It is almost impossible to know what Jesus Christ would have made of the internet, broadband connections being in scant supply in Nazareth 2,000 years ago (as they are, indeed, today). Perhaps he would have spent all day in his room logged on to one of those flourishing muscular evangelical chat rooms, or maybe he would have despaired of the whole enterprise.

With such a dearth of reliable information as to his Lord’s disposition to www, it is lucky that we have one of his foremost custodians to guide us in the matter.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been taking a few swipes at the media and has been disparaging the internet. He has criticised it for dissembling “paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry” — an accusation that could equally be said to apply to much of mainstream religion. He also derided the web as a “free for all” that was “close to that of unpoliced conversation”. To which we might reply well, yes — that’s the point, isn’t it? Not content with missing the entire purpose of the internet, Williams then went on to miss the entire point about the British press. Journalists distorted debate and contributed to a climate of “national cynicism”, unjustly attacking institutions for their secretiveness. So far, so New Statesman. This has become the mantra au courant of new Labour’s fellow travellers, a whine continually heard from the op ed pages of left of centre publications.

The argument goes that the cynicism into which we journalists lapse is not a reaction to the perfidies of government, but a sort of institutionalised personal weakness like drunkenness or sodomy.

It is a whine that we hear sometimes from the prime minister himself, in order to excuse himself from some catastrophe or debacle, such as the war against Iraq. Look, he says, I was honestly mistaken. Criticise me for that, but don’t say I lied to you all. But it is the profound and, to my mind, almost irrefutable evidence that we were lied to that causes the anger and cynicism — not the war itself or the failure of our intelligence services.

It was the centrepiece of Williams’s argument that most interested me, though. The press is here, the archbishop said, to nourish the public good. Not to inform or entertain — but to nourish the public good. Now, where have I heard this before? It was an argument eloquently advanced by Georgi Plekhanov, the proto-Soviet theorist, the first Russian Marxist and the man whom we have to thank for, among other things, dreary socialist realism in art and, for daily reading matter, Pravda. The writer Maxim Gorky said of Plekhanov suggestively that he "resembles a Protestant pastor." Williams’s belief that the purpose of the press is to “nourish public good” underpins every sentence of Plekhanov’s polemic, Art and Social Life, first delivered as a lecture in 1912. It also underpins the ideology of pretty much every totalitarian state that sprang up during the 20th century: there is a commonly agreed public good that we are beholden to preserve and advance.

The bourgeois or decadent notions of disinterested investigation, scepticism, art for art’s sake and so on, had no place in Soviet Russia or, for that matter, Nazi Germany. It is a beguiling but truly repulsive creed and one that I thought had dissolved when the first brick of the Berlin Wall was hacked away by those brave and jubilant East Germans in 1989. But apparently it is still alive and well in the dear old C of E.

There is something naive and hopeless about Williams, qualities which you may or may not feel are also exemplified by the Church of England. Recently he turned his attention to African debt repayments and, in urging us to write off the lot, asked rhetorically if we wished to live in a world where we all trusted each other regardless of whether that trust was reciprocated. But we trust and believe in each other because we learn to trust through experience, not on a whim or through an article of faith.

Now he has assumed that we all share a common belief in what constitutes public good and yet quite clearly — from his own descriptions of the worldwide web — this is not so. And nor should it be so.

Heaven knows, the British press is far from perfect. If the Lord had met Piers Morgan I suspect he would have formed a disaffection for our newspapers every bit as strong as Williams’s. But arguably the most valuable thing we in the liberal West possess is a fervent disagreement about what is good for us as a society.

As David Mannion, editor-in-chief of ITV News, put it, the archbishop’s argument could easily be seized on by those who wish to control the news agenda for their own ends.

The church’s habit of flailing and whining at institutions — the government, the World Bank, the press — and leaving individuals alone is surely an abrogation of ecumenical responsibility. The nasty bits of the worldwide web are not the fault of insufficient regulation and a lack of censorship: they are the fault of individual human beings. The church should be addressing its message of repentance to the individual, not the profession, as its founder did.