Interview: Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams is the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and is currently the Master of Magdalene College Oxford. A Bishop, theologian and poet, Rowan speaks over seven languages. As well as writing the acclaimed Faith in the Public Square, he has made a number of significant contributions on this topic, often defining the debate: on sharia law, on the free market and on social policy.

How would you characterise the present debate concerning religion in the public sphere?

I think in Britain there are definitely mixed messages. On the one hand, there’s a number of books now from the Skidelskys’ work, through to one or two novels recently, which clearly are fascinated by religion, and expect there to be some kind of religiously informed perspective on public affairs. On the other, you have the kind of rhetoric represented by those who say “religion’s a source of violence” “religion’s a source of conflict”, and the relatively recent survey which suggested that a very substantial proportion of the population think religion does more damage than good in public. In that latter context, religion, the word “religion” often stands as a proxy for “extremist religion”, forms of Islam in many people’s minds, and that’s difficult to untangle because it’s unspoken, but I think it’s there. So quite a contradiction when it comes to religion at the moment in the public sphere: fascination, repulsion, a sense that there’s something to be contributed, and also a sense of suspicion.

And what do you think’s driving that response?

Well, a certain part of it is driven by a growing and vivid sense of a moral vacuum, adrift, the difficulty of talking about major issues of value and human dignity in the public sphere with any coherence. And rather in the way that a continental thinker like Habermas has suggested, the feeling that a properly cultivated humanistic discourse needs all the friends it can get, and potentially religion has something to offer there. A sense of frustration about how you talk about major issues, especially issues around human dignity and entitlement in the public sphere. But alongside that is the daily awareness of conflict that if not religiously grounded, is at least religiously expressed, particularly the appalling situation in the Middle East. The association of religion with violence is presented day by day in the media, usually to do with the Middle East, but also to do with domestic anxieties about terrorism and so on. So religious extremism has become almost one word.

How do you think that’s different inflected in Britain and the rest of the world? Presumably there are different perspective on this: how do they meld into each other and feed?

I’m obviously talking as an amateur observer here, not as somebody hwo has any expertise in the sociology of religion, but a few htoughts of an anecdotal kind: across Europe I think there’s a very wide variety of responses to religion. What’s thought of as the French perspective, in which the public sphere is very definitely neutral, nonreligious, has impacted quite a bit on other European societies. And that’s not quite where the UK feels to be, where the public visibility of religion is still something which most people live with without too much anxiety. But in France and countries influenced, the further South and East you go, there’s a history of some tension or rivalry between state and church. Countries with histories of revolution that have turned very violently against institutional Christianity at various points. They’ve shifted from this in very diverse ways. You see in Russia and the Balkans a real return of Orthodox presence, as a culturally dominant moral and imaginative environment. You see also in countries like Spain, a very self-conscious attempt on the part of the Spanish government to distance themselves from a history of clerical domination. So that’s all a pretty mixed picture. As for the United States, well where do you start? Quite a varied picture. On the one hand you still have a substantially higher registering of public religious practice than you do in Europe; but of course you have the first amendment which insists that there should be no public support or endorsement of religion. One of my own research students has been looking recently at the way in which interpretations of the first amendment have become more and more descriptive about ruling out any public support anywhere at any level. There’s a trend there which is interesting. And then in Latin America, if you look at the work of someone like David Martin, whose religious sociology of Latin America, you see how the rise of Pentecostalism has created a kind of culture of professional, aspirational, responsible citizenship, which is carving out some very new forms of association.

What about this shift from formal to informal forms of religion, which perhaps touches on Pentecostalism?

There’s a lot of talk in the US at the moment about the shift away from classical institutional religion towards voluntaristic, more intentional, more a matter of choices and self-created patterns. I think there’s something in that, and there’s probably a lot more discussion in the US than there is here, about what that might mean in terms of the future of large religious institutions, especially the historic churches. So what people talk about in terms of the emergent church in North America is largely informal or semi-formal intentional networks, which don’t map onto the standard denominational divisions very easily. These may be very eclectic. In their inspiration they may have evangelical backgrounds, they may have grown out of that and picked up things from Eastern Christian traditions, from monastic traditions, from non-Christian practice, so there’s quite a bit of that. And I think a lot of that, in North and South America, as well as to some extent in Europe, goes along with the unease about institutions as such, which is characteristic of late modernity.

Thinking about what Grace Davie says about this, that it’s not about one giving way to the other but about both continuing, I wonder how you think they might affect each other?

I think Grace is absolutely right. I don’t see much sign of the formal being replaced. And that’s because in a way informal networks are in fact quite dependent on more institutionally dense and historically continuous practices. If there were not a robust Eastern Orthodox Church down the road, you might not be able to pick up what you do pick up in terms of praying with icons or whatever. You’re always going to be drawing on different wells of inspiration. Certainly new models are going to need the continuing presence of older ones. Equally the way in which older institutions is already becoming more practical. Institutional Christianity has to come to terms with the fact that for good and ill, people are going to approach it in a much more voluntaristic spirit: they will take what they want, they won’t necessarily feel that participation commits them in exactly the same modes, whether mental or material, that might have worked a generation ago. So a sort of osmosis. I don’t think either will dissolve into the other.

