Presidential Address, given by Most Rev Dr Rowan Williams to the Governing Body of the Church in Wales, University of Wales, Lampeter, 20th September 2001
No 'Star Wars' shield of missile defence could have averted last Tuesday's atrocities. No intensive campaign to search and destroy in Afghanistan will guarantee that it will never happen again. If we fear and loathe terrorism, we have to think harder. Indiscriminate terror is the weapon of the weak, not the strong; it's commonly what the 'strong' aren't expecting, which is why they are vulnerable to it. It is the weapon of those with nothing to lose. If we want it not to happen, we have to be asking what it means that the world has so many people in it who believe they have nothing to lose.
They may be wrong in that belief, but what matters is the belief itself. Someone else apparently has all the power there is, and they are frustrating change; my condition is such that I and my family, my culture, my religion, seem doomed to die unless there is change. Sometimes people talk to me about negotiations that will save us from dying, or at least from dying quite so quickly; but this is abstract, I can see no evidence. When my voice is raised, I am promptly silenced.
So my anger rises, to the point where I can't listen to anything outside the situation. If I have to die, at least I don't have to concede victory to my oppressor. I don't want the world to survive my death, our death; after all, what value is there in the world when the truth I know and love has been defeated? That is where terror of the kind we have seen in the last week begins.
When those who have power respond with enormous threats and a high rhetoric of relentless pursuit, they too are dealing with the anger of helplessness; last Tuesday's events were terrible for the USA in part because they made the only superpower left in the world feel unsafe, and the US government had to struggle to overcome the sense of impotence in the nation. Hence too the sickening scenes of celebration elsewhere. I doubt whether anyone in the Middle East would quite have admitted to celebrating thousands of innocent deaths in agony; they had forgotten the human dimension of those deaths because they were glad that the powerful had at last known the furious pain of helplessness, and that was all they could feel. I suspect that the threats and promises coming from the western alliances, while they will certainly create fear, will also be met with the secret feeling of satisfaction that says, Now they are where we are, they are threshing around and planning devastation because they feel helpless too.
Anger always blurs the real human features of those we're angry with. If it didn't, no-one would ever be persuaded to violent action. And so often the anger comes from the sense that I'm not being seen as a human being in the first place. No-one treats me as human, as a conversational partner; so my anger grows to the point where I don't want conversation but release at all costs, a terrible self-affirmation even if it destroys the other. We know this prosaically in our personal relations; we know it in the - by comparison - minor controversies of our churches. Frustration requires that we don't allow ourselves to imagine what it's like to be the other. We were going at this Governing Body to have a motion about the conflict in the Holy Land. Now didn't seem the time to pursue that; but anyone who has ever thought about this will recognise that here is a conflict between partners whose imagination of each other's suffering is almost non-existent. We see the immediate fear and suffering of the Palestinians, and we forget that the self-perception of Israel is also the angry helplessness of a people with two millennia of not being treated humanly, which prompts so many to forget the humanity of their neighbours. The two fears, the two angers, don't connect.
If they did? In God's providence - a concept hard to put to work just now, I know - there is in this diabolical carousel of contempt and fury a sort of window, the brief moment of possibility when grief breaks through the deafness and blindness of my heart and lets me sense what the other experiences. Some have spoken of the threat to our 'way of life' in terrorism. But it isn't ways of life that are the victims, it is persons. The defiant repetition of the will to defend our values changes little; the visibility of specific human suffering just might. But we are not very well-trained in recognising this. We deal more comfortably in the terms of the conflicts of world-views, or of absolute power and absolute powerlessness, the oppositions that dehumanise on both sides.
Power is bound to be hated when it is seen to work simply for those who have it. You know this in the life of the local church: we can't see how power is working for us because the authoritarian cleric, the manipulative layperson, the remote and insensitive bishop, whoever we think has what we haven't got, is not using what they have for my sake as well as theirs. Hate is a strong word for the brooding resentment that so often arises in churches over this, but it's the first stirring of what can become murderous rage (read the first letter of John). And when power is put to work for those who lack it, they don't always see it for what it is, because they are so used to suspicion, so used to being deceived, abused or ignored. When the power of God is put to work, once and for all, for our salvation, it is rejected with violence. Only in the forgiveness that follows can the way open up, precarious and narrow, a path out of a burning building, that might take away some of the zero-mentality in which we're trapped.
In other words, if power is not to be hated, it must take risks, including the risk that it will still be rejected or misunderstood. In 1881, the Emperor of Russia was assassinated - Alexander II, who had liberalised the country and emancipated the serfs. When his assassins were condemned to death, the foremost Christian writer in Russia wrote an open letter to the new Tsar pleading that the death penalty be commuted. Alexander had taken the risks of using power to give power, and the risk had led to his death; but if the effect was another cycle of revenge, nothing would change. To break the murderous deadlock of authoritarian government and violent rebellion, a new gesture was needed. It was not made, of course, and we know the history that followed.
