Radio 4 draws some surprising parallels between two nonconformists
From Calvary to Lambeth Radio 4 The Poet of Albion Radio 4
The giggling archbishop who preached liberation to black South Africa; the English poet who spotted angels flitting about a tree in Peckham Rye - who would want to pair them? Radio 4 did not do so explicitly on Tuesday (27 November), but it ended up convincing me they would have got on very nicely. At the least, they would have shared a healthy contempt for the Anglican Church.
The moment I abandoned hope for Rowan Williams as a reforming Archbishop of Canterbury was when, like the cynical CEO of a multinational, he forfeited his moral principles in order to keep the Anglican Communion, Inc in one piece. A man of conscience who believed in the ordination of gay bishops would have simply expelled any member church that did not like it. Instead, it is Gene Robinson, the Episcopalian bishop of New Hampshire, who happens to be homosexual, who is being excluded from next year's Lambeth Conference. We now know that the Anglicans are led not by morality but by majority rule - in practice the African churches.
Interviewed in Cape Town by Michael Buerk for From Calvary to Lambeth (8pm), Desmond Tutu pronounced himself ashamed. If God, he said, was proven to be homophobic, he would not worship him. Sexual orientation was a personal, trivial matter in comparison with the great sins of poverty, Aids and warfare. Jesus, what is more, talked very little about sexual morality. What he talked about was poverty and injustice. (Paul was different.) In any case, people cannot help their sexual orientation, having been made that way by God Himself.
Give that man a slot on Thought for the Day, you might think. But although Tutu is a great preacher - his whoops and bellows must have shattered many a Radio 4 listener's peaceful evening - he is not much of a theologian. Buerk here proved himself a terrific, dispassionate and analytical reporter. Not content with the scoop of his interview, he found contributors willing to tear the Nobel Peace Prize laureate to shreds.
Ann Widdecombe took all of ten seconds to demolish the argument that God Made Me This Way, Therefore I Am Perfect. He made disabled people, too, and God, through his son, went about healing them. Christ was big on warning us against judging - cast not the first stone - but made it clear that God judged: he told the woman to go forth and sin no more. George Carey, the former Arch of Cant (as I like to call them), pointed out that you could deduce what Jesus thought not from what he did not say, but only from what he did, and Jesus made it clear that marriage was sacred to him.
Robert Duncan, the conservative Episcopalian bishop of Pittsburgh, summed up the case against: "While I would not challenge his right to be recognised as a Nobel laureate, to claim and be known as an archbishop and say that the Bible is not to be seen as the standard and 'I am not much concerned about it' and 'People pay too much attention to it' is a shocking thing for a bishop to say." It was hard not to conclude that Tutu was morally right, yet theologically wrong.
Jenny Uglow's The Poet of Albion (11.30am) turned William Blake into the kind of believer of whom Tutu would have approved. He may, on his deathbed, have burst out singing that he was entering heaven, but his focus was on the living. Uglow placed him firmly within the radical, political wing of Romanticism, there when Newgate Prison was built, amid the Gordon Riots, and all the time raging against Lambeth - not the palace, but its dark satanic mills.
The critic Tom Paulin was called in to perform some hermeneutic examination of the most famous poems. The burning mammal of "The Tyger" was, he explained, the name the London Times gave to the revolutionary mobs of Paris. The invisible worm of "The Sick Rose" was the monarchy and the Establishment doing its police state business by stealth (Blake was twice accused of sedition). The irony that, as another contributor, Boris Johnson, put it, "pathetic public school hearties" weep when they sing "Jerusalem" was not lost on this subversive, enjoyable little programme. It made me love Blake a lot more than I thought I did.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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