Events | 2009.11.22
'Mammon has been given a pasting'
The credit crunch has changed everything, says the Archbishop of York. Now people are beginning to realise that there are more important things than choice and the free market
This is not going to be easy. John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, is all for pulling out of the interview the day before we meet. Whereas he wants to talk only about the trust he has set up to help young people in his diocese, I want to talk about the schisms in the Church of England, racism, the lack of cohesion in British society, Robert Mugabe, maybe even God. I send him a list of questions; he doesn\'t like them; it\'s all off. We patch it up; I accept a more limited line of inquiry and hope I can sneak a few other questions in below the ecclesiastical radar; we\'re back on.
So I\'m in York, wandering around the minster and thinking I have all the time in the world when, with 10 minutes to go before the interview, I\'m told the archbishop doesn\'t live at or even near the minster. He\'s got a whopping great palace five miles out of York. Panic, taxi, sweating, nightmare, God moving in mysterious ways, I get there 10 minutes late. What do you say when you keep an archbishop waiting?
Embarrassingly, we meet first in a corridor, and he says a cursory hello. His two press assistants take me to his private office, telling me it is an honour to be admitted here. The African drums that often form part of his services and that he played at his enthronement in 2005 are outside his door. There is much fussing over tape recorders (both press people sit in on the interview and want to make their own recording). It\'s like interviewing a colonel in the KGB, which is odd because when Sentamu warms up he is friendly and funny.
Eventually, his tape is whirring and we can begin the dance, wherein he will attempt to talk about the trust and I will try to get him to talk about problems he has in the past highlighted – greedy bankers, the failure to integrate migrants, the dangers of multiculturalism, the marginalisation of the church. As an African, a former judge who had to flee Uganda in 1974 because Idi Amin considered him too independent, he has a unique perspective on these subjects. Whether he will offer it today, in these irritatingly controlled conditions, is another matter.
Why did you set up the Youth Trust? An easy first ball. "I had worked in south London, in Tulse Hill, for nearly 14 years," says Sentamu, a compact, gym-going 60-year-old who would pass for 10 years younger. "I was the vicar of Holy Trinity church, and it was clear to me that if we did not tackle education, we were going to be in real difficulty. It was an inner-city school where children came from the estates, but because we worked hard – the teachers, the parents – it was very sought after.
"Many years later, in 2006, I was doing a mission in Oxford and a young man came up to me and said, \'Do you remember me, sir?\' I just couldn\'t – it had been 18 or 19 years. Then he said, \'You came and pulled me out of bed when you were chair of governors, and told me I must go to school.\' I said, \'OK, I remember you now. What are you doing?\' He said, \'I\'m a lecturer in physics.\' I suddenly realised that we can make a difference."
It is a nice story, theatrically told by Sentamu, whose delivery speeds up when he does the dialogue. Whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, appears tortured and fretful, Sentamu seems to believe all things are possible. He is also not averse to the odd publicity stunt. In 2006 he spent a week camping in York Minster to draw attention to the conflict in the Middle East; in 2007 he cut up his dog collar live on the Andrew Marr show and vowed to put it on again only when Robert Mugabe had fallen (he is still open-shirted on the day we meet); and last year he did a skydive for charity, not something one can imagine the cerebral, understated Williams doing. The top two in the Church of England – Sentamu is officially primate of England, Williams is head of the worldwide Anglican communion – are different in every way, which could represent a balanced ticket or might be a source of division. At the back of my mind, a theory is brewing.
"The story [of the young man in Oxford] stuck in my brain," he continues. "Education is the only way you are going to take children out of misery. As a church, we have to be like a handmaid helping nurture education, nurture life." This nurturing, he explains, takes the form of awards worth £10,000 given to social projects run by young people across the diocese.
I feel such a brute. This is important, life-changing stuff, but I have to find a way to broaden the conversation. I try a ball with a little bit of spin. I ask him how, living in this palace, set in nine acres and overlooking the river Ouse, he can identify with people on the street. Don\'t you feel a bit distanced from the things you\'re talking about?
