The Daily Mail (Labour MP's controversial campaign to split church from state) is picking a highbrow discussion last week and upping the ante on it. What's in it we will see.
Apart from being traditionally the longest word in the English dictionary, debates about antidisestablishmentarianism can raise a lot of heat and shed very little light. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who has a mind that can get itself around those arguments as well as long words, managed last week to convince people he was arguing for the case of removing the constitutional privileges of the Church of England and that he was arguing against that same case. He really does have a phenomenal mind, and as he ranged around the subject he caused Riazat Butt of the Guardian to write that Archbishop backs disestablishment (and the Muppets) and her colleague at the Guardian Stephen Bates to write that he didn't How Williams changed views on splitting church from state. The story emerged from a series of interviews with The New Statesman Interview: Rowan Williams.
In a long article that covers a lot of issues for which the Archbishop has been in the press this year, he is asked "if he recognises the case for disestablishment ..." His answer:
"The answer's yes." He went on: "Because I grew up in a disestablished Church; I spent ten years working in a disestablished Church; and I can see that it's by no means the end of the world if the Establishment disappears. The strength of it is that the last vestiges of state sanction disappeared, so when you took a vote at the Welsh Synod, it didn't have to be nodded through by parliament afterwards. There is a certain integrity to that."
But then he balances that with:
"At the same time, my unease about going for straight disestablishment is to do with the fact that it's a very shaky time for the public presence of faith in society. I think the motives that would now drive disestablishment from the state side would be mostly to do with . . . trying to push religion into the private sphere, and that's the point where I think I'd be bloody-minded and say, 'Well, not on that basis.'"
Nothing wrong with that! In fact its great to see someone who sees both side and then look at what will be best for the church and the nation.
In a couple of posts two weeks ago Church of England must serve all faiths says Archbishop and Britain is unfriendly for religious people I picked up on the arguments from several Faith Community leaders in a recent report that looked at the subject in the light of the wider subject of Faith in the Nation. I guess like the Archbishop I can see both views. I have traditionally been for disestablishment on the grounds of justice for all. But I am increaingly feeling that if the Church of England abandons the space it won't be all the faiths that inherit it, but none. The secularist agenda will then seek to act as guardians of that space, circus masters if you will, and insist on moderating that space. And then we will all be the losers, because they play by very different rules.
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