A worm's eye view - A letter to Rowan Williams

The Guardian Unlimited
April 1, 2006

Stop equivocating and apologise, Andrew Brown tells the Archbishop of Canterbury

Dear Rowan

You said in your interview with the Guardian last week that you were consulting about how to deal with the media. So I hope you won't mind some suggestions from me, especially as you clearly loathe talking to the media in person and prefer to travel abroad to do it. I think that your interview in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago was the first time you had talked on the record to the British press since your lecture on journalism last summer.

It's clear from the transcript of your talk with Alan Rusbridger that you can talk fluently and interestingly about the Church's successes in East Kent. On the Today programe you spoke very clearly about global warming. You're against it. You put the consensus view, that it is extremely dangerous, and being hurried along by human activities, very clearly and forcefully.

But when it comes to question of national or international leadership, you seem struck almost dumb with modesty. You doubt that anyone will listen to your words. You think that part of your job is "trying to - to find, crystallise some sort of moral vision that's communicable to the nation at large", but you distrust this, because you think it tends to make you "the comic vicar to the nation".

You object, on principle, to acting on your principles: "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."

But is the Anglican Communion the church as you believe it to be, the one whose deliberations are guided into truth over time by the Holy Spirit? It is certainly polarised and deeply divided. Different parts are making decisions that are mutually incompatible. In that situation, to refuse to do what might be divisive is to refuse to do anything at all. While you wait for your suffering inaction to be persuasive, others speak and act. They are delighted to split the church, providing they end up with most of it.

You talk in your interview as if the worst future were that churches might say to one another "We don't want your filthy money" - but this is something that has already happened. You talk as if you will have to decide what to do when the moment of schism arrives. Everyone else thinks it arrived some years ago, and that you have already picked your side, or had it picked for you by your belief in unity. Here, I think, is where you need to watch your media strategy.

The figures you use to justify your belief that a split may be inevitable are the two heroic German Christians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoeller, who left their own church rather than side with the Nazis. At a time when the official church supported Hitler, they set up their own parallel bodies at every level of the Church's hierarchy. When the war came, they were punished severely. Most of the priests in their movement were sent off to the Eastern Front; Bonhoeffer was jailed, then hanged; Niemoeller spent the war in concentration camps.

Naturally, when secular English people hear you speak of their inspiring example, we imagine you standing up - at last - to thugs like Archbishop Malango of Central Africa, a supporter of Robert Mugabe, or Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria, who has incited pogroms against Muslims, called gay men and women lower than pigs and backed a law that would jail people who even discussed equality for them. In our silly, English way, we suppose that these activities have something in common with the fascism that martyred Bonhoeffer.

Silly English liberals. I fear that what you actually mean by references to anti-Nazi martyrs is that you are on Akinola's side against the liberals, because that's where the majority is. A couple of years back, when a delegation of American conservatives came to you to ask how they could avoid being in the same church as openly gay men, you suggested they call themselves "The Confessing Network" after Bonhoeffer's organisation. There's no doubt that this is how American religious conservatives see themselves, as the persecuted victims of brutal and ungodly forces, who will one day be recognised as the faithful remnant and raptured up into all the glamorous international meetings.

Some spokesman did claim that you hadn't meant it the way it was taken by the recipients, as a reference to Bonhoeffer's struggle against Hitler, but I'm afraid that I really can't believe that. Anyone who has been to a seminary since about 1950 will have been taught about his confessing church. To use "Confessing" without reference to Germany in the Thirties is like using "natural selection" without any reference, even implicit, to Darwin.

So I think that the media strategy you need is plain. You need to explain to the rest of us, who believed you inhabited our moral universe, just why sharing a church with gay bishops is a matter of theological gravity comparable to sharing it with enthusiastic Nazis and in the end just as much incompatible with real Christianity. You need to explain just what the arguments were that persuaded you, after 30 years of standing up for the outcast, that God really is on the side of the big battalions in your church.

This is the task that used to be known as Christian apologetics. It is a little harder than denouncing global warming, but it is more urgent - so get out in front of the nation and apologise.

Sincerely Andrew

--Andrew Brown maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog.