MetaCatholic

I am still digesting some of the questions Rowan Williams was trying to open up in his now notorious lecture. (See my previous post) I have sometimes been inclined towards some related notions, but for different reasons. In particular I think there is an ambiguous and confused relationship between the law and morality, and over recent decades there has first been a decoupling of many areas of specifically Christian morality from legislation, and subsequently, particularly in the last decade, a great many morally driven pieces of legislation, whose morality is rather ad hoc and du jour and whose purpose is social engineering: fox-hunting, homosexual law reform, anti-smoking legislation and more.

I can’t help but feel over-legislated, and that whereas once the Church probably (although with a large degree of consent) abused its authority in legislating for its morality, now (again with a large degree of consent) the Church is being ridden rough-shod over in the area it once ruled. A particular case in point, and, I would have thought in every respect entirely unnecessary, was the insistence that Catholic adoption agencies should be willing to place babies with same sex couples. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of this particular cluster of issues, this was the coercive State overriding conscience, which is arguably a more serious wrong.

Chris Dillow has in my view the most significant criticism of Rowan Williams.

In saying that the UK’s adoption of part of Sharia law is inevitable, I suspect the Archbishop of Canterbury is making the same mistake he made in calling for laws against “cruel speech.” He’s failing to see that there should be a (big) space between individuals and the law, a space filled by civil society.
In a free society, consenting adults should be able to settle disputes however they like; this might entail recourse to a coin toss, Sharia, Beth din or whatever. The job of UK law is merely to ensure that consent is free, informed and not too onerous.

Despite his ostensible Marxism, this looks far more like a classic conservative libertarian argument. But it seems to me that in part, the space for aspects of Sharia that the Archbishop was talking about fits far more into this communal space of civil society, than into the realm of law. I’m not sure whether Rowan Williams would agree: some aspects of his lecture make me think he would.

What is astonishing is the degree of hysteria that has greeted the lecture, of which a key point is actually about how the stranger can be made welcome in that common civil society. The comments on some of the news blogs are astonishing. Sorry, wrong word, the bad-tempered and frequently illiterate inanity of many blog comments is the norm, unfortunately. But many of the comments reveal a particularly nasty, racist and fearful willingness to believe anything of Islam as long as it’s bad, combined with a belief that those born white in Britain are somehow automatically Christian. The hysterical monotony of this type of comment is only relieved by the equally hysterical rants against the Archbishop as a theocrat from those “plague on both your houses” atheists.

I suspect the Archbishop is wrong in the proposals and suggestions he offers, but that he puts his finger on a continuing aspect of Britain’s inability welcome those who are different and give them space in civic society is, I think, borne out by the reactions. The British people are currently as unable to respond rationally to Islam as they were once unable to respond rationally to Catholicism.

Given who his enemies appear to be, I would like to defend him more whole-heartedly. I would certainly rather find myself in his company than the many racist bigots who are attacking him. But in fact I think he is in part diagnosing the wrong problem, and that he should turn his powerful and subtle theological mind on the more general question of the place of the law in relation to morality, and how law should actually function with consent in a society where there are widely divergent moral perspectives, both religious and secular. Currently the balance is tipping far too much away from both individuals and communities in favour of the State, and whatever ideology is currently consuming it. In exploring that question, the Archbishop might find a better way through the questions he has raised in this more narrow context.