The race to Lambeth Palace

Rowan Williams’s would-be successors have begun jostling for position. One stands out

Who shall be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, do you suppose? They are jockeying for position at the moment, suffused with godliness and the distinct suspicion that old beardie has had more than enough and may wish to shuffle off to a warm university sinecure some time soon. The more cynical among you might not give a monkey’s and, indeed, suggest that jockeying for position to inherit Rowan’s mantle is akin to jockeying within the Romanov family to inherit Nicholas II’s mantle in about 1915. As with most artefacts of western civilisation — manufacturing, education, the armed forces, the press — the story is about managed decline. That will be the job of the next Archbishop of Canterbury, as it has been the job of the previous three, at least: to shepherd us all, as slowly and comfortably as possible, towards oblivion.

The Church of England’s decay right now is even more marked, mind; only at the clean-cut shiny-faced guitar-toting creationist and fundamentalist margins is the Church punching at its weight, with the number of worshippers actually increasing year on year. At the high-church end there is the distinct whiff of dissolution, or even extinction. In Rome, the Pope issues the occasional laconic invitation to distressed Anglo-Catholic communicants to join the proper Church, in the manner of a top-four Premier League football team acquiring aspirant players from the likes of Barnsley or Gillingham. The Church seems confused and fragile. The problem is less that it is split on the issue of whether or not God loathes homosexuals, or just loathes what they get up to with one another, or actually quite likes them and doesn’t mind either way, than that a dispute so fantastically banal could be allowed to threaten its existence.