show. They were literally whispering at one point as if sitting in church. Made me chuckle. Has the Beeb has decided to go to the ivory towers of Cambridge to consult the Delphic Oracle.

Don't get me wrong. I love +Rowan. He's deeply intellectual and probably the brightest ABC we've had since Saint Anselm sat on Augustine's chair. His theological works on the human person in relation to Christ is stunning and should rightly be seen as part of the modern deposit of faith. During his time of office he was second only to Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, indeed - they were personal friends and apparently the Holy Father would consult him as "Myr deer Rowan.." He is in many ways a national treasure, and of course there are then those eyebrows. Wow!

But, and this is where my hagiography ceases - there is his positioning on things. I am reminded of the Pope Pius IX comment on the 19th century high churchman Edward Pusey, "He is like a village bellringer. He tolls the bell to call the faithful to church but does not go in himself." By this I mean that +Rowan speaks for the sort of generous orthodoxy that C S Lewis argued for but feels it would be a bit full-on to inhabit it. We saw this during his tenure. He disciplined the American Church for ordaining Gene Robinson but did so because the Yanks had broken the club rules of the Anglican Communion rather than any sense of them overstepping (falling off the cliff!) of Biblical morality. You did not have to work as an eves-dropper for GCHQ to know that +Rowan sympathises lay with a liberal version of catholicism but his job required him to express the sentiments of the vast majority of Anglicans worldwide.

And, so the same patter comes out in his views on Brexit. Here my issue with him and many other prelates is that they are not talking up the kingdom of God. They are doing exactly what the demon  Screwtape urged his apprentice nephew Wormwood to do to the new neophyte Christian.  That is, get their faith so wrapped up in worldly affairs that it chocked any sense of the transcendent world above and beyond.

Be sure the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration, and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is “out there” in the “broken system” rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself.

There is a certain pastoral truth in what +Rowan said about short termism and sharp divides. But, here is where I think he has it wrong, there is a crucial difference between zero-sum disagreements over matters of the management of things and zero-sum disagreements over existential truths. We must have winners and losers over certain kinds of truth. This is crucial in the scientific realm as anywhere else. It would ludicrous to compromise the scientific validity over the position of the earth in the solar system to please Flat Earthers. There can be no 'mutual disagreement' or 'living with difference' there. Someone has to be wrong and someone has to be right for us to move forward to greater truths. Likewise, in terms of other forms of existential truth there has to be what Churchill called 'total war'. We cannot compromise with an ideology which argued that some are less human than others. The current problem is that Brexit is mostly about the management of things but it has some existential qualities about it too. It reveals a subterranean tectonic clash on ideas of democracy and identity. Brexit, like Scottish Independence, has got in between the bone and the marrow. It has unnerved us.

Another danger in +Rowan's progressive worldview is that it comes down to being nice about every dispute without scholastically differentiating between those disputes which really do need to be settled one way or another by total defeat of a bad idea. This puts him in contrast with the early Church Fathers who fought tooth and nail against the heresies of their time. If we took +Rowan ( and +Justin's approach) we would  living with a Christianity that argued for mutual flourishing of Arians and Gnostics against orthodoxy. It would be chaos. History shows that the Arians had the upper hand for a long time and curried favour with the political establishment. Emperor Constantine was indignant that Athanasius (along with Saint Nick) played a very hard zero-sum game.

Alisdair Macintyre in his seminal work After Virtue (1980) demonstrates what happens when we just try to be "nice" about ideas and see all our problems as essentially moralistic and management to the detriment of the transcendent. This is the kind of world that is now emerging where 'he who shouts loudest' gets the airwaves and the sympathies. Macintyre claims that postmodernists will play along with this for a while but then when the season changes, will chuck us and the process "mutual flourishing" down the Seine to perish. Here +Rowan has at times pooh-poohed those of us who have argued great caution. It is as if we have rustled the tea leaves in the old don's tutorial "Steady on old chap." When we have coughed and spluttered about no-platforming at universities or the sort of cultural Marxism that is pushing orthodox Christians out of the public life - people like +Rowan have thought that in our anxieties we were getting just a little too excited. Indeed, Lewis' infamous brutal conclusion to his Brave New World Sci Fi novel That Hideous Strength gave +Rowan the opportunity to comment that Lewis had got a little 'too excited'. Lewis broke the cardinal rule and was not being 'nice.'

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Finally, this leaves me to the role of the cleric in normal political landscapes. St Paul saw himself as all things to all men (1 Corinthians 9.19-23) but I struggle to see how many of the bishops are keeping to this. Rowan for example in the Newsnight interview that he seeks Article 50 to be revoked. There is a general understanding that as clergy we should not use our privileged position in society in exhibit political partisanship. No one will know how I vote or what I voted for in any referendum.  If I did that I would alienate half my congregation. How could they come to me for pastoral care if they knew I could be so easily and publicly biased? Yet, I see the ABC +Justin today say in the House of Lords that a no-deal Brexit would be a disaster. Well, maybe it will, maybe it will not. It could calamity or the best thing since sliced bread. What I know is that I know what I do not know. My job as a priest however is to help people find the best version of themselves. I want to accompany them into the ultimate sanctuary, that is Jesus Christ, so that they can achieve this.

Of course, there will be clerics who Twitter their political thoughts all the time baulking at this. They will say, this is not normal politics and therefore we must speak out for the oppressed and dispossessed. On the whole they are (openly) of one political persuasion. That should give us pause for thought perhaps? Brexit is high octane. Yet, we still have normal democracy. My maternal grandmother who adopted me lived in occupied Bruxelles for her teenage years. She says it was the longest years of her life. Having a curfew every night, seeing Jews being taken away, people beaten on the streets, and having the Gestapo (as they did) come put a gun to head to scare her - that is the sort of situation where the clergy need to find courage to speak out. Sadly, few did.