The Decline and Fall of Rowan Williams

as remarked by Carl Trueman

Neither Williams nor Trueman, but Tiamat

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The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is the title of a book by Carl Trueman published by Crossway in 2020. That being the first year of our preposterous plague, the year in which the modern self collapsed into a cowardly slave of the welfare state under pressure from the protection racket run by the gods of Health and Safety, Trueman's book has not had the attention it deserves.

I was reminded of this by a comment piece that appeared a couple of days ago at First Things, entitled "Rowan Williams and our Sentimental Age," in which Trueman takes Williams to the woodshed for being the leading signatory of a letter to Boris Johnson lamenting the fact that trans conversion therapy is not on the list of banned practices in the United Kingdom.  

The letter describes conversion therapy (or should we say re-conversion therapy?) as "pressure put by one person on another to fit their expectations; the attempt to induce vulnerable and isolated people to deny who they truly are." By this characterization, especially with partygate in full swing, the letter itself might be described as conversion therapy! So, of course, might a good deal of what ordinary folk do in an ordinary day.

Lack of meaningful definition, however, is not the letter's main flaw. What comes next is a still more remarkable generalization. "To be trans," the authors opine, "is to enter a sacred journey of becoming whole: precious, honoured and loved, by yourself, by others and by God."

How exactly would one know that, even in a given case? How is it that scripture and tradition seem quite unaware of it, in any case? And what are we to say of persons who either do not enter this journey or turn back from it—that wholeness has eluded them? Or perhaps all journeys are sacred and everyone will become whole. In which case none of this matters very much and bans are for the birds.

Trueman, who is well aware of Williams’ early rise to a state of rare intellectual grace, is concerned about his subsequent decline and fall into a state of such basic confusion. He criticizes him for taking the idea of personal autonomy to the gnostic extreme of seeking wholeness through denial of the body as a given factor in human identity. And especially for trying to defend this putative wholeness even from the "manipulating" practice of prayer.

Both criticisms are sound, though I will not try to show that here. On the first, I have elaborated often enough. On the second, I will add only that, while prayer can be deployed manipulatively—between men, that is—so can every other form of human speech. It seems, then, that the authors of the letter are merely disappointed in the British government's failure to ban speech with which they disagree if it takes place in a context where people might be persuaded to act other than they would have them act—perhaps to ban even the knowledge of disagreement or alternative action, as the Canadian government has done. Which is hardly worthy of a sophisticated progressive like Rowan Williams, if quite predictable from the likes of Trudeau and Lametti.

All this is symptomatic of a deeper disease to which the former Archbishop of Canterbury has succumbed. It is bound up with LGBTQ rejection of the inter-generational matrix of human life as the ground of action and identity. It is bound up with what Trueman regards in Rise and Triumph as transgenderism's "repudiation of the significance of history, an intentional act of cultural—and personal—amnesia." It is bound up, as I argue in The Measure of the Beast, with the contraceptive mentality, planted in Williams' own garden by the 1930 Lambeth Council. A century later, the moldering fruit has finally dropped from that blighted tree.

The disease in question, which has led not merely to the trans phenomenon but to the mistaking of this phenomenon for a timely re-articulation of the gospel, to be defended by law against every heretical prayer or disputation, is one that attacks the very fundaments of human sociality. Given time to metastasize, the contraceptive mentality—which was from the outset an assault on the body and on the Creator's design of the body—could only lead to an assault on history as such. Not the history of the body only, crudely re-written with chemical weapons or a surgeon's knife, but all history, beginning with familial history.

What, one wonders, would those Lambeth fathers have made of marriage licences that read Spouse A and Spouse B, or permission forms that read Parent 1 and Parent 2 and Parent 3? What would they have thought of birth or baptismal certificates that can be altered after the fact, or of pregnant "men" and "women" with penises? What horror would they have felt at Huxley's Fertility Room, which was soon conceived and now exists, or promises to exist, in every modern state? They had not even read their Solovyov, apparently, or not yet got as far as his final work, in which the Lady says to the Prince: "I think when one does not know one's ancestors one is little better than little boys and girls who believe that they were found in the garden under a cabbage leaf."

