The Archbishop of Canterbury is not the Empress of India

[Snowden]

The Archbishop of Canterbury is not the Empress of India


By Charles Moore
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 28/06/2008



At my village Church of England primary school in the 1960s, we often sang the stirring 19th-century hymn:

Archbishop Rowan Williams has annoyed both
the traditionalists and the liberals

"From Greenland's icy mountains, from India's coral strand,

Where Afric's sunny fountains roll down their golden sand.

From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,

They call us to deliver their land from error's chain."


These places were lovely, was the message, but their people were lost - "Where ev'ry prospect pleases, and only man is vile". It was our mission, the hymn said, to save them: "Can we whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on high,/To a land benighted the lamp of life deny?"

To the extent that we thought about the words at all - I did, because I found them arrestingly beautiful - we were arrogantly unabashed. Few of us intended to be missionaries, but it seemed obvious that people in "primitive" countries with non-white skins were at a historic disadvantage when it came to understanding God: it was our Christian duty to remedy this.

Last month, in the church of St Bartholomew the Great in London, the rector illegally used the words of the Book of Common Prayer marriage service ("With my body I thee honour" etc) to bless the civil partnership of two male clergymen. "It seems to me," he said, "that Jesus would have been sitting in the congregation."

Next month, the Anglican Communion gathers in Canterbury for its 10-yearly Lambeth Conference: 800 bishops from icy mountains, coral strands and palmy plains will mingle and debate. But some will not be there because they are so angry: they are meeting in Jerusalem this week to organise themselves. Anglicanism, in its present form, may not survive.

The issue that most divides them is not really homosexuality, but it is sparked by it. It is about what the Bible says, what tradition teaches, what a Church is, and who decides.

The simplest way to understand what is happening is this: the direction of mission described in that hymn of my childhood has been reversed. In Nigeria, there are now perhaps 40 times more practising Anglicans than in Britain. And it is in places like Nigeria, where people's faith is often a matter of life and death because of the rise of militant Islam, that Anglicans have to be serious about what they believe.

In places where the Christian idea of marriage to only one woman requires constant upholding against local custom and rival beliefs, it seems incomprehensible that white Christians in the West are saying that men can marry men. Where, in 2,000 years of scripture and tradition, can that idea be found? Under apartheid in South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church invented a bogus theology to justify white superiority. The western liberal Anglicans who want to make homosexual relationships the same as Christian marriage are doing something similar - twisting religion to suit the secular political culture of the time.

To millions upon millions of Africans and others in former colonies, it is England, the mother country of Anglicanism, which must seem "a land benighted". They want to bring us "the lamp of life" we once brought to them.

The structures, however, do not reflect this shift of power and spiritual energy. The Anglican Communion, like the Commonwealth, is a product of the British Empire. Unlike the Commonwealth, it is still overwhelmingly Anglo-centric. Anglicanism is defined by whether or not you are in communion with the See of Canterbury, and attendance at the Lambeth Conference is by the personal invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury only. Although he does not have a great deal of direct power, the Archbishop of Canterbury is the boss of everything.

(Lambeth is the specific focus of the current row: Archbishop Rowan Williams has annoyed the traditionalists by inviting the American bishops who ordained the openly practising homosexual Gene Robinson as a bishop; he has also annoyed the liberals by refusing to invite Gene Robinson. Mr Robinson is gatecrashing the conference anyway, to make a scene and sell his book.)

And if all this is annoying for the ex-colonials, it is also annoying, in a different way, for the English. How do poor Dr Williams's endless meetings with furious Ugandans and huffy New Englanders help this country? What do all this conferring and arguing do for Christian mission and worship in England?

As the "broken society" becomes the great topic of political debate, the Church of England should be well placed. It has the parishes, it has the strong role in schools, it has the volunteers, it has the doctrine and practice. It should be able to restore the role of its churches as what are nowadays called "community hubs". It should be able to help people looking for family stability, stronger social bonds, better roles for young men, spiritual food. Dr Williams speaks beautifully about the recovery of childhood. Yet the headlines - and the mental energy - are taken up with these rows. What a terrible waste of time it all is.

In this respect, one feels that some of the conservatives are almost as bad as the American heretics. They are right about the doctrine, but some of them are wrong in their manner of proceeding. They should not be so rude to Dr Williams. They should not denounce homosexuals as if they were barely human beings. They should not think themselves more truthful because they are more quarrelsome. On both sides, the thing has turned ugly.

As someone brought up an Anglican, but now a Catholic, I find I like the Church of England more than I did. Now that I don't have to put up with its impossibilities, I can see its virtues more easily. They are to do with what one bishop describes to me as "the huge treasury of unwritten conventions". They relate to a certain sort of history, of mind, and of temper - a Church, as the saying was, "not ashamed to adore, but not afraid to reason".

These virtues used to be secured by the Church's Established role, by parish life, by a tradition of academic study and by a uniquely beautiful liturgy. But they have all been weakened, and fewer people understand the unwritten conventions. They are plants which grow only in temperate, well-watered habitats, so now they are threatened by cultural climate change. "Save the Anglican wetlands", I say, but perhaps it is too late. Their guardians have made them too precarious to survive.

Goodness knows how the Anglican Communion can run itself, and I use that phrase exactly - goodness knows. Most of the troubles in religion come from what my friendly bishop calls the "fidget, fidget, fidget, fidget" of church bureaucracy and church politics. The website of the Lambeth Conference begins, absurdly, with a large countdown to the moment the conference begins (20 days, 3 hours, 29 minutes and 45 seconds, when I looked yesterday morning). Better, surely, to keep calm. After all, as another hymn puts it, "A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone".


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