THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, Rowan Williams, is at his potty best once more. This time suggesting that the rich and powerful should be obliged by law to spend some time with the poor and needy.
He was speaking on the BBC’s Today programme’s Thought for the Day slot when he made the suggestion that we should have “…a new law that made all Cabinet members and leaders of political parties, editors of national papers and the hundred most successful financiers in the UK spend a couple of hours every year serving dinners in a primary school on a council estate, or cleaning bathrooms in a residential home?'' - and because it would be compulsory, those told to go amongst the poor and presumably wash their feet while carrying the obligatory nosegay, could not receive any credit for so doing.
I know the Archbishop was making a serious point, as he was when he suggested the possibility of incorporating parts of sharia law into our own. But to legally oblige someone to perform good works is at best naive, and at worse totalitarian.
I did not listen to the archbishop’s contribution so I cannot say whether it was made with tongue in cheek or not. But the coverage his remarks received would suggest that he meant every word he uttered.
Did not the archbishop’s God give his children Free Will, either to act in accordance with, or without reference to their consciences? Was there not to be a day of judgement when these matters would finally brought to a head, and mankind would finally be brought face to face with the sins that in life had pursued them to the end?
You cannot make human beings do what they do not wish to do in a free and open society. If however, that society is part of the Muslim world then it can have a measure of success. But has we have seen in North Africa coercion also has its limits.
If the archbishop’s law was enacted, then I hope that many of those to whom it was meant to apply would use their wealth and power to flee abroad, because the country they live in would have had its first religious decree enacted, based as it would have been on Christian teaching according to Archbishop Williams’ long and reflective study of the New Testament.
IF ROWAN WILLIAMS had left the law free to go about its business in its more usual and suitable area of expertise; while only making his suggestion’s obligatory upon the conscience of those he called upon to act, then perhaps the archbishop’s suggestions would have found greater favour at all points of the moral compass.
However, once you call up from the shadowy deep, laws to backup your claim as a theologian who wishes to give his somewhat unorthodox views praxis in the real world, you no longer merit any sympathy; especially if those laws have a religious connotation that opens it up to the same hostility that any suggestion of sharia law did – as he well knows.
Not only does Rowan Williams overstep the mark between church and state with his suggestion, but he also shows a totalitarian streak first displayed with his willingness to accept encroachment of sharia law into English law.
Like all apostles of the brotherhood of man, the archbishop is prepared to impose what he would deem necessary sanctions to bring such an ideal about.
The law is there to stop human nature from overstepping the boundaries of laws society has created to protect the community that such laws are meant to serve. This covers criminal, family, financial and…well, it does not lay claim to enforcing religious laws - and so it should not.
Rowan Williams admits that the basis of the commandment he wishes the wealthy and powerful to obey is a religious law founded in the teachings of Christianity. As such it is no different from Islamist laws, in the sense that the archbishop has used the law to promote his faith. We live in a secular society; and in such a society the laws are made by the application reason at all times.
If there are out there, eccentric millionaires and self-publicising politicians who wish to follow the archbishops suggestion, then they are free to do so. But none from such a community need feel obliged by law to act upon Archbishop Williams’ eccentricities.
I am all for the great and powerful experiencing the lives of those they are either separated from financially or ignored politically. Nevertheless, to suggest that the full force of the law should be used to make such introductions goes beyond democratic values and sadly fits neatly into totalitarian ones.
THE PRESENT ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY should have been the commandant of a seminary instead of leading the Church of England. It was Tony Blair who proposed this man for such high office, and like many other acts of the last Labour government, the country has come to regret ever voting them into power.
The Anglican Church today is a weak and insipid concoction of various examples of political correctness. Its Christian values have been downgraded by society’s acceptance of all forms of behaviour thought of by the Christian church for 2000 years, as being immoral.
Rowan Williams is fast becoming an eccentric who is either to be pitied or condemned. How such a man became the leader of the Church of England beggars’ belief - but then I write as an atheist.
Nevertheless, I still believe that the Christian religion has a primary role to play in society; and it is because of this that Rowan Williams’ suggestion will only aggravate and enhance the further development of secularism in this country.
To me religion has only a cultural significance. Its responsibility is primarily to do with the ‘spiritual’ side of men. Religion, all religion, harbours the spiritual welfare as the primary function of its activities; and as such should be tolerated – especially by us atheists who do not believe in the concept of a soul. The material state of mankind must therefore be of secondary interest to the church. This does not mean the poor should be ignored, but rather that they should be brought closer to the church spiritually and not materially.
The Anglican church under its present leader lacks authority and standing. To have done what the present archbishop did on the Today programme only further mineralises his worth to the Anglican community.
This servant of the church may have been blessed with an intellectual grasp of theology that others who share his faith can only envy; but I am afraid that the Archbishop has promoted his own irrelevance by his insistence upon a law to make men behave morally, when they should only do so according to their consciences. Which many of them quite happily do. The head of Microsoft, Bill Gates has poured millions of dollars into combating malaria in Africa and other regions of the world; and hopes to pour further billions on such projects.
Many of the rich do not need to make the gesture of going among the poor and derelict to “… spend a couple of hours every year serving dinners in a primary school on a council estate, or cleaning bathrooms in a residential home”; they spend their time creating wealth, a generous portion of which is given freely to charity.
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