Rowan Williams has flashed a few glimpses of his final book as archbishop. One of these relates to British Muslims. Muslims living in Britain should show loyalty to "the nation state" rather than "the international Muslim community". They "must make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state".
It is hard to know what to make of this. For 10 years he has been sending out a very different message, insisting that religion of all stripes is threatened by the aggressively secular liberal state. He has often implied that all serious religious believers are naturally wary of "modern political loyalty to the nation state". For example in a lecture of 2008 (shortly after the sharia law episode), he argued that the Christian had an alternative "citizenship" beyond the state: for the believer "the community to which you belong is greater than any limited human society". The secular state must be resisted, for it gravitates towards "coercion of conscience".
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