successive archbishops of canterbury have always prioritised preserving the unity of the worldwide anglican communiond that communion. were they right to hold onto that until the church is ready to take that step together? there's an argument for that, clearly. it is this duality thing again. if your primary value is institutional unity, if you prize unity above said justice, you will do that. and honourable men and horrible men have done that. i can respect that. but if that's all you have, if you just have institutional unity, if you don't have maverick people saying "you shouldn't be doing that — you shouldn't be penalising gay people and women," that's called the prophetic tradition in christianity. there are three classic rules in hebrew religion — profit, priest, and king. king's rule, priestsjustify the rule with god anointing, it is always the prophets, the awkward squad, who come along and say "that's wrong." if you purge the prophetic element of the church, you purge its cleansing element. it's probably not a good idea to make prophets, archbishops or even bishops, which is probably... i wa

can you understand why a lot of people in the anglican communion, a lot of christians who you lead, feelay in which you have changed your thinking about religion? sure. i hate hurting people, i did hurt a lot of people. i said that in my final sermon, i said i had become in my 60s the kind of bishop i hated in my 30s. i had to be true to that. it was a slow, emergent process. i get that. i get the complexity of all of this. i hurt lots of people to whom i was a precious source of support. that's why i had to go away and take a sabbatical from religion. that's the trouble with religion, it got stuck 2,000/3,000 years ago. it got stuck with women. it got stuck with gay people, it got stuck with ways of understanding the astronomy of the universe. you can keep the best of religion and still intellectually go on. and that, i think, is all i was arguing for. i wasn't saying that you mustn't believe in a physical resurrection or a six—day creation. if it helps you through life, do it, as long as it doesn't make you cruel and persecutory, that's not the way i understand these things. i'm sure i