Yet another article praising Rowan Williams in this morning’s Times. He is the outstanding candidate to become Archbishop of Canterbury. No journalist has seriously argued otherwise, no matter what bias they started with. The more closely he has been examined, the better his chances have become.
This is clear, I think, to everyone except professional Christians. Williams stands for everything the present Archbishop, Dr George Carey, has been trying with great success to eliminate from the Church of England. Yet if anyone else gets the job, he will be crippled from the start by the perception among broadsheet newspaper readers — who are the core constituency of the C of E — that he is a second-rater forced on the church by lobby groups.
The thing about Williams is that he talks and acts as if what he believes were true — not true in a special religious way, but in the same banal and dependable way that it is true that everything is made of molecules, or that your train to Waterloo will be late today. OK, because he is an intellectual, he has complicated and interesting views on Christian truths. But he has complicated and interesting views on molecules and train timetables too.
Almost everyone else in the race talks about Christian doctrine and practice with a special cut-off part of their mind. Ask a straight question of them, and they squirt jargon like a panicked octopus, or they produce some crashing banality. Some, of course, can manage both tricks at once.