The English Way of Doing Things

There was an old bearded archbishop/
Who dreamt the church would not blowup/
He danced in the middle/
Spouting nonsensical babble/
While putting two lumps in his teacup.


I have heard it said that there is an English Way of doing things that needs to be understood if we are to understand the leadership of Rowan Williams. At least on the surface this is true; there is a quality of gentility, of courteousness, of subtlety and understatement that often characterizes this way of doing things. Yes, there is an English Way of doing things, but as a child of the commonwealth I ask you to remember the other side of the English way of doing things. Remember that this English Way of doing things brought us the Opium Wars in China, the American Revolution, the Boer Wars, the continuing conflict of Northern Ireland, and the disastrous partition of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that troubles the Middle East like a volcano always on the edge of irrupting into massive violence. Finally, please remember that the English Way of doing things lost England its far flung empire, an empire where once upon a time the sun never set.

You see that English Way of doing things in microcosm in the fumbling gyrations of Rowan Williams. The English Way of doing things is characterized by Neville Chamberlain stepping off the plane in September of 1938 and proclaiming, “"My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time.” You know the result. It took the strong leadership and powerful voice of Winston Churchill to pull England through coming inevitable war. Obviously Churchill demonstrates a different way of doing things.

Remember that the English Way of doing things is not always courteous. In a scheme intended to confiscate the lands of the Irish nobility, the English government under James I in 1609 created state-sponsored settlements and gave the lands of the Irish nobles to encourage impoverished Presbyterian Scots to settle in Ireland. That has given birth to centuries of violence and death. There was in this no more courtesy, gentility, or subtlety than the English exercised under George III at the time of the American Revolution. Throughout English expansionism we see a velvet riding glove wielding a riding crop on an unwilling nag. The image is contradictory; surface gentility all too frequently cloaks a frequently arrogant and violent agenda. Beneath the courtesy one has to ask, what really is going on?

Not all the English do things in this stereotypical way. For every Neville Chamberlain, England is capable of raising up a Winston Churchill. Like the all the rest of us the English can provide either waffling ineffective leaders, or stalwart heroes. We have had our own General George McClellan, but we have also had a Robert E. Lee and a Ulysses S. Grant. At this point in history the English Church needs a Churchill, not a Neville Chamberlain, and the whole Anglican Communion suffers from the English way of understating things with such incomprehensible gentility. The problem in part is obfuscation. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to trust leadership that will not express its true intent with frankness and clarity when you have so many historical examples of the negative exercise of power in English history. Leadership to be effective requires integrity, courage and clarity.