Abstract
In the ‘Introduction’ to this collection of thoughtful speeches and essays the Archbishop gave as one responsible to be ‘some kind of commentator on the public issues of the day’, Williams identifies some of the unifying threads that run through this book. In particular he challenges the presumption that both those who justify and those who do not support the Church’s involvement in politics in the name of the ‘secular’ know what ‘secularism’ means. He thinks it quite important to distinguish procedural secularism, that is, the policy of government to give no advantage or preference to any one religious body, from programmatic secularism in which every public manifestation of any particular religious commitment is flattened out with the result that a public loyalty to the state becomes the norm.
Williams argues that Christians have no reason to reject the first kind of secularism. Indeed it is probably the case that just to the extent that Christianity is a religion of conversion, that is, to be a Christian is to choose to be different by being out of step with the culture to which you once belonged, the Church created and continues to make possible the secular state (p. 66). Because Christians insisted that a distinction must be drawn between communities that understand themselves to be faithful to a sacred power and political communities whose task is to sustain the arguments necessary to balance and manage the inevitable differences that constitute our lives procedural secularism was born.
Williams quite rightly locates this understanding of the secular with those political theorists of the English school such as J. N. Figgis and Harold Laski. According to Williams they made articulate and defended a commitment to a pluralist understanding of social life. Such a view understands the state as ‘a particular cluster of smaller political communities negotiating with each other under the umbrella of a system of arbitration recognized by all’ (p. 50). The law becomes particularly important in such a system just to the extent the law creates the conditions that allow diverse groups to pursue their different ways to understanding what the goods entails.
Though there are hints throughout these essays that Williams knows that this understanding of ‘pluralism’ is quite close to the Roman Catholic encyclical tradition he does not appeal to any of the Social Encyclicals in support of his position. He does, however, observe that the Roman Catholic Church emerged from the Reformation as a ‘resolutely international body’ but with no clear account of the legitimacy of the new states born after the Reformation. He suggests this led to the Enlightenment norm of universal secular legality in which public life is primarily understood as an attempt to balance equality and freedom now divorced from any religious sanctions (p. 77).
Williams’s deep worry is that the procedural secularism, and corresponding pluralist understanding of society and the state, he defends, is threatened by programmatic secularism. The latter, he fears, and one hears echoes of MacIntyre at this point, generates public policies dominated by an instrumental rationality that underwrites manipulative managerial practices. As a result any awareness of other persons as representatives of sensibilities that demand respect is lost. Liberal societies that should produce and sustain ways of life independent of the state are ‘in danger of behaving and speaking as if the only kind of human solidarity that really matters is that of the state’ (p. 32). Programmatic secularism in effect carries the seeds of a totalizing spirit that threatens to silence the voice of the other.
It is against this background that Williams’s understanding of the place of Islam in English society is best understood. Religious pluralism is essential if the state is to be maintained as a limited state. Accordingly the Archbishop of Canterbury, the representative of established Christianity, becomes the defender of the right of Muslims to order their life by their law. He is quite well aware, however, that Islam, which emphasizes the primacy of the umma, might in contrast to Christianity compete for the same space as the state. He observes that while it may be possible for a Muslim to enjoy citizenship in a non-Muslim society it is not clear what citizenship may mean for non-Muslims in a Muslim society.
Williams is, however, committed to what he calls ‘argumentative democracy’. The most determinative responsibility of the state and the law is to generate argument which at times may involve angry confrontations. The job of the state and the law is to allow and even encourage such argument which may mean at times that extreme behaviours must be punished if they threaten to silence the arguments we need to have. The necessity of such punishment must be shaped by fundamental commitments to human dignity that, Williams argues, is based on the Christian understanding of the sacredness of the other.
Thus the Christian conviction that no political order other than the Body of Christ can claim the authority of God turns out to be the necessary condition to prevent society and the state from becoming morally an ‘empty public square’. Though Williams briefly alludes to non-violence as constitutive of his understanding of the Church’s political mission (p. 95) we might have wished him to explore further what that might mean for the war-making function of the state. He quite rightly argues that the more religious people believe their convictions to be true the less likely they are to sanction violence, but he does not attempt to draw out the implications of that commitment in terms of, for example, the coercive character of the law.
Interestingly Williams uses his defence of ‘rights’ to develop what I take to be the heart of his position. As one long critical of ‘rights language’ I found his account of how rights are grounded in our recognition of our bodily character persuasive. Though he does not call attention to his understanding of the significance of the body in his ‘Introduction’ his understanding as well as defence of pluralism and argumentative democracy draws on his account of the body as a system of communication. The communication the body makes possible means the body is not simply one object among other objects and, therefore, should not be used as an instrument for imposing my will on others (p. 152).
That our bodies are not objects means, according to Williams, that we do not own our bodies. Accordingly he argues that respect for our own dignity and the dignity of others should not be grounded in some account of the distinctive structure of the human self. Such a grounding will always threaten those who lack certain human capabilities. In contrast Williams argues if the body is understood as a system of communication we better understand why we rightly acknowledge the rights of others. For rights are not based on claims made by individuals, but rather they are entailed by what makes possible ‘mutual recognition between human beings’ (p. 161). Such a recognition is made possible by the conviction that we are created in the image of God which means the language of rights may not be sustainable if that religious conviction is lost.
We could only wish Williams’s stress on the bodily character of language might have been developed more fully. In particular it would have been fascinating if Williams had engaged with the work of Herbert McCabe who worked out quite similar themes. Of course behind both Williams and McCabe is Wittgenstein. Williams signals this as several times he calls attention to Wittgenstein’s remark that to see the world as involving more than profit and functionality is to have a concept ‘forced on you’. Which means to arrive at a belief in God is seldom the result of a single thread of argument but rather the outcome of letting go of fictions of control such as the presumption that we ‘own’ our body, world and the future (pp. 5–6).
I have tried to locate the central themes that inform these diverse essays but by doing so I have not provided a sense of the wide range of topics Williams addresses in this book. Many reading the book will wonder how he ever found time to write about such a wide range of topics. I wonder when he found the time to do the reading necessary to write these essays. Either way, what he has given us is a remarkable achievement because these essays, particularly the essays on secularism and the law, reflect the practical wisdom that can only come from someone who has done their homework.
Williams brings to his analysis of the environmental crisis, economics, justice in community and questions of religious diversity a quite steely eye, making it possible to see through much of the overly heated rhetoric surrounding those issues. One of my favourite essays in the book is entitled, ‘The Gifts Reserved for Age: Perceptions of the Elderly’. In this chapter he suggests that those who have a picture of human life as a story that needs pondering will naturally want to hope for time enough to do that work. Accordingly, growing old will – or should – make the greatest creative demands on our lives (p. 245).
Williams ends the book by telling the story of Etty Hillesum whose journal attracted much attention precisely because of her ability to express her profound and complex relation with God in the midst of Nazi atrocities before dying in Auschwitz in 1943. To do so may seem strange in a book whose primary purpose is to assess Christian engagement with the public, but Williams contends that if persons like Etty Hillesum do not exist then we have no way to see what it means for God to be present to us. For Williams the question of faith in the public square is finally a question of truth, but it is a truth to be found in the lives of those like Etty Hillesum.
It would be a shame if this book is read primarily as a record of what the Archbishop of Canterbury thought when he was Archbishop. These are substantive essays that should be read by anyone concerned with the burgeoning field of political theology. In this book, Williams is not in conversation with Schmitt, Agamben or even Milbank, but what he has to say is no less relevant to the discourse taken up by those thinkers. We might have wished for the more radical implications of his position to have been made more explicit, but what he has given us he has given us. We should be grateful.