The Lead this morning at the Episcopal Cafe directs me to Theo Hobson in The Tablet. In a piece entitled “Quiet voice of modernity’s enemy,” Hobson characterizes the Archbishop of Canterbury as an old fashioned Anglo-Catholic whose championing of gay rights in the 1990s “made him seem the liberal he never really was.” Hobson’s commentary on the ABC’s now famous remarks about sharia law incorporate a reading of Dr. Williams that is substantially like my own. What I have interpreted as a kind of theological toryism, Hobson reads as “anti-liberal ecclesiology”:

The liberal state, in this view, offers itself as an alternative community of salvation; it tempts us into supposing that we can dispense with the Church, or at least water it down, and develop a more progressive form of Christianity. This leads to weak forms of Christianity that are unable to resist dangerous ideologies: most obviously, the liberal Protestants of Germany embraced Nazism.

I think it’s at least worth pointing out that it was a coalition of liberal states that ultimately defeated Nazism and that notable Catholics, including Pius XII and Martin Heidegger made highly problematic alliances with the fascists. It’s also true that European Christianity whether Catholic or Protestant has deep and abiding anti-Semitic roots. It was the public idealism associated with liberal politics that ultimately stood against Hitler. Perhaps the Quakers can lay claim to a record without shame with respect to the murder of European Jewry, but no other Christian group can.

Hobson pictures the Archbishop as an anti-modern thinker who regards secularism as the enemy of the human spirit. According to Hobson, the Archbishop has argued that secularism “shuns comprehensive visions of human good,” whereas “[r]eligion addresses the whole human being.”

He sees his role, then, as defender of the various subcultural spaces that resist the logic of secularism, the enclaves within our culture where fully human meaning is made. And of course these are not only Christian. In a curious way his vision echoes Prince Charles’ declaration that he would like to be the defender of faith rather than the faith. He wants to be the defender of the endangered cultural space that insists on the priority of God. If the Muslim form of such space is tied up with sharia law, we must try to accommodate this.

I wonder what the Archbishop would say about a story such as that which Nafisi tells in Reading Lolita in Tehran, or about the novels of Chaim Potok. For better or worse, freedom has meant more often than not in modern, pragmatic terms: breaking out of a constricting, dehumanizing, religious tradition. Outside the ancient world, and that only briefly until Christians came into their own politically, the historical instances in which established Christian communities have advocated for justice and human liberty are few and far between, almost nonexistent until modern times with the rise of modern secular tyranny. We have reread Luther and made him an enlightenment hero, but that image will not withstand a careful perusal of Christian Liberty, not to mention Against the Jews and Their Lies.

To argue that religious communities have a unique ability to entertain “comprehensive visions of human good” flies in the face of too much history to be taken seriously. And even in those cases where Christian critiques have influenced social change, as in the modern abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, they have done so in the face of serious and determined opposition from religious groups defending the established tyranny. The history of sectarian groups demanding freedom is long, but with few exceptions and some of those problematic, these same sectarian groups have shown themselves quite capable of instituting tyrannies of their own once they attained political power. Americans need look no further than the history of Massachusetts for an instance.

And one more thing. The Archbishop acknowledges a certain difficulty with sharia law in a modern political system suggesting that it “could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women.” If these minority communities were to be restrained from honor killings, etc., what would be the basis of such restraint? Indeed what is the basis for the ABC’s own critique in the sentence I have just quoted? I suggest the basis will be found in the very principles of secular, positive, law that the Archbishop seems to find problematic. And if we’re talking about teasing out “some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state,” we’re talking about a secular negotiation that can only be conceived of inside the framework of the very liberal politics the ABC opposes, or seems to oppose.

Hence, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks about sharia law, though seriously bothersome to me as an anglican, seem quite logical coming from a thinker whose public statements (as I have argued elsewhere in these pages) seem to indicate a political preference for established social practice over the interest of the oppressed. It’s nice to discover an analysis, such as Hobson’s in The Tablet, that seems to agree. But it’s also interesting to see the Archbishop broadening his approach to established practice to include a defense of freedom for marginalized groups, even if he is pretty selective of the marginalized he chooses to defend. And I don’t think this is necessarily bad. As background for my argument and Hobson’s, I might recommend reading the Archbishop’s speeches entitled “Faith Communities in a Civil Society – Christian Perspectives,” delivered last September and “Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective,” delivered to the Royal Courts of Justice last week.