What Rowan Williams gets wrong about democracy

Rowan Williams used his Reith lecture on religious liberty to make a plea to religious believers: don’t be afraid of being an awkward misfit. The former Archbishop of Canterbury called on believers to challenge the social consensus – even on contentious issues like gay marriage.

His view is that religion is not a private affair, but impinges on public life. It does so, he said this week, in ways that the liberal order will find annoying, even disruptive. Believers appeal to transcendent truths beyond the ‘prevailing social consensus’, according to Williams. As a result, he said, they are rightly wary of an order whose only basis is human law, which is defined by majority opinion. But, he added, religious has a key role to play in standing against ‘the absolutism of the status quo’, and against majoritarianism, whether secular or religious. It is through such dissent that great moral advances are made, Williams suggested; it takes a minority with a profound conviction to challenge the prevailing consensus of the day.