The Telegraph: Removing the State from Rowan Williams

The Archbishop of Canterbury said something stupid. What is to be done about it? There is now a fusillade of demands for his resignation rather as if he were a Chancellor of the Exchequer whose fatally bad judgment had undermined the economy.

In almost any other country in the world, this would seem bizarre but here, the parallel is apt.

The head of the Church of England is a political figure. Founded as a conscious bulwark against the Roman outfit to which the nation's enemies owed allegiance, the Anglican Church must play out its uncomfortable, anomalous role.

Dr Rowan Williams's latest pronouncements are, in a sense (or should I say, "in a very real sense"?) a peculiarly frank expression of the messy overlap between matters of state and of faith that is its remit. And, as so often happens with well-intentioned attempts at appeasement and compromise with the unacceptable, Dr Williams's intervention has made it clear how untenable all this now is.

The archbishop has discredited not just himself, and the über-tolerant multicultural lobby that he sought to support, but the position of the established Church. Read more
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