Skip to main content

Disappointed in Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams has always seemed like he has the potential to be a great Christian leader. There's a lot of great things about him. But he has disappointed me.

He spoke recently about whether he had let down GLBT people in his time as Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. But it actually wasn't this issue that has disappointed me. It was only reading about this talk in an article recently that I realised something that happened several months ago: he has become a member of the House of Lords.

I'm quite disappointed in that. A few years he spoke at the University of Manchester and his talk was, of course, excellent. He spoke about the place of the Christian community as offering a radical alternative to the mainstream society - witnessing to a different set of values than the materialism, hierarchy etc of society (this is from memory so I'm just recalling a rough impression of what he said).

I got up at the end of the talk and asked a question. I said that I totally agreed with everything he said - it's just that I didn't see the leadership of the Church of England living it out. It seemed to me, I said, that unelected bishops sitting in the House of Lords "lording it over" the country was in direct contradiction to everything he had just talked about for the last hour.

His answer was equivocal. He just sort of shrugged and said, "well this is the system we've inherited and we've got to work within it." It seemed bishops in the House of Lords was something he didn't want to defend.

But to find out he has accepted his own seat in the House of Lords, again seems like a betrayal of the values he can and does articulate so well. As Archbishop of Canterbury of course he had a seat, which you could argue just comes with the job; but to accept a personal seat to this unelected illegitimate chamber seems like another betrayal of those Christian values.

All political parties agreed in principle to reform the House of Lords and this government has not only failed to do so, but stuffed the house with more and more and more peers. Rowan Williams has come in as part of a wave of unelected peers that is making the House of Lords even more laughable in a modern democracy. There are currently about 750 peers with a chance under the current system of this going up to 2000. This is not only clearly impractical as a way to run a Parliament, it is also a system based on party patronage, privilege, and unaccountable power.

How I wish someone as respected and well known as Rowan Williams could have witnessed to Christian values by refusing to be a part of such a system.

Comments

Mickbic said…
No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.(2 Timothy 2:4--KJV)

Popular posts from this blog

Radical?

When I started this blog nearly 4 years and nearly 300 posts ago one of the labels I used for it/me was "radical." Perhaps I used it a little unreflectively. Recently I've been pondering what radical means. A couple of things have made me think of this. Firstly this blog series from my friend Jeremy, which explores a distinction between "radical progressives" and "rational progressives." There is also this definition of radical, liberal and conservative from Terry Eagleton quoted at Young Anabaptist Radicals : “Radicals are those who believe that things are extremely bad with us, but they could feasibly be much improved. Conservatives believe that things are pretty bad, but that’s just the way the human animal is. And liberals believe that there’s a little bit of good and bad in all of us.” What interests me is finding a way to express the tension I feel sometimes between myself and the wider Unitarian movement. One way to express this is to say I tend

What does it mean to be non-creedal?

Steve Caldwell says "The problem here isn't humanism vs. theism for theist Unitarian Universalists -- it's the non-creedal nature of Unitarian Universalism" This is a good point. We need to think much more deeply about what it means to be a non-creedal religion. The first thing I want to say is that there is more than one possible understanding of non-creedalism. The Disciples of Christ are a non-creedal church, they say here : " Freedom of belief. Disciples are called together around one essential of faith: belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Persons are free to follow their consciences guided by the Bible, the Holy Spirit study and prayer, and are expected to extend that freedom to others." Quakers are also non-creedal and say here : Quakers have no set creed or dogma - that means we do not have any declared statements which you have to believe to be a Quaker. There are, however, some commonly held views which unite us. One accepted view is that th

What is Radical Christianity?

Radical Christianity is about encountering the God of love . It is first and foremost rooted in the discovery of a universal and unconditional source of love at the heart of reality and within each person. God is the name we give to this source of love. It is possible to have a direct and real personal encounter with this God through spiritual practice. We encounter God, and are nourished by God, through the regular practice of prayer, or contemplation.  Radical Christianity is about following a man called Jesus . It is rooted in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish prophet living under occupation of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago. It understands that's Jesus' message was the message of liberation. His message was that when we truly encounter God, and let God's love flow through us, we begin to be liberated from the powers of empire and violence and encounter the  "realm of God" - an alternative spiritual and social reality rooted in love rather th