"No," he says, sounding slightly hurt. "I was in a school yesterday; I have been camped in a tent; I\'ve done all sorts of things which illustrate that it isn\'t so much where you live as what you do with it. On St George\'s Day, the local primary school came and played rounders here. We gave them something to drink and eat – gingerbread persons! We can\'t call them men any more. Hahahahahaha." Occasionally, he dissolves into high-pitched laughter, and at one point produces a magnificent "Whoooooooooo" when he tells me that he has been called many things and once received a letter addressed to St Amu.
I ask whether the church really can speak to young people, or is now so marginalised as to be irrelevant. "If you use a language which is not one of condemnation, which is not one of judgment without understanding, which is non-doctrinaire but actually speaks of love and compassion, of goodness and kindness, I have found young people will respond," he says. This is an astute way of dodging the question, and I suggest that he has failed to answer my point about marginalisation. "I think that for a very long time the message has been, \'Come and see what we can give you\', instead of: \'We come to you and together we\'ll find out what\'s the best way of doing it,\'" he admits. "So are we connecting with young people? All I can say is this man is trying his best."
By now Sentamu is in full sermonising flight. He is an excellent preacher – I see him in action later at a service in the palace\'s private chapel – and talks with great vigour, though occasionally it is hard to catch what he says because of his intonation.
His rise within the church has been remarkable. After his flight from Uganda, he studied theology at Cambridge and was ordained in 1979. Following his long stint as parish priest in Tulse Hill, he became Bishop of Stepney in 1996, advising the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and chairing the review into the death of Damilola Taylor, before becoming Bishop of Birmingham in 2002. In London, he experienced racist assaults, including being pushed down an escalator, and was also stopped and searched six times by the police, who were surprised, when they asked him who he was, to be told he was a bishop.
Despite all this, he has often said how proud he is of Britain, and how angry he becomes if it fails to live up to its reputation for tolerance. He has, for instance, contrasted the treatment of asylum seekers today with the warm embrace he and other Ugandan exiles received in the mid-1970s.
"When we arrived here we were treated with dignity, with love," he said last year. "There was this sense of magnanimity, the will to meet another person. I find it shocking that [today] you have failed asylum seekers in [prison] with people who have committed violent crimes and drug abusers. It\'s awful – and it\'s not the Britain I believe in." He sees the change of mood as a sign of ebbing confidence, of a society unsure of itself, putting up fences that we think will protect us, but which, in reality, form a "prison of fear".
It is a powerful critique from a churchman who has a persuasive take on Britain\'s identity crisis. It further feeds my theory – that Sentamu would like to be Archbishop of Canterbury. The only shred of evidence I have to back my hunch is the testimony of someone who knows him well. "He already does a great deal of work," says my source, "but I think he feels he could do so much more for the country. He wants to do things, but he gets stopped by Canterbury sometimes."
Another well-placed Church of England source tells me there is no chance that Williams, who is a year younger than Sentamu, will step down early. But I wonder. Six years of internecine conflict must have taken their toll. There are persistent rumours that he would prefer a more cloistered life. Might the integrationist Sentamu, though outwardly as sympathetic to New Labour as Williams, be more attractive to an incoming Conservative government? He seems happier with a public role than Williams, speaks more fluently to the church\'s evangelical wing, and, as Britain\'s first black archbishop, has become a symbol of a society searching for ethnic cohesion.
In political terms, he would certainly be the change candidate and, potentially, a galvanising force. He is irritated that the church has allowed itself to be sidetracked by internal issues such as gay priests and women bishops, and is anxious to reclaim Anglicanism\'s role in society at large. In the past he has been dismissive of navel-gazing. "When the last trumpet shall sound," he once remarked, "a commission will be set up on the significance of the trumpet and the financial implications of that trumpet, and a report will come back in 10 years\' time."
