The Interview in full: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams

Charles Moore talks to Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, at Lambeth Palace

A: No. There's never been a time when I've been an unbeliever. There have been times when I have not been able to make much sense of it but I never had a period right outside the Church.

A: It was a bit more deliberate than that. We moved house when I was 11 and the church that seemed the most exciting locally was the Anglican parish church, which was a moderately Anglo-Catholic church with an exceptionally charismatic and saintly vicar. The whole family thought that it was a large and welcoming room to live in over the years.

Q: You bring to bear a Left-wing perception about social affairs, but it seems to be Christian before it is Left-wing. What do you say to a person who says I'm a Christian but I'm not Left-wing. In fact I think the Left-wing is ghastly.

A: I would think that might include one or two readers of The Daily Telegraph. I would say that Christians are always bad party members on any side.

My Left-wing commitments have come from two main impulses which have been deep anxiety and unhappiness and distaste about the individualism which has sometimes characterised the Right in the last two or three decades and something which I suppose does come from deep in the Welsh non-conformist tradition, not pacifism exactly, but a deep-rooted internationalism which makes me extemely sceptical about war as a solution to international problems.

Q: Is there a misunderstanding among Christians who are Conservative? Is their Christianity defective in respect of their political views? If they say that they do believe in a minimal state and thereby by implication, I suppose, greater individualism, or if they say they do believe in war as an unfortunate but necessary instrument of national independence and policy...

A: If those points of view are put forward with intelligence and clear reference to Christian ethics, you can argue, and short of heaven there's no clear answer to who is right.

My concern is more with those people who say that there is an absolute division between political concern and theological vision, and that's why I can argue much more happily with a Maurice Cowling than with some others, and I am very interested in conservative political theory of a classical kind.

I have an interest in Coleridge, some of the things that stem from him, and also Leo Strauss, because those are people who seem to have a real intellectual sense of what a conservative vision is which is not reactive, trivial or self interested.

Q: What do you think of the idea that essentially Left-wing ideas of the 20th century have crushed a lot of the practise of Christian life because of the transfer of responsibility from the individual and small community to the State? Is that a reasonable critique?

A: It's a very reasonable critique because I think there has been an element of the political Left which has been quite committed to the idea of the State as a kind of agent, and I think one has to be very careful about giving the State a personality in that way. If you like, it is the gap between William Morris and Karl Marx.

For William Morris socialism is about empowering the small community to determine its agenda, so that it is not at the mercy of large interests, so that those who are making significant decisions about the community have a shared stake in what happens. Marx is a bigger and more mythological figure and one of the Russian writers I researched years ago, Sergei Bulgakov, noticed the extent which Marx was secularising the mythology of the apocalypse, the last days and the reign of the saints.

There's a lot in that. One of the things that the Left have to be candid about and face is this messianic streak which can run thorough progressivism. Alistair McIntyre has some wonderful things to say on this too.

A: No. I think all good Christians should ask themselves why they are going or why they are not going, and have a Christian answer to give.

A: [Long pause] Difficult, that. It seems to me that it is not the kind of thing that the Archbishop of Canterbury should go on. It's always a tightrope. The office is not, I think, just at the mercy of the current agenda.

I have said what I have to say on that subject. As it happens I'm elsewhere but yes, at the end of the day, I have to say that something has to be done to keep this particular position from being mortgaged.

A: Yes. It's a tightrope, isn't it. There are times when you can use the position constructively for what you believe and there are times when the position needs protecting.

Q: One thing you seem to think is very wrong is that people should, because they think there is a threat, that they should use war to prevent a threat. But how realistic is that? Is it always the case that the Christian must strike the second blow, or if you see that I'm pointing a gun at your child, and you believe it to be loaded, you don't need to wait for me to fire before you act rightly, you can dash it from my hand or indeed shoot me.

A: It's not about whether the Christian should be passive or reactive in these circumstances, but about what reaction least worsens the situation. In such a circumstance, let's say, an unsuccesful attempt to shoot the gunholder could make things a great deal worse. Hitting him in the calf of the leg might not actually solve things much.

Q: That won't be the problem this time because if America wants to get rid of Saddam Hussein it will, won't it?

A: If America wants to get rid of Saddam Hussein it will and it can. I go back to something I quoted recently from a lecture of Douglas Hurd's, that the war can be won in six days and lost in six months, and what the middle to long-term strategy is has to come in here. In a sense all that is pragmatic, not purely moral, but I'm enough of an old fashioned moralist to think that pragmatism does come in. The virtue of prudence, as an earlier generation would have said, must come in.

Q: Why doesn't Mr Blair agree with you? He is a Christian, he is a member of the moderate Left, he is a man with a conscience.

A: He has a very strong commitment, which I respect, to a moral vision of international affairs, a very strong belief that it is possible to intervene successfully.

I think he believes that it was right to do so in Kosovo. I think he sees it slightly in those terms. I am not buying the idea that he is in thrall to Bush or that there is some kind of sinister agenda about oil markets and everything. That's glib. I think he is perfectly serious and I respect his reasons.

But at the end of the day, my two greatest anxieties, if you boil it down, would be the long-term question of prudence in the region, including what I have mentioned on one or two occasions, the needs and the problems of Christians in the region, and other minorities. And the other is the precedents set by preemptive military action.

Q: Mr Bush is someone who prays a lot. Indeed his life was changed by Christianity by his own account. What do you make of him and his approach?

Again I think there are two things about Bush which I respect and take perfectly seriously. One is that he was shaken to his depths by September 11, and he is determined that it should never happen again. The other is a serious sense, however much one can ask questions, that there is a role for the US and nobody else to mop certain things up.

That is not a silly or a trivial thing to believe. I don't think that anything is gained by personalising this and saying they are stupid warmongers or anything.

A: I think I'm frightened of any one state taking on the role of global policeman.

Q: You praised the people of Uganda for their constant invocation of God. We have in our midst people who take that very seriously, Muslims. Yet most of the violence in the world seems to relate to the Muslim world. Sometimes it is perpetrated by Muslims and sometimes in the name of Allah. What do you make of it and how optimistic and pessimistic do you feel about Islam? What can you say to Muslims in Britain?

A: There have been times in history when the most serious conflicts in the world have clearly been sustained by Christians. One wouldn't really want to draw too many conclusions from that or about Muslims.

I'm very conscious in this country of the eagerness of most people in Muslim communities to distance themselves from the terrorist rhetoric, I think with deep sincerity. There is a difficult question coming up in many Muslim communities, it has come up in Egypt particularly, which is how to think through a Muslim theology and morality and politics which is faithful to the Koran but which can work outside a classic theocratic model of Muslim society.

There are people thinking a lot about that and it is a very long question. And I would be sorry if that whole discussion was preempted or aborted because people rallied round in defence of an Islam they saw was threatened by others.

A very long piece, but interesting. Although Williams is a committed leftist, he appears to not be the communist loon I had thought him to be. He is especially scathing on Prince Charles' stupid idea to change his title from "Defender of THE Faith" to "Defender of Faith", which would be unconstitutional in any event.

Too many people have seen this new +Cantuar as almost a cartoon character. He is, for anyone who takes the time to read what he has actually said, a man of very great intellectual and spiritual depth. While I disagree with him a good deal of the time, I'm glad he's asking the questions. We need to be forced to think and to not walk in lockstep with an ideology. BTW...this will score points with many Freepers, +Williams is strongly Pro Life.

2 posted on 02/12/2003 5:21:12 AM PST by nofriendofbills (Quando omni flunkus moritati)

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