The reaction to On Rock or Sand, the volume of essays edited by the Archbishop of York, has been depressingly instructive. For whether right or wrong, well-meant or muddled, the response to them by a strident section of the doctrinaire free market “right” has made Richard Dawkins sound almost reasonable and open to doubt. We’ve been told that the essays reek of the “notorious” (and of course “Marxist”) Faith in the City report by the Church of England in 1985. That the clergy involved are “out of touch”, that they need to “earn” the right to enter the debate and that one after another foolish thing follows from their critique of modern British life as it’s endured by far too many of our people today. This is a narrow, ugly, and I hope for its sake, wrong view of what conservatism is. And dare I say it, a tellingly guilty and defensive one too. What Justin Welby argues – the economy should not have “the power to dictate what is and is not possible for human beings” – is unanswerable. What interests me is quite why so many proclaimed conservatives and even Christians have sought to answer it quite so wrongly.
First there have been the smears. Lord Heseltine, for example, called the Archbishops “out of touch”. I suppose it’s possible to be in touch in a Belgravia townhouse or agreeable country seat and equally it’s not impossible to be out of touch running, say, a soup kitchen, it’s just unlikely. I’m not sure that the critics of the Archbishops who have personalised their attacks have really hit the mark. Not least because the ex-oil trader, and the ex-lawyer imprisoned in Uganda by the tyrant Idi Amin, simply aren’t unworldly figures.
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