THE former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams is undoubtedly a silver-tongued orator; but the take-home metaphor from his contribution to The Reith Lectures (Radio 4 FM, Wednesday of last week) was more shabby than gilded.

The secular liberal world can be an oppressive environment, and the obligation to recognise faith is regarded by some as a nuisance. This is the “granny-flat view of tolerance”, which requires society to accommodate an irritating, obsolete ideology at the bottom of the garden until it dies off. It’s a wonderfully vivid image; well-rehearsed, but refreshingly direct all the same.

But his was a difficult subject: the freedom to worship. And by worship he was talking not just of Friday prayers or Sunday eucharist, but “the extended sense of shaping a life in public in response to what are believed to be the pressures of a reality beyond the immediate social context”. In play were all the controversies of gay cakes and crucifixes, equipped with the full arsenal of the culture wars.

On script, Lord Williams was elegant and persuasive. Who could doubt the common sense exuded by his advocacy of a “freedom to believe that certain human actions and policies derive their goodness or rightness not from consensus or even legality, but from something more lasting, something about the way things are”? Off script, there was a greater sense of jeopardy.

It was during the question period that the “granny flat” was evoked; and, in the Q&A came also the one moment of real vulnerability, when he was asked about the case of a B&B refusing lodging to a homosexual couple. “I find my sympathies are more enlightened,” came the initial, blustered response. For somebody who usually manages so deftly to avoid claiming for the liberal cause such disputed epithets (“progressive” being another), it was a rare lapse.

For any further lessons in diplomacy, the former Archbishop might like to go to John Rutter, the composer whose music is ubiquitous at this season of the year. To understand the extend of the cultural chasm that might have swallowed up the participants in last week’s Music Matters (Radio 3, Saturday), one must remember that the presenter, Tom Service, was for a time the artistic director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival — the rumpus room of the European musical avant-garde — while Dr Rutter is happy to admit that he writes “in the comfort zone”.

And, despite suffering early in his career critical alienation and contempt from the classical music mainstream, Dr Rutter is indefatigably charming, gracious, and self-aware. He was, he confessed to the presenter, a magpie composer, and proceeded to demonstrate how his much-loved “Star Carol” draws on Mozart, gospel music, and Harold Arlen’s “Somewhere over the rainbow”. And, as a composer working in the marketplace, he knows what is required of him. The choirs themselves, largely amateur, are his customers. His job is to write music that they want to sing.