This week the Church of England debated empty pews and dog collars and got nowhere. Its next head, Dr Rowan Williams, had more important business. Even before his induction he was fending off backwoodsmen charging him with heresy, opposing war in Iraq and publishing a book of poems. He was, in other words, emerging as a public figure.
His opposite number the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has been no less busy. Summoned to a theological court in Manchester he has been forced by orthodox rabbis to recant his recent book on the diversity of religions. He is accused of condoning polytheism and there are demands for his books to be burnt. Not to be left out, the Roman Catholics are tearing themselves apart over priestly sexuality, and awaiting the doctrinal upheaval likely to follow a new Pope. These may seem storms in a vicarage teacup. They may yet spill into the saucer and stain the tablecloth.
In my blacker moments I have wondered what would follow our ancient democracy. It has had a good run but seems weak and tarnished, as if knowing it has served its time. Politicians, once elected, do nothing to keep it in good repair. The franchise is a quinquennial game show and Parliament a down-market Garrick Club.
What next? What neo-democratic dispensation is on the horizon? I see it as a shambling coalition of party oligarchs, commentators, consultants and celebrities, a sovereignty of the articulate. Influence will depend on who can muscle on to the platform, who can seize the microphone in the breathless 24-hour media conversation that passes for populist government. Today’s religious leaders seem eager for this challenge.
Dr Williams has shown no inclination to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps. He is no quiet pastoral don. George Carey greeted controversy as he might a growling whippet, with a hesitant pat on the nose and God’s blessing. I cannot recall any matter on which he offered a strong view. It was not his style. Dr Carey’s successor is of a different cloth. He seizes any passing controversy by the neck and shakes it for sense.
The new Archbishop’s zest for publicity comes from an impenetrable theologian but an accessible writer. A remarkable volume of his poems appears this week. His Church may be on the floor but he seems ready to lift its eyes to the heavens. I love his image of another Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas, in his lonely cottage in North Wales: “Words from a window/ Smoothing the sea, the iron back and forth/ To probe the fugitive wrinkles/ Carving a path down to the lost gate.” I love too his medieval Angharad, “Carrying the chaos of those so breakable hearts . . . giving to us, clear under God’s sky,/ The priesthood of her caring”. The legacy of Donne and Herbert is in good hands.
Dr Sacks is of different mettle. He is a more political operator, adept at sidestepping trick questions. His website motto is epic vapidity: “The future will happen, but it is we who must bring it about.” Yet the Chief Rabbi is in the intellectual rather than ethnic tradition of rabbinical leadership. He may be wary of specificity but not of publicity. He is for war on Iraq but “with safeguards”, carefully chosen to cover every option. He is scrupulous on Israel, but has reportedly found recent events “incompatible with our deepest ideals”, at times making him “very uncomfortable to be a Jew”. This is brave, for a rabbi.
Dr Sacks’s book, The Politics of Hope, was emphatically “a work of politics, not about religion or spirituality”. It was a serious attempt to ask why the bonds of social cohesion in Britain seem to have collapsed under recent Governments. He professes a “lovely friendship” with Gordon Brown, whose deeds in office glaringly contradict the message of his book. But priests have long been susceptible to flattery.
The Chief Rabbi’s latest work, The Dignity of Difference, is more radical. It celebrates religious diversity and pleads that only by each faith respecting all others can religion be harnessed as a force for peace. “No one creed has a monopoly of religious truth,” says this dynamic ecumenist, “in Heaven there is truth, on Earth there are truths”. Dr Sacks has been wounded by his critics claiming that his book, aimed at Gentiles, questions the uniqueness of Judaism. He has now agreed to “a clarification not a retraction” in a new edition, to “reformulate phrases and passages that have been misunderstood”. What new inquisition haunts the heights of Maida Vale?
Religious leaders are well cast for their new public role. They enjoy institutional respect and a measure of invulnerability. They are accustomed to preaching. Their job security frees them from regular accountability. Despite his recent experience, Dr Sacks seems to revel in debate. The media demoralise only those who show they are hurt.
Fewer people may be going to church. The Archbishop and the Chief Rabbi may, like Stalin’s Pope, have no divisions. But Dr Williams leads some one million worshippers and Dr Sacks has 280,000. This beats most politicians. It is a large enough constituency to validate access to the media. Churches are presumed to be opinion factories, quangos of comment. Provided they promise controversy, a mobile pulpit is at their front door. It is called a radio car.
Thought for the Day is now worth any bishopric. The Moral Maze is a weekly sermon for the hard of hearing. Songs of Praise is a virtual Mass. I am sure half Britain thinks that Lionel Blue is the Chief Rabbi and Sister Wendy is head of the Roman Catholic Church.
These new “hierarchs” understand that outspokenness requires argument. The old-fashioned churchman was a servant of public opinion, not its master. He announced that there was justice all round and may the Lord watch over you. Such platitude cuts no ice with the media. An opinion is disseminated only if someone, somewhere, can be found to disagree. That is no criticism of the media. It is the essence of dialogue, the definition of debate.
Dr Williams and Dr Sacks have opinions. We already know where the new Archbishop stands on everything from gay priests to the weapons inspectors in Iraq. He is unlikely to be sprinkling holy water on Tony Blair’s bomber crews as they depart for Baghdad. Both he and Dr Sacks have been accused of heterodoxy, indeed heresy, by their followers. It is ironic that they should both have fallen foul of fundamentalists when both are theological conservatives. They hold firm to the holiness of texts and respect the sanctity of rituals. Neither would be described as morally “relative”.
Religious heresy is like treason, “a question of dates”. Ockham, Erasmus, Cranmer, Keble, Temple, were all considered heretics by some or all. Today these men are woven into the tight cloth of English civilisation. What is sad is that the cries of heresy against both Dr Williams and Dr Sacks are for their espousal of religious tolerance, one of the prouder boasts of British history. Protestants, Catholics and Jews have all been its beneficiaries. The rantings against Dr Williams of the Church Society and the mullah-like edicts of the Manchester rabbis take us back to the intolerance of the early 17th century.
All heterodoxy is welcome. By definition it challenges orthodoxy. Without controversy institutions die and without institutions there is no democracy, just the vote. These new heretics court controversy. A view on the Iraq war, Your Grace? A comment on the Israeli Cabinet, Chief Rabbi? Any views on the firefighters’ strike? The demise of Parliament and the decay of the vocation of politics has left a public voracious for arguments, opinions, points of view. Newspapers are crammed with them.
I do not agree with Yeats that the best lack all conviction and only the worst are full of passionate intensity. But Yeats was a pessimist and timid. He told his poets to keep their mouths shut, “for in truth/ We have no gift to set a statesman right”. Every democrat has that right. All are welcome to the new aristocracy of the articulate. Welcome in particular are intelligent churchmen not in thrall to the powers that be.
Especially welcome are poets. “Squeeze, stretch, strike,” cries the new Primate, “and the equations, sweating, give their answers./ Turn up the heat and choke the roads: come/ to the edge of things and sounds . . . and leave a map vibrating in the cloud.” He is chiding physics, a metaphor for politics. More, please.
sjenkins@thetimes.co.uk
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