CHRISTIAN relationships must not be further reduced to “vicious polemic and stony-faced litigation”, the Archbishop of Canterbury urged in a powerful presidential address in which he took both sides of the Communion debate to task. “Trust one another for your own good.”
Ways had to be found to decide contested issues which did not “simply write off the others in the debate as negligible, spiritually unserious or without moral claims”. Questions about the balance of liberties in society were “not best addressed in the megaphone tones we are all too used to hearing”.
Dr Williams drew parallels with national and international debates on the Equality Bill and the question of assisted dying. The basic conflict in the former was “not between a systematic assault on Christian values by a godless government on the one side and a demand for licensed bigotry on the other”.
The freedom of government to settle debated moral questions for the diverse communities of civil society was not something that should be endorsed too rapidly; nor should those communities try to determine for the whole of society which legal freedoms should be granted to any particular category of people.
What mattered was government acknowledgement that there was “a boundary that is risky to cross without creating ideological powers for the state that could be deeply dangerous for liberty in general”.
As for the Anglican Communion and homosexuality, he reminded the Synod of the global impact of both the freedom claimed by the US Episcopal Church to ordain a partnered homosexual bishop and the anti-gay legislation in Africa. It was not, he insisted, a “simple plea for the sacrifice of the minority to the majority”.
He once again defended the Covenant, as a means of holding the Communion together, though he accepted that it may create “a situation in which there are different levels of relationship between those claiming the name of Anglican”.
But without what he called a “three-dimensional” view of one’s opponents, people faced the prospect of being separated in the “zero-sum, self-congratulatory mode that some seem to be content with”, and the “anxious, self-protective image that is so much in danger of entrenching itself in the popular mind as the typical Christian position”.
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