On Easter Day, John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, will be standing up to his waist in water inviting allcomers to renounce the devil before plunging them in his open-air baptismal tank.

Last week he settled for renouncing John Hutton, secretary of state for business, enterprise and regulatory reform, who has said we need more millionaires and should celebrate the freedom to get rich.

“To celebrate wealth for its own sake is such a strange view,” says Sentamu. “We should celebrate creativity, people who expand our horizons to become more loving and more caring, not celebrate people who are driving big cars. Wealth creation is in order to improve the lives of all, not just for the individual.”

If he rejects the Gospel of John Hutton, he is nonetheless a firm believer in the Gospel of John Lewis, which last week announced profits of £379m and revealed that its 69,000 staff – partners in the business – will receive bonuses worth 10 weeks’ pay.

“That is what I am looking for: the John Lewis model,” he says. “It’s not about making more and more millionaires, because there is no evidence that these millionaires put back what they get out.”

Sitting on a sofa in the downstairs room of a tiny one-bed flat within the garden of Lambeth Palace, where he bases himself when in London, the second most senior figure in the Church of England pours the tea he has made.

Sentamu has no problem sounding authentic when it comes to talking about wealth and poverty. Born the sixth child of 13 in a village outside Kampala, Uganda, he did not get his first pair of shoes until he was a teen-ager. Supported by missionaries and teachers from Britain, he won a place at Makarere University and became a lawyer.

He expresses alarm at what he sees as a destructive attitude to money fostered now in the UK. His heroes are what he calls “the chocolate trinity” of 18th and 19th-century philanthropic Quaker entrepreneurs: Rowntree, Cadbury and Fry.

“They recognised that their workers had God-given opportunities, so they built schools for them and good homes. People said to them, ‘This is not how you make profit’, but they replied that a happy workforce will produce better goods.”

In case the message is not quite clear to those who want to celebrate wealth for its own sake, he brings up Jesus’s parable of the rich man who built bigger and bigger barns to store all his possessions.

“God said to him: you fool, your soul is required of you tonight . . . which means you are not going to be able to enjoy your wealth.” Not for him the carefully calibrated philosophical musings of Rowan Williams, his fellow archbishop, whose language is frequently misunderstood.

If Sentamu laments what he calls the “public lynching” of Williams over his lecture last month on sharia (Islamic law), he himself has become adept at playing the media.

When politicians were hand-wringing or holidaying after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, it was Sentamu who threw a media spotlight on international inaction by shaving his head, going on a fast and moving into a tent in his cathedral. In December, on BBC1’s Sunday morning politics show, he pulled off his clerical collar ( “symbol of my identity as a priest”) and theatrically cut it to bits before a bemused Andrew Marr.

Admittedly a slightly out-of-focus visual parable of Robert Muga-be’s destruction of the identity of Zim-babwe, it was all the more powerful given that Sentamu had himself been jailed by an African dictator. Idi Amin made him a Ugandan high court judge in 1973, when Sentamu was just 24.

Disliking displays of judicial independence, Amin then locked him up for three months. He has described being “kicked around like a football and beaten terribly”. Sometimes his grand gestures do not come off. The Church Commissioners turned down his proposal that the renovation of Bishopthorpe Palace, his official home in York, should include rooms for the homeless. But he did persuade them to recarpet the place with fair trade sisal.

The purchase funded schools in South Africa. If he now lives in a palace, his flight to Britain from Amin’s Uganda under threat of his life still informs the way Sentamu looks at the world – and at the UK’s current treatment of asylum seekers.

“When we arrived here we were treated with dignity, with love; and in the rest of the nation there was this sense of magnanimity, the will to meet another person,” he remembers, before drawing a sharp contrast with a recent visit to an immigration detention centre. “I found it shocking that you had failed asylum seekers in with foreigners about to be deported, people who had committed violent crime or were drug abusers. It was awful – it was not the Britain I believe in.”

At the root of public anxiety over immigration, he says, is Britain’s loss of identity since its loss of empire. He detects “a lack of knowing who we are as a people and as a nation”. People who lack a sense of identity “put up fences thinking they are living in safety; actually they are living in a prison of fear”.

He wants an honest debate about immigration that recognises that this small island cannot sustain everyone who wants to come here while making sure there is no discrimination against any group because of ethnicity, religion or colour. Sentamu arrived in Britain with a ready-formed sense of identity as a Christian and an Anglican. He took up theology at Cambridge and began his ascent through the ecclesiastical hierarchy. His real security, he says, comes from his identity in Christ.

“I don’t find any threat from a Muslim because I am a deeply committed Christian and my faith wants to treat them with dignity, love and care.” But with a grin he adds, knowing it’s not politically correct to say it: “Who knows, they may be converted in the process!”

While he believes that Britain has an identity crisis, he has no time for commentators who say the country is going to the dogs. It’s all about how you are disposed to read events, he says, and his disposition is sunny. A few weeks back his 20-year-old Ford Escort was stolen from the drive of Bishopthorpe. But the neighbours, he says, eyes ablaze with delight, recovered it for him.

The press would lead on the fact that an archbishop’s car had been stolen; he would rather that the headlines were about the common British decencies of his neighbours, he tells me.“We have lost a measured approach to life. Everything is exaggerated beyond belief which createsa sense of insecurity and worry, the politics of fear.”

The National Health Service and social security mark Britain out as one of the great places to live, but the media encourage people “to ingest a sense of despair and hope-lessness borne from stories which describe criminality, horror and cruelty”. Look no further than the treatment of Williams: “At its worst such blood-lust is reminiscent of that displayed at Tyburn Hill as the crowds gathered for public hangings.”

The criticism was pretty unanimous, I suggest; most people felt that the archbishop had made a serious misjudgment. “Lynch mobs are unanimous,” he shoots back. “But that doesn’t mean they are right. Majority never guarantees that the decision is right.”

It will be consensus not majority that both archbishops will be looking for at July’s Lambeth conference, when Anglican bishops from around the world – or at least the 70% who say they will attend – will attempt to come up with a way of disagreeing over same-sex blessings and the ordination of gay bishops to avoid the total break-up of the church.

If the more conservative of Africa’s bishops give Williams a hard time, he will have another African-born bishop at his side. They seem an unlikely pair to be friends, let alone leading the church: “Rowan uses different words from me, that’s true, but a Welsh guy and an African guy – we get on because what drives both of us is the same.”

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