Alas, poor Rowan, we knew him well

When I asked Ayaan Hirsi Ali yesterday for her opinion of the Archbishop of Canterbury, she laughed, saying she almost felt sorry for the poor guy. Here's a pretty brutal British postmortem on Rowan Williams' influence,, one written by a Guardian columnist who appears to be a secularist (he'd pretty much have to be to write for the Guardian) who laments the mess Dr. Williams made of the sharia speech. Why? Because it is not possible to eliminate religion from public life, he says, and if thoughtful Christians like Dr. Williams lose their authority, it will not end well for society:

There's no point now in kicking the corpse of the Archbishop of Canterbury's career as a public intellectual. After the debacle of Rowan Williams' speech on sharia, no one who has to make decisions will ever take seriously anything he says again. Nor will they take seriously the church he is supposed to lead. If you want to know what he is good at, there is a rather fine funeral oration online that he gave at the funeral of a Cambridge don in the middle of all the outrage. But nothing he says now matters to anyone who isn't mourning.

[snip]
One of the things that has emerged from the debacle is that there is a very strong body of opinion in this country which holds that you can't be truly Muslim and truly British. This isn't just the belief of the Islamist nutters, though they make it their central claim. It also animates an astonishing number of people writing in or to the media who would describe themselves as Christians. It is as if three quarters of the country had risen to sing "Land of hope and glory" at the Last Night of the Proms.

It is at moments like that that we need an established church, precisely because it dampens zeal down. The undemocratic privileges of the Church of England are much better for everyone than democratically won privilege would be. Bishops in the Lords are infinitely preferable to priests who tell people how to vote.

If, say, the Economist got its way and the Church of England were disestablished, and replaced by the American model of a confusion of sects all competing for votes, what could stop them responding to the popular demand for a condemnation of Islam? What could give them anything of the Church of England's woolly, incoherent but essential belief that it has a duty to everyone in this country, no matter what their beliefs are. Can any sane person want a hundred English Paisleys competing against each other for the nationalist Christian congregations, and their money, and at last their votes? Because that is the spectre that rose from the debacle caused by Williams' speech and interview.

It's silly to pretend that Williams should have made the speech just because it could have made a number of reasonable and important points. Of course he shouldn't. There are some things that no Archbishop of Canterbury can say if he wants to maintain respect for his office or the institution that he heads. This particular Archbishop seems to think it beneath his dignity to say anything plain and short and he cannot tell the difference between a sentence that is deathless and one that was stillborn.