Rowan's Laugh-In-Archbishop Demonstrates Why Liberal Christianity Is A Joke

A friend of mine went to high school with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"He was a nice enough fellow," the friend told me in his lyrical Welsh tones. "But whenever we had rugby or gym he seemed to have a note from his mother saying that he was ill and couldn't do sport."

Never trust a man who won't show his knees or run around a field. And never trust an arrogant liberal, especially one who makes a public statement that the British should introduce a form of Sharia law to their country.

The comments, made a week ago, outraged the nation and were condemned by the leaders of all of the major political parties, most of Williams' own senior bishops, Catholic and Jewish leaders, editors and commentators and even many influential Muslims.

The archbishop made the usual semi-apology that wasn't really an apology at all and then went on to explain how clever he was and how everyone else was taking him out of context.

The real tragedy here though, good sir, is not your tedious remark but the fact that it doesn't actually matter.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglicans, the United Church and liberal Christianity all over the western world have become largely irrelevant.

These denominations still have some money of course and will continue to sell off empty churches to pay bills. But members have hemorrhaged and the old establishment simply is dying off.

DYING DENOMINATIONS

Put directly, within a generation in North America and Europe these denominations will cease to exist in any meaningful manner.

But the damage they have done is incalculable, and in some ways it has little to do with religion. Even people who had no belief system and no time for organized faith saw the church as a representation of the absolute.

Certain acts, attitudes and actions were wrong and while we might fail and fall, they thought, the church was somewhere out there to remind us what was right.

Whether it was theft, dishonesty, cruelty, infidelity, greed, perversion, promiscuity, selfishness, vulgarity or plain old general sin — a word largely expunged from the liberal theological lexicon — it was obvious where the good guys stood.

This didn't guarantee a perfect world, but it did oblige us to try a little harder and to resist rather than surrender.

Once the church gave up the fight and said that almost anything was okay if it made you feel good, the door was wide open. Rather like the alcoholic who is told that a drink doesn't matter or the diabetic instructed that candy does no harm.

At the very time when we most needed an unchanging and sometimes annoying principal to tell us there were limits and that we shouldn't cross them, we were instead given a substitute teacher. Rather than a strong voice we had a weak accent.

Within us all there is a God-shaped vacuum. Now it's filled by Oprah, celebrity, sound bite morality and the latest guru with comforting words. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms will save us and the state will pay for the new road to happiness. What a mess!

Roman Catholicism and the evangelical church stand firm and, no surprise at all, Islamic and Jewish orthodoxy are growing steadily. As for the archbishop and his kind, perhaps they can bring an excuse note from their moms. It better be convincing.