Holy Week: Faith & Politics Questions & Answers Session

Archbishop Answering Questions from the Pulpit

Listen to the Faith & Politics Questions & Answers Session [23Mb]

Question:

Could you suggest one thing that we as individuals could do to help build a better relationship and dialogue with the Government politic? What would that be?

Archbishop:

There's a little cluster of things that I think Christians in particular might very well like to reflect on. One is very simply praying for your MP, building a relationship with your MP, and trying to make sure that local MPs do get invited to engage with the local Christian community wherever you are. And at Election time Churches are remarkably well-placed, in my experience, to organize hustings for candidates. I think at both the last Elections, there was very good evidence for saying that where the Church had organized public hearings for candidates in public office, they had been better attended than in any other context, by a very substantial factor. That's something worth thinking about if you want to get engaged in a good mutual debate.

Do you think that sometimes it's possible for the political realm to prophesy to the Church, and other religious institutions when they fall short of their calling?

Yes, I do I think that in the history of Western Europe there have been moments when the wider society has called the Church to account for not following its own truest instincts, and I've often used the analogy of the Church itself having lit a very long fuse which trails outside the boundaries of the Church and explodes sometimes in the face of the Church itself. Society brings back to the Church its own deepest convictions and says 'isn't this what you meant?' I like to think that the history of Feminism has been a bit like that (that might take me on quite a long excursus) but I do think that it's often been the ambient society that has taken more to heart some of what the Bible has said about the rights of women, than the Church has.

Does Christian resistance to what goes against God's justice amount to rushing to God's help in his divine weakness? Doesn't this make Christians appear much more powerful than their God seemingly is?

There's a very profound theological insight in that question. And that's why I don't think, as a matter of fact, Christians ought to 'rush to God's assistance' as if God needed our help to maintain his cause or his justice. I do think though that that's rather different from the Christian claiming the liberty not to obey a law which in conscience is believed to be unjust, because that may bring the Christian into just the marginality and the vulnerability which is where God meets us in the Cross. Recently, for a variety of reasons, I re-read a play by Charles Williams -- the Anglican novelist, poet and critic of the nineteen twenties and thirties – on my predecessor Thomas Cranmer. At one point one of the figures who represents a particular form of religious extremism in the play says to Cranmer something like; 'how is God going to be safe if we stop killing?' Now that's what over the centuries, a good many Christians have taken for granted. That, I think is a chilling, appalling, almost blasphemous observation, and that's not what I mean by the Christian claiming certain rights of dissent.

Was Jesus a-political?

No, I don't think he was. Jesus was certainly in no sense a partisan in the politics of his day, but it's perfectly clear from the Gospels that what he intended to do was to establish a community, a people, an 'Israel', a community in which God was reflected (or not) in the way in which people related to one another. And that's why the Church begins with Jesus, not with St Paul, because Jesus deals with the exclusion from community that affected the sick or the unclean. His miracles of healing for example are very often to bring the excluded within. And so I don't think you could say he was a-political. He was constantly being nudged and shunted into position by those who wished him to take their side in a political conflict, but he evades those pressures. He evades them not by taking refuge in an internal world of spirituality, but by acting to re-create community in his own terms.

Do the rights of the few or the rights of the many predominate, if the use of torture is in order to prevent a terrorist attack?

I would have to say that there are some things which when we do them, so alter the moral character of our own position, that we only do them at the cost of undermining everything that we stand for. That's why I believe that even in such circumstances, torture is inadmissible. It's never been a successful way of getting reliable information to put it mildly; it's not as if you've got a cast-iron case for its efficiency. But even if you had, I would say (as I would have to say about nuclear weapons) there are some things the use of which represents an abandonment of our own moral claims. That's why I think we mustn't give in.

The human right to influence can become control: fundamentalisms, atheism, Christian, Muslim, Jewish politics and religion. Comment.

