by Ian Paul, Psephizo
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has made a rather startling remark about Church bureaucracy. He was in a conversation at Unherd about evil and the demonic in culture—especially “the erosion of standards of truthfulness in public life and the normalisation of violence in word and deed”. And he was also worried about a church “too preoccupied with strategy — with schemes for solving problems — and not preoccupied enough with its own integrity as a community of witness and prayer.” Was this, too, demonic? “In a word, yes”, explaining that the diabolical is a “pull to the destructive and towards a kind of idolatry of the self and the corporate self and its well-being and security and control.”
At one level, I find William’s engagement here very refreshing, in that it takes seriously the spiritual dimension to the realities of the world around us. But his comments also highlight the problems that immediately arise in deploying this language in public debate. The interviewer, Freddie Sayers, challenges him: