Archbishop of Canterbury Harshly Criticizes America

The Episcopal Church in America, already deeply divided over its conflicting attitudes to gay clergy and same-sex civil unions, is reeling after an unprecedented attack last night on American values by the church's symbolic head, the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams.

Further offense was likely to be caused to American Episcopalians by the fact that Archbishop Williams's blistering assault was published in a British magazine for Muslims, Emel.

Archbishop Williams, 57, who was visiting Trinity Church on Broadway on September 11, 2001, accused American leaders of losing the moral high ground since the terrorist attacks. He compared American foreign policy today unfavorably with that of the British Empire, which he said nurtured its subjects.

"We have only one global hegemonic power at the moment," which is America, he told Emel. "It is not accumulating territory; it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That's not working." He described America's actions abroad as "the worst of all worlds."

"It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalizing it. Rightly or wrongly, that's what the British Empire did, in India for example. "It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put things back together — Iraq, for example."

He described the impulse to invade Iraq as little more than a general feeling that something had to be done, what the archbishop called "a quick discharge of frustration," to respond to September 11.

"A lot of the pressure around the invasion of Iraq was, 'We've got to do something! Then we'll feel better.' That's very dangerous," he said.

The way forward in Iraq is to try to restore civil society and for American troops to withdraw, he said. The archbishop proposed that America and its allies provide "a generous and intelligent program of aid directed to the societies that have been ravaged; a check on the economic exploitation of defeated territories; a demilitarization of their presence. All these things would help."

The archbishop blamed devotion to materialism for the widespread moral uncertainty he sensed in the West. "Our modern western definition of humanity is clearly not working very well," he said. "There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul.

"If the soul is, to give the most minimal definition, that dimension of us which is most fundamentally in conscious relation with the Creator, then those things which speed us up and harden us are going to get in the way of the soul."

In remarks that are sure to provoke an angry response from evangelical Christians in America, Archbishop Williams, a distinguished scholar of theology at both Oxford and Cambridge universities, said he found he could not take seriously Christian Zionists and their "chosen nation myth of America, meaning that what happens in America is very much at the heart of God's purpose for humanity."

He said he did not agree with arguments that suggested that the West and Islam were heading into a clash of civilizations. "I am very skeptical about fixing the identity of civilizations in an eternal form, as if they are bound to clash with each other," he said. "Civilizations develop in dialogue and this has been quite a part of Muslim Christian history."

But he agreed that modern life and religious beliefs did not easily sit side by side. "There is an essential clash somewhere," he said. "What are humans for? The Muslim, the Christian, the Hindu, the Sikh would say that we are for the glory of God; so that God's light may be reflected and God's love diffused. It is never just about how we fit into the cogs of society, or about economic production.

"The more our education system is dominated by functionalism, skills, productivity, and the more our whole society is determined by that kind of mythology, the harder it is for the religious voice to be heard. There is a real abrasion between lots of the forms of modernity and religion."

Although as the leader of 77 million Christians attached to the Anglican communion the archbishop's main remarks concerned the theory and practice of Christianity in the West, he remarked that the political solutions offered by Muslim leaders "aren't always very impressive." He urged them to consider more seriously notions of "classical liberal democracy that might fit with an Islamic world view."

However, he praised the Muslim tradition of prayer five times a day, with religion "built deeply into their daily rhythm."