Today it is right and proper that we seek for justice. Even in the extremity of anger and misery, people are answerable for the choices they make, and the decisions to kill several thousand innocent people was a real decision, an unspeakably wicked and deluded decision. It's not for any of us here to talk prematurely about forgiveness, and it is sentimentality to suggest that the gospel has nothing to do with punishment. But those who have written about punishment have so often said that ideally a punishment must make sense to the person being punished; i.e. it must be recognisable as more than retaliation, within a shared frame of reference. Our problem is that in a world where political and economic power does indeed belong so overwhelmingly to one nation and its allies, recognising a shared framework is difficult, if not impossible. No-one has been trying very hard to build such a framework, double standards have so often seemed to apply for the friends of the powerful.
So the challenge before the USA and its allies today, I believe, is to ask what is to be done beyond punishment to make any such punishment more than revenge. How do we build something more of a common world of moral reference? How is power to be used so that it is not hated? If, in addition to whatever anti-terrorist measures are taken, the western governments could make a visible common commitment to some new initiatives that would put power at the service of the most frustrated, what might happen? A further round of debt cancellation; a concerted international initiative to break the deadlock in the Holy Land and to bind the security of Israelis and Palestinians together; a review of sanctions in Iraq, a consultation on economy and environment in the Middle East resourced by the USA and the EU? I don't know, to be honest, I don't know. At the moment it seems almost too late for any such initiative to make any impact or to be seen as other than Greeks bearing gifts. But I hope that someone in Whitehall or Washington is asking some questions along these lines. After the last war, the victorious allies poured resources into the defeated countries, partly out of economic self-interest, partly knowing what the catastrophic effects had been of failing to do this after the first war. What can be done comparable to this, alongside the 'war on terrorism' announced.
For - to go back where I began - there is no final security without the redistribution of power. And the tragedy of our civilisation is that this is regularly seen as weakness; yet the real weakness is the inability to change the terms of the relation, as if it must always be the terrible drama of contempt and rage. No Christian can accept the political definitions of weakness and strength as they stand. The Christian is not called to make a sentimental plea for easy forgiveness or moral indifference, and it won't do just to echo some sort of facile anti-Americanism or to regard the horror of last week as a blow against the military-industrial complex. It's a blow against human individuals made by guilty and deceived men. But the Christian is equally not free to echo calls for retaliation; the Christian above all others is supposed to know that understanding just where the rage of the powerless comes from is as necessary as air and water in a world that isn't to tear itself apart.
In conclusion: last weekend, a prominent anti-religious academic chose to write in one of the national broadsheets an article about how religion in general and Islam in particular create a suicidal mindset in which death is no deterrent, because rewards are promised beyond the grave; so that there can be no sanctions against ideologically motivated violence from such quarters. In the middle of the non sequiturs and illiteracies of this piece, one insight stands out as actually true. Faith is about dealing with the fear of death. But it is about dealing with death by acknowledging and accepting that the power we have is first of all limited ('You fool! This night your soul will be asked of you') and that it is in our hands only to be shared, because it can't be kept for ever ('Make friends for yourselves by using the evils of Mammon'). The Church in particular is the fellowship of those who have agreed to face death together and to share their power and resource and gift - and so to know life together, the life that is communion with the inexhaustible God of communion. Last Tuesday, I was privileged to know for a couple of hours what it might be to face death in company, and I was blessed with a group of people around me with whom I can say without exaggeration I was glad to be in such a moment. The Church is supposed to be a community of people you'd be glad to die with; it strikes me that this is a sobering standard, but it is one of the things I want to leave with you today in the wake of last week's experiences. And if that is true about the Church, then, Richard Dawkins or no Richard Dawkins, faith becomes the one wholly inflexible ground for resistance to violence, precisely because it teaches us how to face death - not in excited expectation of reward, but in the sober letting-go of our fantasies in the sure hope that a faithful God holds us firmly in life and death alike. This is the hope that allows us to recognise power for what it is and isn't: as what is given us for the setting-free of each other; not as the satisfying of our passion for control. And only if we are learning in this way how to die and to love, can anything we say have any weight in a violent world. We have to prove that risk and reconciliation are indeed 'a new and living way' - and to plead with the powerful to consider where true security lies, lest the trap of violence close still more finally on us. It is a hard moment; perhaps we can understand afresh why we pray not to be brought to the time of trial and to be delivered from evil.