In praise of Justin Welby’s ‘less bossy’ Church of England

Justin Welby is not my sort of Anglican. Or maybe he is, in a way. I’m not really sure who he is. And I don’t mean that entirely negatively.

When he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church seemed to be opting for cheesy banality after the intellectual roller-coaster of his predecessor, Rowan Williams. It was a slightly dangerous roller-coaster, to be sure, with some alarming rusty bits, and stomach-plunging drops, but always interesting. 

Welby looked like a beta male from the Alpha course, the slick evangelical outfit led by public school officer-class types. I had my gripes about Williams, but he seemed a Hyperion to this satyr.

I have moved to a more nuanced view. Welby might not be an illustrious theologian, but he is no fool. He might have no compelling vision for the Church’s renewal, or even survival, but nor does he offer easy answers like most of his fellow evangelicals. He seems steeped in the good-humoured, self-deprecating honesty that the Church is still known for, just about. And maybe this goes beyond style: maybe he is surprisingly in touch with the liberal Anglican tradition that I favour. 

My reflections are prompted by a couple of remarks he made in a speech this week. The decline of Britain’s Christian culture, he said, ‘is not all bad, for churches are ruined when wealth and power lead them to self-reliance. I rejoice in less of a bossy attitude, and of the church stepping back from telling everybody what to do, here and elsewhere.’ 

He then said that society was in danger of further fragmentation. We need ‘leadership towards a consensus on the agreed values of the society…There have to be boundaries that are known, owned, applied and understood. The remorseless decline of religious views in the west, I would say especially of Christianity, is both a cause and an effect of the breakdown in agreed values.’

This sounds like healthy realism about the secular assumptions of British culture. Instead of yearning for a strong Church to re-order our culture, we should be honest that the sort of order it needs cannot come from religion, at least in the short run. We need stronger shared values – ones that a Muslim and an atheist can sign up to. We need a robust inclusive liberal culture, in other words.

This is exactly what Rowan Williams did not say. He said that non-religious shared values were an illusion, a neo-liberal trick. He drank deep of the ‘postliberal’ solution, indeed he helped to brew it up in the first place. In this view, the only hope for society comes from religious traditions daring to be themselves, in the face of liberal assumptions. He would have bristled at Welby’s criticism of the Church’s ‘self-reliance’, fearing that this opens the door to its dilution by the arrogant liberal state.

So I repent, a bit, of my initial opinion of Welby. In a mild, muddled way, he seems to be conscious of the Church of England’s deep affinity with the liberal state. I hesitate to say it, for it sounds crassly anti-intellectual, but his sensible approach to religion and liberal society owes a lot to his detachment from academic theology.

Around 1990, British theology was taken over by a brainiac movement that resembles the rise of Brexitism in the Tory party. It was rooted in a post-Marxist antipathy to liberalism, seen as a veneer for capitalist individualism. Williams’ undoubted intellectual heft was infected by this virus – and it still enthrals many younger Anglican intellectuals. His less bookish successor has restored some balance. In theology, a lot of learning can be a dangerous thing.