Back where he belongs

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has resigned. He is going off to be an academic, at Cambridge, which in my view is what he was fit for all along.

When he became Archbishop in 2003 everyone knew what his tasks were. He had to diffuse the remainder of the row on women priests, and he had to sort out a burgeoning split on homosexuality. As to the first, the issue of women priests per se had been sorted in 1994; there remained the issues of whether a safe place could be found within the church for people who disagreed with the idea, and whether women could become bishops (and thus ordain other priests). The homosexuality issue was driven by a separation between the Western Church, in Britain and America, where liberal attitudes prevail, and the African church, equally numerous, where there is great intolerance of homosexuality. David Cameron's recent push towards making marriage equal for everyone is merely an exacerbation of the rift.

There are two ways in which you can resolve crises such as this. One is to take a principled stand, the other is to negotiate. Williams chose the latter and it was the wrong choice: these debates were not being conducted by a malleable general public, who, by and large, couldn't give a damn. They were conducted amongst educated, principled people with fundamental differences on what they saw as vitally important matters. They weren't going to be fobbed off. If there were a measure of confidence and satisfaction among churchgoers it would be lower now than in 2003.

What Williams lacked in organisational ability he more than made up for in original thought. He once said that Britain should be ready to accept pockets where Sharia Law was practiced; and on the issue of whether Christians had a right to wear a cross or crucifix, he said that many people were taken in by the business of selling souvenirs. Both of these were intellectually defensible but idiotic as utterances of the Archbishop.

For most of my lifetime the Archbishops have been soaking wet liberal ditherers. Church attendance under their guidance has collapsed and no one believes anything at all. The last Archbishop who was any use was Michael Ramsay, and he retired in the 1970s. In my view the Anglican communion will now split up into Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical and Liberal arms. Its future, if it has one, lies in the third world.