Holy sage

There is an old Jewish proverb that if God came to earth, people would start smashing His windows. After an initial period of loving Rowan Williams, the press and the Church are beginning to have their doubts. The man who was hailed as the complicated Welsh poet and the much longed-for Intellectual in Public Life is now a Welsh Windbag who can control neither the openly gay bishops in America nor the conservative evangelicals at home. He has dismayed his former liberal friends by supporting, a little oddly, it must be said, a measure in the Synod (heavily defeated in the event) which would have brought back heresy trials to the Church. At the same time, he still wants to be gentle and understanding over the issue of gay sex, so he hasn’t really won any friends among the Bible-bashers. As well as the evangelicals, the usual suspects among right-wing journalists now line up to denounce him — Peter Hitchens, the Revd Peter Mullen and so on — because of his supposed weakness on such subjects as Hell, Islam and other matters.