The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has held a lecture in Hull last night urging politicians to rediscover the moral energy and vision that inspired William Wilberforce to campaign for the abolition of the slave trade.
The head of the Church of England told political leaders in Hull, the birthplace of Wilberforce, to defend the right of the citizen to call the state to account for its actions and asked whether Britain still believed in the notion of "a moral state".
Dr Williams said that if action were taken, it could not be left to the state to decide for itself what is moral: "The modern state needs a robust independent tradition of moral perception with which to engage. Left to itself it cannot generate the self-critical energy that brings about change...for the sake of some positive human ideal."
Wilberforce believed "that a career in Parliament was a potentially virtuous and Christian calling...It was possible in political debate to appeal to a general sense that government was indeed answerable to more than considerations of profit and security...Take away that sense and it is a great deal harder to think about political life as a vocation.
"The more politics looks like a form of management rather than an engine of positive and morally desirable change, the more energy it will lose," he said.
Dr Williams, who is the spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said that every citizen is implicated or "morally involved in what the state enables or supports in terms of the common life" - slavery being one historical example.
Dr Williams challenged Christians to hold the Government to account on issues counter to their beliefs: "The Christian citizen cannot in a democracy simply accept in all cases without question that what the state determines through political majorities is right, because he or she shares an accountability for the corporate moral standing of the state."Wilberforce's legacy is about the question of whether we believe in a moral state.
Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
Safeguarding the contribution of Parliament in the moral functioning of the state was crucial, Dr Williams said.
"We are in a disturbing position if, on major issues of public morality, people expect to make a change outside rather than within the electoral system.
"If Parliamentary democracy is the structure we have, and if the alternative is an executive-driven administration preoccupied with quick results and efficient management, something of the dignity of the democratic process has been lost."
The Archbishop continued to speak of the implications this would have for discussion of reform of the House of Lords: "It is important in our current debates about the Upper House of Parliament we take seriously the role of such a House in offering channels of independent moral comment" in which context "the nature and extent of religious representation ..is not, as some seem to think a marginal question".
Archbishop Williams concluded: "Wilberforce's legacy is about the question of whether we believe in a moral state. If we accept that public morality is inseparably connected with the moral health and well-being of persons in a society and that human moral agents can be damaged by being implicated in public and corporate immorality, we are in effect saying that the state's organs of action cannot be immune from challenge on moral grounds.
"Wilberforce, not to mention Equiano and the others, confronts us now with the question, 'If Christians, committed to personal responsibility and social justice, cannot keep before the eyes of the state and its legislators the greater issues beyond security and profit, who can?"