Influence can become control, yes. Which is why everybody, religious or otherwise, claiming the right to persuade (and I would underline 'persuade' rather than 'influence' which is a more nebulous and perhaps more dangerous word) needs at the same time to have a very robust doctrine of legitimate dissent. That's why I said the believer needs to be active for the sake of the conscience of the unbeliever, just as much as the other way around. I think if that is so, if the priority of ongoing disagreement is accepted, then the claim to a right to persuade is proper. What I mean by that is that if you win the argument on some controversial matter, that doesn't give you the right to stop the argument for ever, you can't close it off. Winning any argument in political terms is a short-term thing: it's worth trying when you care deeply about the issues involved, but you can't, if you win, close it off and assume you now have the right/mandate to allow no further change. While I think the Christian Church, like other bodies, needs to have some scepticism about one form of democracy applicable to absolutely everybody, everywhere, there is an element of democracy, the simple right of disagreement, which the Church does need to defend.

If politics is the science of living together with justice and the Church is involved in that, why has not more effort been made by the Church to oppose the abolition of the Blasphemy law, when blasphemy as Leslie Newbiggin said 'is the poisoning of the well-springs of social survival and justice?

A very current question ... I wasn't able to be in the Lords for the debate on the Blasphemy amendment, but I was able to say something about it a couple of weeks before in the Lords. And the problem that I think many Christians felt in conscience about this was that the Blasphemy law had been used consistently only in circumstances where social disorder was involved, not as a matter of ideological principle, for a long, long time, and that suggested it had become a 'dead letter'. The point that the Archbishop of York and myself made in writing to the Prime Minister about it was; if the provisions in the religious hatred legislation cover some of what is legitimate concern in the existing Common law of Blasphemy then we don't want to go to the stake for the existing position. That I think was why not everybody wanted to put their neck on the line for this particular bit of the law. The concern which the Blasphemy law rightly covers is a concern to protect a general register or tone within our society which is quite simply respectful of disagreement; and there are certain kinds of public utterance or publication which do not respect disagreement or difference. Now, the level at which that impinges on freedom of speech has notoriously been very hard to calculate, but there are areas of concern there, they're not adequately provided for under the existing Blasphemy law. Perhaps they're better catered for in a law about religious hatred, such as has been passed and is now developing in practice. We'll see what happens.

Why not vigorously pursue political power to effect the honouring of the faith-based values one holds, to the greatest degree practical?

Whenever there have been Christian political parties, they've tended to turn into something rather different before very long: groups that are more and more dominated by one social interest or another; groups that let go of radical Christian commitments in order to be acceptable. I'd much prefer to see Christians being 'unreliable' party members -- that is people who always have rather awkward questions about the political affiliations they're in the middle of -- than trying to have a watertight consistent, Christian political approach. The history of all that is pretty unpromising, whether it's Christian Democrats in Europe, or the alliance of certain Christian groupings with the political Right in the USA.

How do you rate the health of the American political system?

Not being an American citizen, I don't think I'd better say very much about that, except to observe a real anxiety about the way in which for high office in the US it's impossible to campaign without what, for British people, are unimaginably vast financial resources. I don't think that's good for a democracy.

Does personal morality impinge on one's attitude to politicians? Are the shadowy areas of a politician's private life relevant to their public credibility?

I don't think there's a watertight distinction here between the public and the private. I deeply deplore the way in which the private life of politicians is a matter for idle prurience and curiosity but I think that if a politician's personal life is characterized by an untrustworthiness in a wide area of relationships, I would have some questions about their trustworthiness in politics. I don't think that's an absolute or simple guide but I'm unwilling to make a complete disjunction here between the private and the public. It's one person we're talking about, and if they are in the habit of untrustworthiness in one area, I'd need to be convinced that they were trustworthy in others.

Is there a fundamental conflict between those who base politics on revelation and those who base politics on reason alone?

I haven't met all that many people who base politics on reason alone. Even if they think they do, they're very often taking for granted a good many hidden moral and even spiritual assumptions. Reason alone is often identified with managing a variety of people's self-interests and that gets you so far, it doesn't get you to the point where politics turns into something a little bit bigger than just the calculation of self-interest, when it understands something about obligation outside the immediate, when politicians act for the sake of the poor elsewhere or for the sake of the environment generations on, or whatever. I don't think that's covered just by classical accounts of self-interest, and in that sense I don't think it's just about reason; there's something about vision and moral energy in there somewhere. So I'm not sure I'd accept an absolute difference between revelation and reason in that connection.

Can politics live without faith?

I think my answer to the last question might suggest that I don't think it can, really, without faith of one sort or another, what I call moral energy and imagination.

