Archbishop Rowan William created a major controversy following a BBC interview and a lengthy lecture on “Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective.” On both occasions Dr. Williams seemed to be suggesting that the British legal system must inevitably accommodate itself to Islamic law. Amid calls for his resignation, a blizzard of blogs describing him as “a dangerous buffoon” and as “so utterly clueless as to be a liability”, and after a phone call from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the Archbishop took responsibility for “any unclarity” or “any misleading use of words that has helped to cause distress or misunderstanding among the public at large.”

Despite the fact that “unclarity” doesn’t appear in my complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, I think I understand that the Archbishop of Canterbury is saying his words did not communicate the message he intended and that he in no way believes he might have been mistaken in his message. Because of the protracted, ongoing disputes with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion as a whole over homosexuality and the authority of Scripture, I have been a regular reader of Dr. William’s speeches and pronouncements. Accordingly, I can say without reservation that his public reflections upon Sharia law and its place in English law are typical of the Archbishop’s public expressions.

As Stephen Bates of the Guardian says of Dr. Williams, “his subtle academic mind contains so many caveats and subordinate clauses that ordinary mortals regularly find it difficult to navigate the labyrinth of his prose.” In commenting on this form of “intellectual arrogance” at the center of the Church of England, Ruth Gledhill, of the London Times, described Rowan Williams as “confident enough of his intellectual gifts to consider that he does not need the wisdom of others in guiding the public expression of his thoughts.”

We do not have an established church in this country for which we should all give thanks. Most of us are mere mortals with some recognition of the wisdom of others, believing additional guidance is often helpful and necessary. The Episcopal Church has been unable to ignore the Archbishop of Canterbury because his position provides a platform from which he broadcasts his “unclarity” across the Atlantic. Much of the muddled thought of Dr. Williams regarding English law and Islamic law seems to stem from his perspective in a declining established church within a more and more diverse society. He is clearly concerned to explore some of the issues around the “rights of religious groups within a secular state.”

Unfortunately, from this perspective, his thinking seems to gravitate strongly to the official comingling of religion with civic governance and law as the means of recognizing the allegiances of differing religious communities. On this side of the Atlantic, where we are very clear that religious communities are voluntary associations which do not need and cannot have a cozy relationship with our nation’s mechanisms of law and governance, Dr. Williams ideas are misleading and should be ignored.