Crass, Ignorant Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams is a clever man in a way, but he has emphatically not reached the beginnings of that wisdom which, you will remember, Plato defined as knowing how little we know. The trouble with excursions into the field of politics by prelates of his kind (not that there are all that many) is that they raise yet again that old but perennially foolish question “does the Church – do clergymen – have any right to pronounce on political questions?” The implication here is that they should stick to what they know about: and every time someone as senior as Rowan Williams demonstrates as vividly as he has just done how utterly ignorant he really is about politics – and not just about political principles, but about the basic facts of what he is going on about, he undermines the ability of clerics who really do have something to say about political morality to become engaged in the public square.