States Need to be Comfortable with Public Faith

 Delivering the Chatham Lecture in Oxford, Dr Williams warned that the desire for a 'neutral' public space as far as faith was concerned has produced a tendency towards secular hostility to public displays of religious conviction.

"Increasingly what we see, in the actual policies of some states and in the rhetoric of the political classes in other states, is a presumption that the rational secular state is menaced by the public or communal expression of religious loyalty. It is not a matter of one sacred order (empire or nation state or religio-political unit) facing a rival, but of a sense that the public space of society is necessarily secular – that is, necessarily a place in which no local or sectional symbolic activity is permissible."

Setting the argument both in the historical context of religious conflicts and also the current debate about Islam, Dr Williams cautions against accepting the notion that religion has a negative effect on the life of the state:

"In the textbook version of modernity, the Wars of Religion in the early modern age produce a kind of disgust with the claims of public faith, religious commitment that is active in the arena of public life...but the story is not after all so simple. ... it would be much more accurate to say that the Wars of Religion arose from the use of religious controversy by political agents to justify military adventures aimed at national consolidation or expansion..."

Hostility comes from fear, he argues, and the state needs to accept that religious belief is neither a rival loyalty nor simply a matter of personal conviction. In dealing with the religious element, the state inevitably becomes involved in the rights of whole communities who have their  own part to play in decision-making. Religion's value to the state comes in bringing its perspectives to that process.

"... the motivation for pursuing a critical debate arises from loyalties that are bound up with narratives of God's commitment to the believing community. It is thus equipped to survive particular defeats within the system; it insists that majority votes do not specify what is true, even if they determine what is, descriptively, at any moment lawful. And this is a significant critical element in any society, which, if it is not to be at the mercy of pure legal positivism, needs some vantage point from which non-pragmatic moral questions can at least be raised."

Faith communities, he argues, have to construct 'alternative possibilities' within the body politic:

"...the Church as a political agent has to be a community capable of telling its own story and its own stories, visible as a social body and thus making claims upon human loyalty. While not a simple rival to the secular state, it will inevitably raise questions about how the secular state thinks of loyalty and indeed of social unity or cohesion."
Dr Williams concludes:

"We do not have to be bound by the mythology of purely private conviction and public neutrality and... the future of religious communities in modern society should show us some ways forward that do not deliver us either into theocracy or into an entirely naked public space."