Paul Elie, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has written a lengthy and mostly well-informed profile of Rowan Williams for the March issue of The Atlantic.

He makes some noteworthy errors, writing that Williams was “elected archbishop of Canterbury in 2002 by the other bishops on a wave of enthusiasm like the one that would later carry Barack Obama into the White House, rooted in surprise that such a person—brilliant, decent, happily married, forward-looking—had reached the top without selling his soul.”

Williams was indeed received with enthusiasm, but he was appointed rather than elected. It is amusing, though, to see an American writer reverse an error of many British journalists, who forget that bishops of The Episcopal Church are elected rather than appointed.

Elie shows no signs of having spoken with a conservative, so he mistakenly accepts Giles Fraser’s poorly informed belief that conservative Episcopalians built coalitions with African Anglicans in response to the nomination of Jeffrey John to become a suffragan bishop for Reading. The coalitions began in the run-up to the Lambeth Conference of 1998.

Worse, Elie takes at face value Fraser’s attempt at knowing the motivations of conservatives, which he of course assumes are sinister:

Fraser says those in America and England cared nothing about the views of the bishops of Africa until they saw the chance for an alliance against the progressives. They took up the ordination of gay bishops as a wedge issue, and made a show of unity; they claimed that a pro-gay agenda was a new form of imperialism against the global South. “They drafted the Church of Nigeria, with its numerical strength, as a way of raising a ruckus over it. They got the white man’s guilt going. The Internet sped it along.” And it worked. “Rowan backpedaled,” Fraser said. “He asked Jeffrey John to resign.”

Elie makes a fairly convincing case that Archbishop Williams stands by what he wrote in “The Body’s Grace,” which he delivered as an address the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in 1989. Elie depicts Williams almost as a prisoner of his office, unable to speak his mind freely. He devotes inadequate attention to the archbishop’s frequently expressed distinction between writing “The Body’s Grace” as an academic and working for the Anglican Communion’s unity as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Nevertheless, Elie’s essay is important reading as Anglicans seek to better understand the archbishop’s thinking and leadership style.
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Doug,
Thanks for this quite interesting interview about Rowan.  And I really appreciate your introductory comments.  They helped me to frame the discussion and notice things I would otherwise have missed in a quick reading of the interview.

So, is this going to show up at GetReligion? (‘cause it should)

I had very nearly the same reaction that Doug did. There’s a lot of Williams being shown, but the article is heavily colored by reportorial bias that seems in part to arise out of a limited selection of sources. (Fraser’s theory on the Afro-American alliance is amusingly Anglocentric, if nothing else.) However, there is this nice money quote:

“That essay is my contribution, made in good faith at that time. Now my responsibilities are different. The responsibility is not to argue a case from the top or cast the chairman’s vote. It’s to hold the reins for a sensible debate—and that’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

What he says here is exactly how I interpreted his actions: that as custodian for the communion as a whole, his job is to speak for the church, not for himself. And that is utterly in opposition to the American church view of the hierarchy as a locus for the advancement of (at the moment liberal) positions. Elie simply cannot accept that Williams can operate this way.. I’ve noticed, BTW, this slight tone-deafness to religion in the Atlantic for a long time now.

Yes, it’s interesting how Elie can appreciate Rowan’s approach yet yearns for a Tutuesque certainty, one that stakes out a position and says (to quote Martin Luther) “Here I stand.  I can do no other.”  Yet Elie misses that Rowan has staked out a position that is just as full of resolve, but not resolution—that is it is tough, principled, and yet resists the temptation to certainty and therefore challenges us to be patient and humble in the midst of conflict—two things that most people (esp. Americans?) are very bad at being.

That Rowan Williams refuses to “pull the trigger” on either side is frustrating for those of us who know what the truth of the matter is (and isn’t that all of us?)—and who suspect that deep down in his heart of hearts, Rowan must know the truth, too, and is simply unwilling to have the full courage of his convictions.  But this ignores the fact that his deepest convictions aren’t about the hot-button issues (though of course he has his own thoughts on the subject).  Rather, his deepest convictions are about how it is that we need to live in relationship with each other, regardless of what our convictions are on the topic du jour.  My money quotes are:

“They’re not going to go away, and we shouldn’t pretend that they are.”  The “they” is just as much the traditionalists as it is the progressives.  And, “I think the challenge that God is putting to us is this:  Granted the differences of conviction, with how much positive expectation and patience can you approach the other?  It doesn’t mean you stay together at any price, but it is a matter of whether we can demonstrate to the world a slightly different mode of operation than that which the world commonly operates with.”

I am glad that Elie rejects the canard that Williams “has traded truth for unity.”  If he has, where’s the unity?!  Rather, he’s traded the easy and self-righteous truth claims of either side for the hard road of the cross that leads to the only truth and unity worth having:  the Mind of Christ.  Neither side has the full measure of this Mind.  No one does.  We only attain this Mind by engaging in that “slightly different mode of operation” that leads one to worship a man crucified as a criminal rather than fall down at the foot of the powers and principalities that crucified him.