Thank you, David, for reminding us of this just-war argument against Trident, which I have always found completely compelling. Possessing Trident was always morally unacceptable. Renewing it today would not only be immoral but also strategically irrational and financially reckless at a time of such severe cuts to public spending. It would do nothing to make us more secure; it would seriously compromise our efforts to work globally for non-proliferation, and arms reduction generally; and it would generate new injustice by sucking astronomical amounts of scarce public funds away from other urgent government spending priorities such as caring for the elderly and disabled and investing in renewable energy. 

Thanks, Philip Thomas, for pointing us to the Law Gazette article, available at: http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/home.law ('Sharia unveiled'). I recommend everyone reads this article. It clears up several confusions about what it could mean to 'accommodate' Sharia law in English law. For those who appetites are thereby whetted, try the Ontario government's 'Boyd Report'  at: http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/boyd/ (190pp - but there is an executive summary).

Thanks to David H and James, both of whom seem to me to be getting both the law and the Archbishop right.

I'd still ask Pluralist if he can quote from the ABC's lecture to support his specific interpretations:

1. that the ABC was proposing a 'group opt out to a parallel court, with an individual opt-out back to the universal court'. If I have missed something, I'll happily acknowledge that.

2. that the ABC was proposing a system which was 'competitive and parallel, being up to the litigants to decide which court to attend and apparently without communal or faith sanction - utterly unrealistic and chaotic, but parallel in that each court contains full legal powers to make a decision.' Now I do admit that he slipped in the notion that there might be a degree of competition (a market place) between civil courts and religious courts. He got that idea from a Canadian feminist Jewish legal theorist called Ayelet Shachar, who was not arguing for 'parallel' systems in Pluralist's sense, and whose chief concern was to protect vulnerable women - but the ABC did allow for misunderstanding here, I concede.

Pluralist says: I already have

Well as I read them, those quotations don't clearly establish your case. And ++RW has specifically rejected the suggestion that he meant "parallel jurisdictions" in any of your senses. Perhaps it's a good rule of conservative hermeneutics that we read a disputed text in the light of the stated intentions of the author.

Pluralist writes: 'I'd say that Rowan Williams was suggesting parallel jurisdiction on certain civil matters as a community opt out from state laws, and would presumably involve more than Muslims, with then an individual opt out back into the state system. Both courts would have real legislative teeth....Williams's form of multi-culturalism...is a separate packages pluralism....' (19 Feb). And: 'The Archbishop's system was a chaotic set of parallels, in that community courts would have legal powers with individuals consenting to use them.' (20 Feb).

Can you support these claims about RW's intentions by quoting from his actual lecture?

Fern quotes me as saying in my article: "I was then dismayed by the speed with which the government later ditched its own report under intense pressure from an emotionally-charged campaign by Muslim, secularist, and feminist opponents across Canada."

Fern goes on: 'Why 'dismayed', I wonder? Did Dr Chaplin consider that perhaps muslims, and muslim women in particular, had a better idea of what introducing elements of the sharia might mean for them and their children than non-muslim academic theologians?'

No, dismayed because the Ontario government simply cast aside a year of thorough research which it had commissioned and which was based on widespread consultation including with many Muslim women's groups. Their views are amply and forcefully represented in that 190-page report.

Fern goes on: 'Chaplin moves on to what he call the 'tectonic' question.  He asks "whether the authority of a state can presume to take precedence over every other obligation on citizens’ loyalty", and goes on to quote Acts "we must obey God rather than men". '

Not quite. I didn't say that it was 'the' tectonic question, only that it was one of them. The one Fern raises is just as important. Here's how he sets it up:

'So if people have deeply held religious convictions that they should travel to a small middle-eastern country and blow-up civilians, are we all OK with that? And Islam is only one faith in the melting pot.  Who's going to define what is 'religious' and therefore to be granted a free pass from observing laws its members dislike?  Should Rastas be granted exception from the drug laws?  Should we no longer be horrified when the headless bodies of 5 year old boys are found in the Thames because some West Africans have 'deeply held religious convictions' about child sacrifice?'

Readers can judge whether that's a reasonable implication from what I wrote about civil disobedience. But within the polemic there is a serious question: unless you impose an absolute ban on civil disobedience for any reason whatsoever (would Fern do that?), then you have the problem of distinguishing between acts of CD which are morally legitimate and those which are not. Well, a state will necessarily take a view on any acts of civil disobedience. Obviously it will respond harshly to those which involve violence or serious public disorder, and so it should. So the British state should today bring down the full force of law on radical Islamist jihadists who would engage in or foster terrorism. Nothing in my article questions that. Indeed Christians should support the state in doing that because they believe it is ordained by God to maintain justice and peace in society, including protecting the security of tis citizens.

You are right to make the distinction between convictions and actions. States shouldn't get into defining what counts as acceptable religious (or ideological) belief, only into whether the public expression of a belief actually threatens public order. Mere belief in radical Islamism, fascism, or communism, by the way, are not illegal in the UK (is Fern implying it should be?). But of course the state will not 'grant a free pass from observing laws' to adherent to such beliefs. In so refusing it is not deciding which religion is true. It is acting within its own mandate to maintain justice, and  if a religious group appeals to its faith to justify acts of violence, it will meet the state head-on. I did not argue that just any appeal to religious conviction to justify resistance to the state, is legitimate. But I did argue that there might come an extreme point when, in order to 'obey God rather than men', Christians might have to disobey the state. Nothing new about that in the Christian political tradition.