Poor Little Lamb Who Has Lost His Way (Baa!)

The Archbishop of Canterbury birthed a storm of controversy last week when he said that Sharia law should be accommodated in the U.K. It’s very easy in a ten-second soundbite world to decry his statement. The Western image of sharia is one of horrible excess: beheadings, stonings, cutting off limbs, and honor killings. And these punishments are often meted for “offenses” that are not even considered to be crimes in the West.

But Dr. Rowan Williams is not a stupid man (although some have referred to him using Lenin’s apocryphal appellation, useful idiot). His entire BBC interview reeks of reasonableness.

There's one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it's a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and the law needs to take some account of that.

The Archbishop starts with an uncontroversial proposition: the people and their representatives all have different backgrounds. But from there he seems to make a leap to "one law for thee and one for me". We use reasoning, moral sensibilities, and personal experiences---whether grounded in religion or not---to formulate our laws; and because we have such diverse backgrounds and beliefs, laws are the result of compromise and very few are to everyone's liking. But in our system there is one law, agreeable or not, that all must obey.

The problem I have with Archbishop Williams---and the Anglican Communion’s U.S. branch---is that there’s too much of turning the other cheek and not enough of defending the faith and the civilization from which it springs. Perhaps it is because many church leaders believe that the fashionable theology of the moment (Gaia, the un-Virgin birth, God the Mother, the Resurrection is a myth, homosexuality is innate but not sinful, sin is a quaint outmoded concept, etc.) is “truer” than beliefs held for hundreds if not thousands of years. If they don’t believe in the mission, they should behave as normal people do in the workaday world and resign.

And what does the traditional church believe about the primacy of secular law?

The Power of the Civil Magistrate extendeth to all men, as well Clergy as Laity, in all things temporal, but hath no authority in things purely spiritual. And we hold it to be the duty of all men who are professors of the Gospel, to pay respectful obedience to the Civil Authority, regularly and legitimately constituted.

--Articles of Religion of the Episcopal Church, 1801.

© 2008 Stephen Yuen