The Background to Williams’s Political Thought

In 1984, Rowan Williams wrote an essay on ‘Liberation Theology and the Anglican Tradition’ where he discussed the impact of what was then a relatively new theological movement and how it might affect the Church of England. He delineates a number of obvious differences between English Anglicanism and the sort of political theology that had developed in Latin America. First, he notes the established nature of the Church of England and the ‘assumption of absolute givenness in the political structure’.Footnote 1 On this sort of model, which was obviously central to the origin of the Church of England in its break with Rome, and which was maintained in the nineteenth century by F.D. Maurice (among many others), the Church cannot govern ‘precisely because it is not a body separable from the state’.Footnote 2 For much of Anglican history, there was a harmonious and singular vision of church and state as one body. Within the Church of England significant critics of this understanding of church and state emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whom, including Charles Gore and other Anglo-Catholics, clamoured for a ‘free church in a free state’.Footnote 3 This separatist movement obviously carried with it certain political implications.

According to Williams, the most important theorist in this development was the scholar-monk John Neville Figgis, who differentiated between two forms of political authority. Figgis was one of the so-called English Political Pluralists, who included among their number G.D.H. Cole and Harold Laski (although both later changed their minds), and who were active in the early years of the twentieth century.Footnote 4 Although the Political Pluralists drew on the writings of earlier figures, most importantly the German legal historian, Otto von Gierke, they developed an understanding of the state based on a very different model of sovereignty from that maintained by opponents such as John Austin. Figgis thus differentiated between two forms of authority. On the one hand, he described a form of absolutist sovereignty, which manifested itself in the idea that all forms of association — including the church — were granted by the sovereign’s will.Footnote 5 On the other hand, however, he also outlined a theory of association where the voluntary corporation rather than the sovereign state was understood as the primary political unit. Figgis’s principal contribution to political theory was his application of the theory of associations to the organization and role of churches in his ground breaking Churches in the Modern State.Footnote 6 On this model, Williams writes:

For Figgis, as for Williams, federalism and decentralization become the hallmarks of such a system of politics, political arrangements that were hinted at in the conciliar movements of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Footnote 8 Although the Reformation period saw a resurgence and to some extent a triumph of absolute sovereignty, particularly among rulers like Henry VIII, Francis I and Philip II, Williams suggests (again with Figgis) that the religiously monolithic state has completely broken down since the Enlightenment. This means that in the modern world churches, including the Church of England, have become voluntary organizations to which nobody can be compelled to belong. Consequently, Williams claims, the only ‘ground upon which the Church of England can now justify its existence … is a federalist theory of ecclesiastical unity and authority’. This carries with it implicit political implications, since, as Williams puts it, ‘[w]e cannot consistently be federalists in our ecclesiology and absolutists in our politics’. For this reason, he suggests provocatively: ‘It might even be said that the Anglican Christian has a peculiarly direct reason for adopting a strongly syndicalist view of political power and of the rights of associations over against an encroaching state.’Footnote 9 And it need hardly be said that for an archbishop in an established church this is a very bold claim (although admittedly he said it a long time before he was elevated to Canterbury).

In such a system, the state’s role is to work out a system of justice and to ‘rectify imbalances’. The state thereby becomes an arbitrator, rather than as a commanding sovereign. While in the end it might have to exercise sovereign power, this is conferred on the state by the participating parties, rather than by nature. According to Williams, this means that Figgis turns the Anglican synthesis of church and state on its head. Gone are the old organic unity and pre-established harmonies of the sovereign state, and in their place emerges a political system that is more about negotiation and pluralism than about absolutism and sovereignty. Williams’s 1984 essay provides a preliminary statement of a number of guiding themes that have shaped his approach to theology and political theory ever since,Footnote 10 and which have re-emerged in his time as archbishop. However, perhaps not surprisingly — in 1984 there is no mention of Islam or other religions.Footnote 11 In the intervening 20 years or so there has been a recognition by many church leaders of the importance of the need to understand and engage with the other faith communities present in the multi-faith society of contemporary Britain. Indeed, it would be fair to say that in his application of pluralist thought to modern society, Williams has been one of the first Christian leaders to move to a level of sophisticated theological thought about multiculturalism.