The path from York to Canterbury is a well-trodden one, though no one has made the transition since Donald Coggan more than 30 years ago. It would complete an extraordinary journey – from the village near Kampala where Sentamu, the son of a teacher and one of 13 children in an Anglican family, was born. Weighing just 1.8kg (4lb) and "smaller than a rat", according to a neighbour, he was not expected to survive and a priest was called to baptise him immediately. But survive he did, going on to study law at Makerere University in Kampala, becoming a barrister and then, at the absurdly young age of 24, a judge.
His powers of survival were tested again last year when he contracted salmonella on a trip overseas. "I had septicemia," he says. "I was told by the doctor that 95% of my blood had become poisonous." It was extremely serious and could have been fatal, but he mentions it only to illustrate the general point that, just as young people are written off, so critics always pick up on the failings of the NHS rather than what it is getting right. "The message goes out that hospitals are all filthy. But why do we generalise rather than look at specifics and say, \'That ward isn\'t very good, but within that hospital there are another 25 wards that do very well\'? I don\'t mind people being critical – criticism is helpful – but cynicism is a disease."
The final part of the interview is a bit like Just a Minute. Sentamu is filling up the time rhapsodising about young people; I am trying to test my theory. I ask him whether he enjoys running so large a diocese. He may be a charismatic preacher, but I imagine him as a reluctant bureaucrat. "I believe good management is essential so you are not firing blanks," he says. "But you have to realise that the job, in its essence, is to engage with human beings. I don\'t allow the administration to take over from what it is to be human."
It is at this point that he invites me to the eucharist in his chapel, to be followed by lunch for all his staff. "We don\'t force people to come who don\'t have a faith," he says, "but we want to be a community." At the service, he preaches a sermon marking the anniversary of the deaths of the Protestant martyrs Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, who were burned at the stake in Oxford in 1555. He takes as his text Latimer\'s words to his fellow bishop: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man." In the sermon, he says he thought about Latimer\'s courage – the exhortation to be fearless – while he was "being treated like a football by Idi Amin\'s thugs".
Sentamu is an intriguing, unclassi- fiable figure. I congratulate him on having been named Yorkshireman of the Year in 2008, but ask him again whether anyone outside the church is really listening. "We had the Yorkshire day in April and I was leading the procession," he says, "and I\'m told they had the biggest turnout they\'ve ever had. The message about what makes a good community has to be heard, whether people are in church or not."
The credit crunch has, he believes, changed everything. "Mammon was given a pasting. We may go back up to where we were, in the belief that now the markets are becoming more stable, but I\'m not sure people really trust that any more. We\'ve lived in this libertarian time where choice was seen as important and the free market was important, and as long as you did it within the law you could do whatever you wanted to. It\'s now beginning to dawn on people that choice isn\'t all there is about life. My neighbour matters."
At last I have him on more politically charged ground, but too late. One of his minders chips in with "one last question". I should probably ask him outright whether he wants to be Archbishop of Canterbury, but my courage fails me. Instead, I ask why he didn\'t want to talk about the issues I\'d raised in my original list of questions. I see this as the Canterbury question in disguise, because another of my theories is that he doesn\'t want to be seen as too self-promoting because that would be a sure way to wreck his chances.
"I don\'t matter really," he says. "What matters are the things I\'m doing. As a child, one of 13 children with parents who believed in me, we were very poor. I went to school, but I couldn\'t get the rest of my education finished, and a missionary doctor, a man called Shepherd who was a surgeon, paid for my school fees. I went to university, and a friend gave me accommodation. As a young person growing up, there were along the road those who were good signposts, those who offered help, and that\'s what I want to talk about, because that\'s what drives me."
Modesty can, of course, be a form of self-promotion. Or perhaps I, too, am a godless cynic. At the service in his chapel an hour or so later, the archbishop gives me a personal blessing, but at the lunch that follows he largely ignores me, and I get to sit with his two gardeners (who eat stupendous amounts of cottage pie and cauliflower). I fear that even Sentamu, the eternal optimist, realises I am a lost cause.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/23/archbishop-john-sentamu