They can, of course, be absolved for that omission, but not for their dismissal of Casti Connubii, which Pius XI managed to produce before 1930 was out. Pius mapped for them the next stages in the trajectory of those who seek to adapt settled Christian teaching "to the present temper of men and the times;" who wish in fact to unsettle it far enough to accommodate new (or old) forms of sexuality and parentage, etc., by affixing sanctifying labels of a scientific or psychological or spiritual sort. Though he knew nothing of today's transgenderism, he included this prescient warning:

Christian doctrine establishes, and the light of human reason makes it most clear, that private individuals have no other power over the members of their bodies than that which pertains to their natural ends; and they are not free to destroy or mutilate their members, or in any other way render themselves unfit for their natural functions, except when no other provision can be made for the good of the whole body.

We may respond, if we like, by making what we can out of the exception clause. The requisite success in that endeavour, however, can only be success against the tradition, not for it.

Leaning on Philip Rieff rather than Pius XI, Trueman points out that, "in traditional cultures, the role of the elites is to transmit society’s values and beliefs down through the generations, ensuring continuity and stability;" whereas our modern elites have "adopted the opposite calling." They have taken up the posture of "irresponsible iconoclasts," who see their task, not as one "of preservation and transmission," but rather as one of "demolition and negation." Of this, says Trueman, "we have a prime example in Williams’s complicity in demolishing even what it means to be an embodied person, transforming it from an objective given into play-dough, the raw material of a sacred—or perhaps better, sacrilegious—journey."

Often enough, I think, the journey in question is a reaction against a sacrilege, as in the case of Tiamat, which I have treated briefly in The Politicization of Gender. Be that as it may, Trueman observes of the letter's authors that they seem uninterested in such matters. They "find rhetoric more attractive than truth" and are inclined to substitute "sentimental mush" for "careful moral reasoning."  

In that respect, his claims puts me in mind once more of The Abolition of Man, in which Lewis traces the devolution of modern western thought from the stage at which it mistakes moral sentiment for mush through to the stage at which it can barely reason at all, but only endorse the unexamined impulses of its most powerful men. I mention this because it is important not to omit from our analysis the step in which the value of properly formed sentiment is discounted on the way to—or from—discounting the moral order itself. Some sentiments are grounded in natural law, in other words, and it is important to show how, a task Lewis (like MacDonald and others who influenced him) pursues quite vigorously in his fiction. These, however, are the very sentiments that have been subjected to ruthless attack, especially since Bentham. Their loss leaves room for the sentimentalism Trueman decries.  

I will not remark myself on the trajectory of Rowan Williams, but I agree that the letter is "sentimental" in that sense, and a scandalous example of the turn to expressive individualism that Trueman critiques in his very fine book. The line that stands out to me as most scandalous is the one that affirms that "every church should be a safe space that affirms people in being who they are, without fear of judgment." A contention more contrary to reason, to say nothing of the Good Friday liturgy in which we have just participated, would be difficult to conjure.

Trueman mentions in conclusion a chance conversation in Cambridge that touched on Williams' return to academia after his labour as Archbishop of Canterbury. For my part, I recall a similar conversation that took place before Williams took up that mantle. As recounted in Canadian Converts, I was sitting with my mentor, Colin Gunton, during a conference of the Society for the Study of Theology at Exeter, where we were listening to a paper Williams was delivering on the subject of "Prayer and Theological Integrity." At one point Colin leaned over to me and whispered with a mischievous grin, "Just another Welsh pietist!"

Well, perhaps this Welsh pietist knew better than to send a letter to Boris Johnson that wasn't, as Trueman charges, "light on actual theology." Trueman, however, is not wrong to worry that such theology as it contains or implies is sentimentalist in nature and deployed in a curiously self-contradictory fashion. There is indeed a problem here with "a wrong-hearted notion of care and a wrong-headed understanding of conversion."  But the problem, like this fine formulation of it, is arguably William's own.   

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A very happy Easter to my readers, for whom I will try to write something more in keeping with the Easter/Passover season.