I’ll bet Dr Wil­li­ams is taken aback at the response his com­ments has gen­er­ated, and I have to say, I think a lot of people are over­re­act­ing. Obvi­ously, I make no secret of the fact that I dis­agree with him and I’ll argue my point, but heck­ling the poor man out­side his Church? Call­ing for his resig­na­tion? Not even remotely called for, and noth­ing more than an attempt to limit his right to hold an opin­ion and express his views.

At this stage it’s prob­ably worth point­ing out that there are — at least — two sep­ar­ate groups who’re being crit­ical of his pos­i­tion, and it’s not the sec­u­lar­ists and the lib­er­als who’re call­ing for his resig­na­tion. Those voices are raised from within his own Church, and they’re not object­ing on gen­eral grounds to reli­gious accom­mod­a­tion in the law, they’re object­ing very spe­cific­ally to accom­mod­a­tion of reli­gions that aren’t theirs. Need­less to say, I dis­agree with those people at least strongly as I do Dr Williams.

In fact, on a re-​​reading his lec­ture, I real­ise just how badly mis­rep­res­en­ted by the media Dr Wil­li­ams was. I’m not say­ing I agree with him; far from it, but I don’t think he was call­ing for whole­sale modi­fic­a­tion of Brit­ish law, either. He makes some subtle points, and his words are, at times, ambigu­ous (one might say disin­genu­ous,) but there is cer­tainly a way to inter­pret what he said as noth­ing more con­tro­ver­sial than “just because the law gives someone a right, doesn’t mean we should neces­sar­ily force them to exer­cise that right at all times.” That much is obvi­ously true.

So, surely true enough is fair enough? Well, yes, but the assump­tion that someone might not want to exer­cise their rights is a dan­ger­ous one to estab­lish leg­ally, and an even more dan­ger­ous one to nation­ally con­sol­id­ate through the estab­lish­ment of local courts around the coun­try, which (will inev­it­ably) pre­sume the com­pli­city of the entire local pop­u­la­tion. Wil­li­ams talks about these supplementary-​​jurisdictions as being purely vol­un­tary, but offers no sug­ges­tions as to how to ensure duress of any kind does not play a role. Mat­thew Par­ris puts it excel­lently, in his piece in The Times:

Faiths cap­ture people. I do not mean this dis­par­agingly. So of course do pat­ri­ot­isms, ideo­lo­gies, fam­il­ies. But a reli­gion, prop­erly under­stood, makes pro­found claims on an indi­vidual and com­munity, quite unlike the demands of a golf club. It involves the use of pub­lic places and pub­lic ser­vices, the sub­or­din­a­tion of the individual’s will; and may demand that he sub­or­din­ate his spouse’s and children’s wills too. Hence our unease about duress, and the com­plete­ness of “consent”.

Dr Wil­li­ams, in a wel­ter of words, makes no ser­i­ous attempt to resolve this. Those who read his speech prop­erly will see that his entire argu­ment turns upon the free­dom of the group mem­ber to “opt out” of the “sup­ple­ment­ary jur­is­dic­tion” and choose Brit­ish law instead. But repress­ive faith groups make it cul­tur­ally dif­fi­cult — some­times well-​​nigh impossible — for a mem­ber to opt out. This gives them the very togeth­er­ness and focus that Dr Wil­li­ams wants to foster.

A reli­gion is more than a col­lec­tion of rules and habits: it is a com­plete moral and philo­soph­ical sys­tem with deep claims upon the inner and outer life of the adher­ent, from cradle, through school­ing, and bey­ond. The rules it lays down — the private laws — are of a more com­mand­ing kind than the rules of Scrabble or the High Peak Hunt because they are mor­ally joined-​​up: joined with a loy­alty bey­ond the State; joined within an over­arch­ing faith and its explan­a­tions of the Universe.

How can we expect someone who’d been raised, edu­cated and gov­erned accord­ing to cer­tain cul­tural and reli­gious pre­scrip­tions to real­ise, when it mat­ters, that they are able to “opt-​​out” of all that? Every­one they know believes and acts a cer­tain way; they have been raised to do the same. They might not even know there is a wider law guar­an­tee­ing them greater liberty. Paris, char­it­ably, talks about reli­gions as provid­ing “togeth­er­ness” and “focus,” and I dare-​​say he’s right, but the other side of that coin is obed­i­ence, con­form­ity and acqui­es­cence; not traits that I believe will lead to people look­ing out­side the sys­tem for redress.

Put simply, reli­gion and gov­ernance are a bad mix at any level. Reli­gions are, by their very nature, strongly ideo­lo­gical, and strongly ideo­lo­gical gov­ern­ments, reli­gious or oth­er­wise, fall all too eas­ily — some might say, inev­it­ably — into oppres­sion of dis­sent­ing views.

Addi­tion­ally, and as I’ve said before, there are real risks with intro­du­cing even small-​​scale sup­ple­mental jur­is­dic­tions in the con­text of the cur­rent Brit­ish pop­u­la­tion. By grant­ing legal status to aspects of cul­tural codes, we run the risk of grant­ing a ven­eer of legit­im­acy to the entirety of those codes, includ­ing ele­ments that the major­ity find abhor­rent, and by grant­ing already insu­lar com­munit­ies even greater autonomy, we don’t increase social cohe­sion on a wide scale, so much as splinter into a series of small, inde­pend­ent com­munit­ies with little in the way of com­mon­al­ity to bind them into a cohes­ive whole.