In an agenda-setting speech, his first since taking up office at the start of the month, Dr Williams showed the depths of his determination to advance an intellectual agenda and make the Church of England a powerhouse at the centre of the debate about politics and morality.

The speech, delivered to an audience of politicians, academics, church leaders, newspaper editors and other opinion formers in Central London, was one of the most intellectually ambitious and far-reaching speeches from an Archbishop of Canterbury for 30 years.

In his speech, the Dimbleby Lecture, which will be broadcast on BBC One tonight, Dr Williams argued that without religion “our whole politics is likely to be in deep trouble”.

He said it was inevitable that governments can no longer deliver in terms of setting out a moral basis for ordinary citizens to live their lives by.

While governments are successful at encouraging enterprise and consumerism to an unprecedented degree, they are no longer capable of guaranteeing long-term security.

He made it clear that he believes that in a post-September 11 world, it is God that has to define how we live rather than our political leaders.

At the press conference to mark his nomination earlier this year Dr Williams spoke of his determination to “recapture the imagination of our culture for Christianity”. His lecture was an indication of how he intends to set about doing that.

Dr Williams took as his starting point The Shield of Achilles, a seminal work describing how the traditional model of the nation-state is being superseded by the market-state, by the American academic and former White House adviser, Philip Bobbitt.

He said that we were living in a period “where the basic assumptions about how states work are shifting.” He said: “The idea that’s being increasingly canvassed is that we are witnessing the end of the nation-state, and that the nation-state is being replaced in the economically-developed world by what some call the market-state.”

A new form of political administration has arisen in which the idea of being a citizen and a politician has changed. Where the job of those who ran the state was once seen as guaranteeing the general good of the community, the state no longer has the power to keep its side of the bargain. The international power of the markets and consumers meant that any one country is unable to guarantee employment — one indication of how things have shifted.

In addition there are “sinister implications” in the revolution in electronic communication, with international conspiracy harder to detect and frustrate. “Al-Qaeda and similar networks inhabit a virtual world, not an identifiable headquarters in a single place.”

The deregulation involved in the new political mode has meant “the withdrawal of the state from many of those areas where it used to bring some kind of moral pressure to bear,” he said.

Dr Williams described how the educational system, despite the best efforts of teachers, is empty of vision.

He said: “It means that government is free to encourage enterprise but not to protect against risk, to try and increase the literal and metaphorical purchasing power of citizens, but not to take for granted anything much in the way of agreement about common goals or social good.”

One “worrying sign” of this underlying philosophy was the way successive governments have dealt with education, with the emphasis on parental choice and the publication of results. He conceded these in themselves were not “social evils”. But he said: “They also fit all too neatly into the consumer model and allow the actual philosophy of education itself to be obscured behind a cloud of sometimes mechanical criteria of attainment.”

Dr Williams, a fan of The Simpsons, illustrated his connection to popular culture with a reference to how a society without deeper meaning behind its culture can lose itself in repetitive behaviour from which it never learns. “Groundhog Dayis a comic horror, but a real enough one: we know how easily we can get stuck in repeating patterns.”

This was a further argument for society’s need for Christianity because it gave people the historical background and morality not to be forever repeating mistakes.

Dr Williams said that modern politics was about sating consumer needs. “The unspoken model of political expectation now is increasingly the consumerist one: the individual confronts the state, asking for what is promised — maximal choice, purchasing power to determine a lifestyle. Policies that restrict lifestyle choices are electoral suicide.” He accused politicians of only concentrating on the short term, bouncing from one election to the next.

Religious belief could fill the vaccuum, he said. “If specifically religious tradition has a place here, it is because of those elements that only religious conviction seems to secure in our sense of what is human. To see or know anything adequately is to be aware of its relation to the eternal,” he said. “Without that relativising moment, our whole politics is likely to be in deep trouble.”

The challenge for religious communities is how to offer a vision as a way of opening up some of the depth of human choices, he added.

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