Invoking art, history, and faith is no substitute for facing the realities of mass migration
It has been twenty-three years since Rowan Williams stepped down as Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Communion. Yet he still feels compelled to intervene in national debates. He has now turned his attention to the thorny issue of migration in the opinion pages of The Guardian, no less. It turns out to be exactly the right venue for the piece, though it also confirms that Williams is no longer well placed to pronounce on an issue as wide-ranging, contested, and materially consequential as this.
One might expect Williams to be well-placed to comment — drawing on his impressive cultural as well as theological knowledge. Alas, erudition can be compatible with intellectual cowardice and complacency. Indeed, cultural references can mask a lack of analytical acuteness.
It is he who proceeds to paint in the broadest, most reductive strokes
Williams complains that “we are repeatedly sold a painfully two-dimensional picture of the motivations of those seeking shelter in Britain”. Yet it is he who proceeds to paint in the broadest, most reductive strokes.
The article constructs a straw-man interlocutor against whom easy moral victories can be claimed. Williams implies that critics of current migration levels wish to halt migration altogether, and that they deny migrants any role in Britain’s history. In reality, most concern on what Williams snootily dismisses as “the right” centres on scale, speed, and governance. But this paper tiger allows him to demolish a phantastic position rather than engage with an argument that actually exists.
The veteran theologian then commits an egregious category error, treating elite work-based mobility and mass migration as if they were broadly comparable phenomena. The implication is that those objecting to an influx numbering in the millions are really objecting to the small number of highly skilled, highly valued migrants whom every society, at every point in history, has actively sought out. By invoking exceptional figures — artists, composers, Gothic master masons for goodness’ sake — the article conflates small-scale, skilled, invited movement within shared civilisational frameworks with contemporary large-scale, rapid, often low-wage migration. These are not variations of the same thing; they are phenomena with entirely different social causes and consequences.
True to his lifelong habit of airily contemplating the heavenly plains, Williams substitutes aesthetic and moral reflection for everyday material reality. Cultural enrichment and creativity are offered as answers to concrete problems such as housing pressure, social cohesion, labour markets, and public services. Symbolic benefit is substituted for actual cost. It may suit Williams’s lifestyle and self-image to drift between art installations and elite colloquia celebrating “migrant voices”, but such concerns are not foremost in the minds of people whose towns have been transformed beyond recognition. They cannot get a GP appointment, never mind secure decent, affordable housing.
Of course, the history of Christian thought is full of privileged men who withdrew from worldly cares to contemplate the state of their souls. Shortly after his conversion, Augustine of Hippo retreated to his patron Verecundus’ villa at Cassiciacum, just outside Milan, where a small, educated circle engaged in the colloquies that became the Cassiciacum dialogues. But Augustine was acutely aware of the conditions that made this possible. He reflected explicitly on that which he later names Christianae vitae otium — the leisure of Christian life. The saint critiqued pride as a barrier to wisdom and showed gratitude for the patronage that bought him time to think. Writing later, in his Retractationes, he criticised the youthful works for their overly classical tone. This combination of privilege, self-awareness, and accumulated humility is precisely what is missing from Williams’s serene invocations of art and colloquium culture.
Williams’s article might still be indulged as the unaware affectation of a long-time ivory tower resident, were it not for the fact that Williams then adds insult to injury by invoking grooming gangs. His acknowledgement of serious harm is purely tokenistic, shocking in its flimsiness, though regrettably familiar coming from a senior figure in an institution itself riddled with sex-abuse scandals. Williams’s cursory reference to grooming gangs functions as rhetorical cover rather than engagement, naming an atrocity only to move past it in favour of safer, abstract cultural themes. Here he reveals himself not as a harmless old dreamer but as someone who falls far short of what might reasonably be expected of a former Archbishop of Canterbury.
The gravity of the grooming gangs scandal is wholly out of proportion to the treatment Williams affords it. The survivors are not a marginal “concern” to be nodded at and passed over; they are working-class children who became the victims of sustained sexual violence. Their testimony exposes repeated institutional failure, the active suppression of truth for reputational and ideological reasons, and a catastrophic collapse of trust in police, local and national government, and the media. To dispose of all this as merely “an undeniably appalling series of events” is not merely inadequate. It is shameful.
Anyone with a serious feel for the Gospels would be justified in recognising something performative in Williams’s standpoint. Jesus’s scriptural condemnation of hypocrisy is aimed at moral seriousness turned into display — righteousness made safe, self-congratulatory, and untouched by consequence. The hypocrites perform their piety in public and, as Christ puts it in one of his most devastating judgements, “they have their reward.” In this sense, Williams stands squarely within the pattern of hypocrisy Christ condemns: moral posture, self-flattery, and theological flattening. Christianity is presented simply as the badge of progressive liberal virtue. It is affirming, self-congratulatory, and cost-free, rather than a tradition of hard choices that exact a price. The article reassures Guardian readers of their rectitude instead of unsettling them. It flatters where it should disturb.
His article is a failure of imagination on a grand scale
In the closing paragraph, Williams swaps Christ for a version of our old friend, Paddington. He assures us that the presence of migrants, like the bear in the Brown household, will gently transform us: “Paying attention to their imagination may even release our own, helping us to see ourselves in a new light.” Yet his article is a failure of imagination on a grand scale. Williams shows no curiosity at all about the everyday pressure mass immigration places on ordinary British men and women. These are the descendants of those who once filled Church of England pews and who have now, entirely understandably, deserted an institution that prefers sentiment to seriousness, offering smug pieties instead of risking serious engagement with parishioners’ concerns.