Should politicians give direct expression to their religious convictions in framing laws for the benefit of the community?

I hope so. I hope that what makes their minds up as they vote for this or that law is shaped by who they are as people, including their convictions of faith. But that's rather different from saying that their agenda should be dictated by a set of religious principles which they go in to enact (it's the Christian politician/party business again). So I want to see people across the road there, acting on their Christianly-informed consciences when they vote. That's why I believe that there should be a free vote on certain bits of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, incidentally, because that's a conscience issue for so many people.

Should the Archbishop of Canterbury be a (good) politician?

The Archbishop of Canterbury's bound to be a politician in the sense that he has got to think about the understanding and the management of a quite varied and often rather unruly Christian community: the Church of England and the Anglican Church, worldwide. And of course there are politics in that, understanding power, understanding responsibility, transparency, accountability: the Archbishop's bound to be a politician. But in the context of our society, I think an Archbishop – like any other Christian, and particularly any other Christian pastor or teacher – does have the responsibility of trying to move forward the sort of debates I've been talking about, and draw out the assumptions of people in our society about human dignity and human nature: in that sense a politician. And by long tradition the Archbishop is in fact a legislator, and like any other legislator the Archbishop needs to vote according to his conscience. So I hope that when he does that, he is in some sense a 'good' politician.

Is there still a case for an established Church in England? To what extent would the removal of Bishops in the House of Lords result in social anaemia? How do you view the possible loss of the Bishops from a re-organised House of Lords? Isn't having the Queen at its head, itself a political statement by the Church something that inextricably aligns the Church with a certain political view?

The case for the establishment of the Church of England is, I suppose, the case for two things: one, for the recognition by the state of some element in its life, answerable to more than narrowly political interest; the state says 'we keep a place there for a community recognized by us as a state, which looks beyond the boundaries of the immediate political conflicts'. That's one part of the case. The other part is the state's recognition that everyone in the nation has a right to access some kind of spiritual service. Quite a lot of both of those can be met in ways other than the establishment as we now see it. I had ten years as a Bishop in a disestablished Church in Wales without noticing a great deal of difference a lot of the time. So I don't believe in the general principle that disestablishment is lethal for the Church, or that the establishment in its present form is a ditch the Church would have to die in. I have more faith in the Church than that. At the same time if disestablishment meant the pushing of a strong secularizing agenda, or the removing of that sense that a state needs people in it who have obligations and affiliations beyond, to transcendent reality, then I'd be worried. I'd think that the state would lose out in that.

Bishops in the Lords?

In the context of what I've just been saying, that's where the legislature allows that there are people in it licensed to ask awkward questions on a religious basis. They wouldn't in principle have to be bishops and it may well be that in the future of the House of Lords we'll see other religious bodies drawn in; I'm sure that'd be right. But simple removal of Bishops from the Lords might well be the amputation of a genuinely useful part of the polity: not because the Bishops are clinging to privilege, but as a matter of witness to that more than political dimension that I touched upon.

What about the responsibility of Christians to take a stand for human rights, the rights of those suffering injustice, like the plight of Palestine? Why aren't Christians taking an active part in the peace process, claiming their part of the Holy Land?

I think Christians actually are taking a part – sometimes quite prominently – in that discussion. Many of you will be aware of the role that Christians of different confessions have played in the peace process in the Holy Land as elsewhere. And whenever I've been in Jerusalem I've found a remarkable willingness on the part of a number of religious leaders to get together and engage with this, Christian, Jewish and Muslim. My predecessor launched some years ago the Alexandria Process, designed to draw religious leaders of all these traditions into the peace process much more visibly. And in terms of standing up for human rights generally, the rights of the disadvantaged, I think the record of the Church in many contexts worldwide is not bad, and sometimes wonderful. Whether it's the South African history which is, I guess in most people's minds, the history of many of those in Latin America, who've stood alongside the poorest: or the current fact of those in India who so vigorously defend the rights of so-called 'untouchables' in Southern India especially.

Should the current preoccupation with rights be balanced with the greater recognition of responsibilities?

The nature of the Christian Church is that it is a community where people take responsibility to and for each other before God. And the most fundamental question about the moral colouring of the Christian Church is: how effective is that responsibility to and for one another? That is part of what the Church proposes to society as a vision and an ideal.

© Rowan Williams 2008