So sticking with Grace for a bit, the connection between both of those and this vicarious religion, this great group of people that are interested but not active, what do you see as the connection there?

The vicarious religion phenomenon is very real in pretty well all the contexts I’ve mentioned so far. And just look around in the UK, it has to do with two things, one of the ambivalent, one of them much more positive. The ambivalent one is a slightly nostalgic feeling that it’s quite good that as part of the cultural repertoire there are some people that are still doing tradition things. And you might say quite patronisingly “bless them”, but it doesn’t really impact on the values you’re working out for yourself, but you’re sort of glad they’re there. But at another level I think it’s a great deal more serious. Whereas someone deeply committed might feel patronised by the first attitude, the second is a matter of recognising that you are always as an individual going to be living in spiritual and imaginative forces a bit bigger than your own capacity. And you may not know what quite to do about them, but you’re conscious of a space into which you might be able to move for certain purposes and at certain times, and that it’s very important that some people are the custodians of that. It’s what I’ve sometimes expressed, quoting one of my former students, as the church being a place where you put stuff that won’t go anywhere else. I mean the television report of the Sunday service after some tragedy somewhere. There’s been a murder, there’s been a disaster, and the news will show you a church service. It’s a sense in which people will literally treat the church as a space to take things. However they articulate their commitment, there is some obscure way in which you draw nourishment, which you can use at certain points and for certain purposes. That’s very different from how churches define their role, but it’s very important and very visible.

That leads me to wonder about another interface that seems to be opening up, and that’s the one between society and theology. What role has theology to play?

A very important part of the theological role is to reflect on not just God but humanity. That’s to do with an attempt to ground within the act and purpose of God, the dignity of human beings. It’s also an attempt to create some space from which critical questions can be asked about any and every social settlement. If you believe there are certain things about humanity that are answerable to God, and if those can be spelled out a bit theologically, then those give us a sort of leverage to look at, respond to, and interact with the rest of society with some sharp questions: what is proper to human beings, what is owed to human beings, what human beings ought to be, do and be growing into, is not going to be defined by what happens to get the majority vote at this or that particular point. Potentially that’s a fruitful annoyance for society. Society’s flourishment has then got some grit, some goad to ask themselves awkward questions. So I think that’s an area where there is a real interaction. And of course if you talk about what’s proper to or owed to human beings, you’re talking about certain basic forms of social interaction that are seen as life-giving. In the Christian context, the powerful, central significance of interdependence in the social world, which from the very beginning shapes what Christians have said about the church, and the church seen as signifying or anticipating what human social life ought to be moving towards: that I think does have a purchase in a society where interdependence, the absolute inseparability of your welfare and mine, is not the obvious message.

And how ready do you think the public is to hear theology when it’s spoken?

Again it’s a mixed picture. I think the public, for some of these discussions, is certainly less exclusively Christian than some theologians imagine. And I think it’s interesting that theologians are invited into a number of conversations. Sometimes they’re invited into, let’s say a technical question regarding bioethics, because they’re assumed to have principles and positions derived from doctrine which will impact on that technical discussion. But I don’t know that that’s the most important way. I think there’s a lot to be drawn out from the way in which certain kinds of narrative, certain kinds of life, are sensed by a wider public to have some meaning and coherence. I’m thinking there of the iconic status of figures like Desmond Tutu or the Dalai Lama who do speak, not literally but their stories speak, to audiences that are by no means strongly religiously committed but can see that there is a coherent story.

And if you had to call it, what would you say is the relative balance between that sort of warm reception and the sort of visceral rejection that’s the other part of the story that you started with?

Very difficult to call. And I suspect reactions would vary depending on where exactly where you’re asking the question. So in times of trauma and stress, communal or individual, a kind of basic assumption of trust seems to dominate. But casually, day to day, anecdotally, there’s a good deal of hostility and cynicism; that’s why I wouldn’t want to give percentages; I’d want to say who are you asking and when?

Moving away from the public, I’m interested in what David Ford says about the relationship between social science and theology. These are methodologically very different worlds, but David talks of putting them into dialogue. What are your thoughts about that?

Yes I think theology always benefits from having serious and critical dialogue partners. And if you look at Michael Banner’s book on the ethics of everyday life, you’ll see there an attempt to engage theology with social anthropology. So I think there are real conversations to be had here, but I don’t think that a theologian needs to write off social science by any manner of means, and I think some of what David Martin has been writing, especially his recent book on religion and power, is a very helpful reminder to the social sciences that rationalist and functionalist accounts of social interaction frankly aren’t going to be very much use because they misses that the symbolising and imaginative elements are inescapable. But I think that also puts some questions back to theology: to keep its own anthropology, its own picture of humanity in good working order, and to understand a bit better how mythos works.