Despite the changes of the past 20 years, there is a strong sense of continuity in Williams’s writings. He remains deeply inspired by Figgis and has developed this at length in many of his recent lectures on multi-faith society in modern Europe. Although he no longer uses the term ‘syndicalism’ — which is probably just as well given its association with anarchism — there is much in his theory of what he calls ‘interactive pluralism’ that owes its origin to the English pluralist tradition of the early twentieth century. For instance, in a lecture given to the European Institutions in 2005, Williams writes:

Interactive Pluralism

The clearest exposition of ‘interactive pluralism’ that Williams has offered so far during his time as archbishop is his David Nicholls Memorial Lecture.Footnote 13 Williams used Nicholls’s own discussions of Figgis and other pluralists including Nicholls himselfFootnote 14 to outline his own approach to the relationship between state and what he calls ‘first-level’ associations.Footnote 15 Regarding Figgis and others as still offering a ‘powerful analysis’,Footnote 16 he observes that the role of the state is principally that of brokerage, in order to provide

This means that the lawful democratic state is not concerned principally with a delegation of authority from above, but rather with ensuring that the interests of the ‘first-level’ communities are ‘both recognized and effectively brokered, so that none of these communities is threatened in its pursuit of the social good by others’.Footnote 18 Because it is no longer an absolute, this means, according to this pluralist model, that

The state thus exists in virtue of the free consent of the members of the ‘first-level’ organizations who have accorded to it the role of arbitration and balance. It will facilitate ‘co-operation through its own sponsorship and partnership’.Footnote 20 In turn this leads on to a kind of subsidiarity but — and here it stands in contrast to the use of the word in most British political discourse — one in which the reference is always upwards rather than downwards.Footnote 21

The role of the state in a complex society will thus be twofold: first, it will have an interest ‘in securing the liberty of groups to pursue their own social goods’, and second, it will have ‘an interest in building into its own processes a set of cautions and defences against absolutism’.Footnote 22 On the one hand, then, the lawful state ensures that basic human dignity is preserved and life is safeguarded, while, on the other hand, it ‘embodies the possibility of its being held to account; it denies its own invulnerability from criticism’. This means that its ‘sovereignty is not a claim to be the source of law, but the agreed monopoly of legal force and a recognition of where the ultimate court of appeal is to be located for virtually all practical and routine purposes’.Footnote 23 This means that the state will guard against what has been called ‘repressive tolerance’, that is, as Williams suggested (in a different context) ‘an intellectually idle and morally frivolous prohibition against raising uncomfortable questions’ about truth. Never, however, is the state the sole source of authority or truth or beyond criticism.Footnote 24

Within this pluralist system the role of the Church and the Christianity it represents is complex. Williams regards the political role of churches as principally that of deflating the claims of the state, of reminding it that its role is primarily that of negotiation or balance rather than sovereignty or command. He claims that no state can ever be accorded absolute authority for one simple reason:

The true sovereign is Christ and no other claims to authority can ever hope to compete. Indeed, Williams regards this as inherent in Christianity through history, even when it appeared most authoritarian. As he claimed in a recent lecture given in Liverpool on ‘Europe, Faith and Culture’:

In the end, it was the cross that led to the sceptical tendency in all Christianity. This meant that the Christian should be ‘wary of any such universal sovereignty as of any sacred claims for this or that national polity. There is, ultimately, only one sovereignty which is theologically grounded, and that is Christ’s’.Footnote 27 Consequently, according to Williams, there would always be an ambiguity in the relationship between church and state. It comes as no surprise then that he writes: ‘Christianity has a mixed history of relation with political power. It has always been a complex balance’.Footnote 28 It needs both to engage with power, but also to retain a sceptical distance. In this way it becomes a kind of critical friend or conversation partner with the state and its laws.

Given his denial of absolutism and sovereignty, Williams has an ambiguous relationship with political liberalism. In particular, he is deeply suspicious of universalistic versions of liberalism, which suppose that the liberal state has the responsibility to dictate and define all forms of human identity in terms of a monolithic centrally imposed system. In his Chatham Lecture, for instance, he characterizes the problems of secularism:

At the same time, however, Williams recognizes that the critical impulse behind ‘interactive pluralism’ also emerges from the questioning of authority, which has been the great triumph of the political liberalism that emerged in Europe in the Enlightenment, but which has its seeds much earlier in history. Indeed, he claims, what is best in liberalism is what is best in Christianity, since ultimately interactive pluralism is founded on Europe’s Christian heritage. He consequently writes of the virtues of political liberalism that they ‘will survive best if they are seen as the outgrowth of the historic European tensions about sovereignty, absolutism, and the integrity of local communities that were focused sharply by the Christian church and its theology —a theology that encouraged scepticism about any final political settlement within history’.Footnote 30 An ironic detachment from all systems is thus at the heart of Christian political theology. This results in the ‘readiness to question in the name of a something more that God alone opens up and makes possible’. Williams consequently suggests:

At the same time, the Christian faith in the equality and dignity of all human beings as created in the image of God helps guard against the loss of a conviction that there is a ‘common hope and vocation for human beings, such that the welfare or salvation of one section of humanity cannot be imagined as wholly different from or irrelevant to that of the rest of the race’.Footnote 32

According to Williams’s understanding of theology, the political role of the Church is understood principally as that of calling the state to account by ‘obstinately asking the state about its accountability and the justification of its priorities’. The liberal state is thus obliged to listen if it is not to turn secularism into ‘another tyranny’.Footnote 33 Here again Williams moves to a discussion of the role of the state as mediator and ‘space-maker’ rather than sovereign. The key role of the Church is to ensure that the state claims nothing more. If that is the case then the state will be primarily that place

The alternative, which is maintained by those who regard religious communities as little more than private arrangements between consenting adults, will lead to exclusion and ghettoization, even to what the Bishop of Rochester has recently and rather hysterically called ‘no-go areas’. Nazir-Ali’s solution amounts to a return to Christianity as the historic English public faith with little regard to pluralism or seeing other religions as ‘first-level’ communities of equivalent status.Footnote 35

In distinction, Williams holds that what is key to human identity is not a vague sense of Britishness or Europeanism, but a solidarity that emerges from the primary unit of socialization, which, for many, will be their religion. Thus he writes:

Interactive pluralism thus becomes a way to ensure participation in the political process by respecting other cultures and religions as agents of identity, and drawing them into a wider debate negotiated cautiously by the institutions of the state, most obviously the democratic process itself, at the local, national, and international level. As Williams put it in his Chatham lecture:

In this way, European politics will mature into what Williams calls ‘effective partnership with the component communities of the state, including religious bodies’. European politics, he claims, will thus

Williams’s recent Royal Courts Lecture,Footnote 39 which provoked much ill-informed criticism, is a further example of ‘interactive pluralism’, which Williams explains (in a different context) as ‘a situation in which difference is publicly acknowledged and given space, but not regarded as an excuse for “ghettoization” or exclusion from a serious degree of shared work, shared resources and mutual responsibility’.Footnote 40 Interactive pluralism is consequently hard work and requires constant testing. As will be shown in the next section, it is in this broader context that the lecture needs to be understood.

Islam

The Royal Courts Lecture was an intelligent and wide-ranging discussion of some of the key issues involved in the reciprocal relationships between religious communities and the wider society. It touched on the themes of sovereignty, particularly as expressed through law. Williams’s primary aim was to ensure that dialogue with Islam is maintained as the pluralist state negotiates space for all religious groups. As it does this, however, it needs to protect freedom, while at the same time fostering minority religious participation in the political process. However, although he was specifically addressing Islam, the lecture has implications for any faith group, including the churches. In contemporary Britain all such groups are ‘first-level associations’, and as such, and like the other constituent groups that make up society, all are voluntary organizations. In modern Europe all religious communities are minority communities. This means that they are forced to co-exist, but also to engage with one another within certain limits that are circumscribed and negotiated by the state. At the same time, however, ‘first-level’ associations are public and political rather than private societies. They provide a primary — sometimes the only — source of socialization and identity.

Despite the nostalgic attachment to establishment by some, and the implausible designation of a Christian Europe by others, Williams holds that in practice all religions will need to address these issues.Footnote 41 This makes criticism from within the church at the very least disingenuous, since all religious people are in practice in much the same boat. In an ill-judged article in the Sunday Telegraph,Footnote 42 for instance, George Carey concludes with an aside that, since Muslims constitute a mere three per cent of the population, the proposals set out by Williams would be like using a ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’. What he fails to observe, however, is that this percentage is higher than the number of practising Anglicans. Williams’s question is thus vital for all religions. He consequently asks as to ‘what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes’. On his model of interactive pluralism it affects Christians as well as members of the minority faiths, since Christians too are inevitably a ‘minority community’.Footnote 43 As Williams wrote earlier in his Chatham lecture:

In the complex society of modern Britain the answers cannot be straightforward. In particular, any discussion of Islam is especially sensitive, as is demonstrated by the hysteria that greeted the lecture. However, the lecture fits into Williams’s overall political framework. While complex, his central argument is clear. First, drawing on recent scholarship, he shows that sharia law is not a monolithic system but is always related to context. This means that there does not have to be a ‘standoff between two rival legal systems when we discuss Islamic and British law’. Secondly, wherever there is a recognition that Islam co-exists alongside other faiths (and none), then any acceptance of sharia law will need to be a free choice on the part of those belonging to the Islamic community (and the same would hold true for members of other religions in choosing their own laws). Drawing on the writings of Tariq Ramadan, Williams had earlier made this point in his lecture on ‘Religion, Culture, Diversity and Tolerance’:

Ramadan even suggests that Islam shares a similar critique of the state to Christianity. He writes: ‘the Muslim distinction between religious and social authority, between what is enjoined for the good of the soul and what is ordered for the stability of an external environment, is really much the same as the Christian distinction between church and state’. Islam is not restricted to primitive and fundamentalist forms. Instead, Williams claims:

For this reason a Muslim (as well as the practitioner of any other religion) will have a dual or multiple (sometimes called a ‘hybrid’) identity. This means that there will inevitably be a degree of ‘political plurality’ where our ‘social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging’.Footnote 46

For Williams, there are two related dangers that might emerge if this dialogue with Islam is not attempted: on the one hand, failure to engage might lead to the growth of those religious groups who see any participation in the political process as a kind of betrayal, while, on the other hand, it might strengthen those who regard the secular government as solely responsible for the construction of public identity. Understanding the complex relationships between religious groups and legal and state authority is thus crucial. For this reason the law of the land needs to be clear about precisely what counts as a matter of religious conscience, which brings with it important issues concerning the social and economic status of minority communities and their access to the political process.

This leads Williams on to the problem first, of the place of ‘religious scruple’ in legal cases, which requires a sensitivity to the religious and cultural ‘construction of people’s identities’. It becomes imperative that there is some way of distinguishing between cultural habits and ‘seriously rooted matters of faith and discipline’. If there were to be more latitude given to ‘rights and scruples rooted in religious identity’ there would also need to be an enhanced Muslim legal council to interpret and decide in such matters. Secondly, and more controversially, Williams moves on to discuss the area of ‘supplementary jurisdiction’ and its relationship with the universal law of the land. He is clear that there needs to be a way of safeguarding it from simply ‘reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive and retrograde elements in them’. In a plural society there can be no question of taking away rights that are acknowledged as universally valid, or deny the citizen access to the law. Recognizing a supplementary jurisdiction, he writes, ‘cannot mean recognizing a liberty to exert a sort of local monopoly in some areas’. Political plurality consequently means that citizenship will consist of a complex set of identities. Quoting a Jewish legal theorist, he suggests that we need to ‘work to overcome the ultimatum of “either your culture or your rights” ’.

Williams’s third problem concerns the commitment to legal monopoly, which is firmly established in European legal systems. While this is central to issues of protection and equality of access to the law, at the same time it fails adequately to grasp the complexities of ‘multiple affiliation’.Footnote 47 The key point here is the confusion that arises from seeing law as a protection for the citizen as somehow implying that the sovereign state authority has the responsibility for permitting all other levels of identity to exist. Religion would then be a secondary association, or even a purely private matter. Politically this is dangerous principally because it leads to a ghettoized form of social life —religion, which is far more than a set of private beliefs and which is key to human identity, would nevertheless be lived out behind closed doors and beyond the reach of the law. In the pluralist state, according to Williams, law should protect all citizens and consequently monitor the rules and activities which members of religious communities use to regulate their affairs — this is a crucial point in that it prevents the creation of ‘mutually isolated communities’ where individuals are constrained purely by their communities and traditions and where there can be no public redress. Law consequently functions as a kind of regulatory framework, ‘a way of honouring what in the human constitution is not captured by any one form of corporate belonging or any particular history’. Put simply, in a pluralist context religion is not a private activity but is a complex political identity that lives in an uneasy symbiotic relationship with the wider society.

This leads Williams to some tentative conclusions: the essentially liberating vision of universal human rights, he claims, is not imperilled by a loosening of its monopolistic framework. Instead in complex plural societies there is a need for ‘transformative accommodation’ where in carefully circumscribed matters ‘power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents’. This system will be complex and fraught with difficulties. But an over-rigid application of a monopolistic framework is worse. It can have the effect of ‘ghettoizing and effectively disenfranchising a minority: both jurisdictional parties may be changed by their encounter over time, and we avoid the sterility of mutually exclusive monopolies’. While many secularists find it hard to defend faith schools, Williams suggests that they ‘bring communal loyalties into direct relation with the wider society and inevitably lead to mutual questioning and sometimes mutual influence towards change, without compromising the distinctiveness of the essential elements of those communal loyalties’.Footnote 48 Elsewhere he writes: