Lord Chris Smith:

Here we are in the middle of Lambeth Palace. One of the things which I've worried about for a long time is that much of the automatic knowledge of the stories from the Bible, of Greek and Roman mythology, of the episodes of the history of our country and the rest of Europe, these are things which 50 years ago automatically people growing up would have known about, would have had the stories in their lifeblood and yet now we seem to have lost some of that. Am I just being a grumpy old man here, or is there something that's worrying about this?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Well, if you're being a grumpy old man I think you're not alone, and I feel the same sort of concern. It's really a concern that there isn't a kind of bank that people can draw on, a bank of stories in which they can find themselves, because one of the reasons that stories matter, surely, is that they give us roles and ideas, patterns of behaviour that make a bit of sense of what's happening to us. A lot of people don't have stories they tell one another and themselves. Then you have just a chaos of emotions and reactions and people don't really get on top of their own lives, I think. It's that kind of deprivation we're talking about.

Lord Chris Smith:

Some people would probably say 'Ah, but modern stories have come along and have taken the place of the old.' That Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings, and suchlike – these are the stories that we now live by and does it matter that we've lost some of the old stories that used to inform our grandparents and our great-grandparents?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think there are two things about that. One is of course that Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and so forth actually build on much older stories and bigger stories in some ways, and you get the most out of them when you know a bit about the world they come from, and the second is really to do with that world that they come from. The stories of Classical mythology, the stories of the Bible, are the stories that have shaped lots of people's lives across history and lots of the art around us and the cultural world, the literary references, and so again if we want to experience the most when we're encountering that heritage we need to know something about that.

Lord Chris Smith:

And just thinking about how we've lost some of that automatic knowledge, how do... if we want to put it back, how would we set about doing it? Is it the education system? Is it the media? Is it parents? Is it in the stuff of society? Where can we do things to intervene here?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think some of it is education and some of it is parenting. I think that for all sorts of reasons parents telling their children stories is a vastly important human activity. It's no accident that that's what we often associate with parenting. It's stories being told. Rhymes and songs being communicated. It's telling the generation coming along that their human experience is actually part of something bigger. Now, how you encourage that among parents is difficult, but I sometimes toy with the idea of people appointing community storytellers, but already you see sometimes at festivals and community events, you have storytellers in a way that actually you didn't in decades past, because you take it more for granted. Now people are bringing that in a bit, bringing it back, that's a good thing.

Lord Chris Smith:

Is it perhaps rediscovering a bit of the Medieval troubadour, who'd come and would gather a group of people around them and sing a song or tell a saga or whatever? Perhaps we're rediscovering some of this?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think we probably are, yes, and I think at schools too people need to be perhaps quite unapologetic about communicating stories. And it's not as if you're saying you don't count as a citizen in this society unless you know these stories or whatever. It's saying in order to function as best you can here you need the best possible equipment and that's what we're going to offer you, and part of that is the stories. And obviously as a Christian I would say the most resourceful story in the world is the story that we have to tell of the Bible, the story of God's interaction with human beings, the story of Jesus, and whether a child takes that on board as finally true for his or her life or not in the long run, I think they need to know it before they say no to it, and they need to know what possibilities it might open up.

Lord Chris Smith:

Do we have a duty though to expose them to other religions and other traditions as well? Obviously, we are a Christian country and full of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and that should, because of that, hold primacy of place, but there's a lot more to discover as well, isn't there?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

There's a lot more, but I think we get very muddled here. On the one hand, to understand where we are and how this particular culture and country got to be the way it is, there's a sort of repertoire of things that you really need to know and understand how they work. But increasingly that landscape shifts a bit, more things come into view. We're a much smaller world, as they say in some ways. We know more about each other, and so I think we do need to know a bit about how our neighbours work. But I'd not make too much apology about saying we do need to know at the very least where we come from and part of that is the Christian heritage.

Lord Chris Smith:

Is there an issue that in a way the whole way in which we approach education is all about rationality and logic and fact, and are we missing something here? Roland Barthes used to say that we lived by myth and our lives, yes, need to know and recognise fact but they also need to give us the opportunity to relish stories and myths. Is this something creative that we're missing in the education system, that we should be thinking about bringing back?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think it's hugely important and it is one of the great failings of our educational system at the moment, that by excessive emphasis on survival skills, really, how to survive in a succession of tests from the age of 5 onwards we just lose out on that dimension of imagination. We need to be imagining who we might be, and one of the things about childhood is a childhood with lots of stories fed in is a childhood that's giving people lots of ways of thinking about what they might be and who they might be, and that's good, so you don't from day one imagine you're just a cog in a machine, you're just there to be a productive citizen. You're there to be yourself. But being yourself is work, hard work, and to do it you need all those resources – well I could be like that, I could be like that, the world might be this way – and that's such an important part of a creative childhood. Just drama is an important part of education.

Lord Chris Smith:

And it's about being able to imagine something that isn't there, reaching for something beyond what you can see. It's about aspiration and imagination and dream in a way that we perhaps don't recognise it.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Absolutely. It's about that deep conviction that the world doesn't have to be like this, and OK the world will probably not turn out to be exactly as it is in fairy tales, but never mind. You have that experience of thinking the world could be much more mysterious than it looks at first and that means you go through the world with that extra dimension of expectancy and not quite knowing what's going to come up next, and the feeling that perhaps what you do might make a difference as well. That's how the imagination works and that's why the imagination is subversive and changes things.

Lord Chris Smith:

So like George Bernard Shaw famously wrote, 'some men see things as they are and say why, I dream things that never were and say why not'.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Indeed, and that wonderful line in, is it, in Wallace Stevens – 'things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar' – when you get into the arts and the imagination, things as they are shift. They become different, and again for a religious person, for a Christian, there is this huge focal story about how things changed beyond recognition because of one set of events, one narrative.

Lord Chris Smith:

Does the church have a role to play in helping to re-establish some of the knowledge, some of the ability to imagine?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think it does and I think to be honest it's true in lots of churches that we don't help people to know the stories either. It's not just a problem out there. I would say as an insider in the church it's a problem for us too. We give people little edited snippets of the Bible. We don't give them the grand narrative, we don't give them the big plot, the story. We expect them to survive sometimes on a very thin diet. But of course people don't necessarily these days respond best to hours of undigested Bible reading, and talking to a group like the Bible Society, which does some very imaginative work at the moment, you get the sense there of people who are trying to find ways of getting the story out in terms that can be understood, in our culture, in our environment, and a few years ago there was this series of very, very innovative and fresh dramas late at night during the week before Easter, which took the different characters in the story of Jesus's crucifixion and yes, just pushed the boundaries a little bit further with each of those characters and introduced people into the story from a quite new perspective.

Lord Chris Smith:

And caught a spark in their audience by doing that?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Hard to say. It was a good try. It takes a lot, I think, to kindle a spark. I think that a while ago the series about the Passion of Jesus did a little of that, again. It made people see it afresh, and sometimes you have films, dramas of a not too explicitly religious kind which bring the story back in some ways and help people into it, help people find a way into it.

Lord Chris Smith:

It's the sort of thing that in Medieval times people would have got through a mystery play or a passion play because that would have supplemented what they went and listened to in Church on Sunday, or...?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

That's right. I think in Church on Sunday they would have had the basic ritual pattern. They would perhaps have picked up a little bit of the story, but when they went to the plays, and these plays would take a whole day to perform, of course, then they would really be caught up. They would see themselves on stage, people like them playing the parts of the Biblical figures. They'd hear it in their own language and they'd connect it with their own emotions. One of the things that really strikes me about the great Medieval plays, about Bible stories, is how incredibly raw and direct they are about the emotions people are feeling. Look at the plays about Abraham being invited to sacrifice Isaac, and Abraham's agonised meditations, and you think, these people knew as much as Shakespeare did about the emotions.

Lord Chris Smith:

Just take the Abraham and Isaac story for a moment, and this is something that's been depicted in art through the centuries, the moment when this agonised father holding the knife over his terrified son and suddenly there's the burning bush and the ram caught in it, and... Having that sense of that story is something which automatically my parents almost certainly, my grandparents absolutely would have known. Absolutely. They'd have known how the characters were, what it was about, they'd probably have felt some of the pain and the anguish and the terror and the magic of the incident. Now, I suspect if you asked 10 people in their early 20s now, would you get 5 who knew it?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

You'd be very lucky to get 5, I think, and of that 5 some of them might have read Wilfred Owen's poem based on that, GCSE let's say, and would have had to be told at that point well actually behind this there's a story about a man called Abraham in the Bible who was invited to sacrifice his son and he nearly did so and then God stepped in, and in the First World War the old men really did kill their sons, and you denote through that that means... But of course the implication of that is that someone picking up a poem like Wilfred Owen's cold woudn't have any idea where to start and that's the deprivation I think. You'd have to have it explained to you, but it's like having jokes explained.

Lord Chris Smith:

And just thinking about how it's possible to get that sense of the knowledge of that basic story, because if you lose the story you lose the understanding of centuries of art, you lose the real understanding of Wilfred Owen's poem, and you also lose something that tells you quite a bit about the relationship between fathers and sons, and between God and man, and between humanity and the natural world around it. How do we get back to a situation where people will know that story?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Well, I wish I had a prescription for it. I think there are ways of recreating dramas which open the door to it. I'm very interested in that recent experiment of doing Shakespearean dramas in slightly modernised versions, using different language, but the situations, as a way in, takes you some distance into it. There are things you can do with Biblical stories that push you in that direction, but you do need someone to make the connections, and that's what I worry about a bit, that we haven't got the connection-makers. It's where schools do of course come in very importantly and where as I said earlier schools need to be quite unapologetic about making that story available.

Lord Chris Smith:

I suspect that we would find that if kids were challenged with this sort of story, with this sort of material, they'd rise to the challenge.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I'm glad you've said that because I think the opportunity is where you've got people who don't already know the stories, they come across very fresh. I've found myself on two occasions in schools telling the story of the Prodigal Son and the good Samaritan to children who had never heard them before and finding the level of response and excitement was enormous. People really were engaged, and then of course you can start talking about the feelings, the characters and what does that remind you of, and where do you see yourself in this story, which is the great exercise you have to go through I think with these stories, and that's just so important. It's a way of enlarging the world all the time. There' s more to you than you thought.

Lord Chris Smith:

I was talking a few days' back with a wonderful man called Vic Ecclestone, who was a teacher down in Bristol and he got some really tough kids from a working class estate in South Bristol working on the Prometheus myth, and creating dance and opera out of it, and he said when people now bring an arts project or an arts organisation onto an estate to work with kids, the assumption is all they're going to be interested in is how to do graffiti art or how to become DJs, but actually he said they're not interested in that because that's their normal everyday stuff. They're interested in the things that will challenge them, that will raise their horizons, that they haven't experienced before, and the Prometheus myth, through all its difficulty, through all its challenge, was absolutely something like that. They really got excited by it.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

That's right. It's not about what can you do to entertain yourself. It's about who could you be, and how big is the world to live in, live into? Which is where the Prometheus story or the Oedipus story, as Freud reminded us, or the story of Abraham, or the story of Jesus, really does come alive. Take Abraham and Isaac again – it's a story about fathers and sons, it's a story about sacrifice. It's also a story about choices, a story about the fact that there are circumstances where you have no way of doing the right thing, and that's something which when you learn it really does change your sense of yourself. It's part of growing up.

Lord Chris Smith:

And is a lesson that I suspect politicians learn every single day of the week.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Politicians, and probably Archbishops too!

Lord Chris Smith:

Does the media have a role to play in helping to change the public climate on this at all?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think so. I think it's something to do with how high the media's expectations of its public are. I think when you have a media that generally has low expectations of its public, well they won't stand for this- it's rather like that Arts project going to the council estate, all they can cope with is x, y and z, and I do get a bit anxious that that's a mentality that's getting a grip on some bits of our media, and it's very hard to know where you get the leverage in that world, to say actually expect the best, people deserve the best, expect the best from them and give the best to them and who knows? Of course there are things that work like that, thank goodness, on the media.

Lord Chris Smith:

I remember, it must have been about 7 or 8 years ago now, there was an exhibition at the National Gallery called Seeing Salvation, which was a number of different depictions of the Crucifixion, and they did a series of five minute programmes on television just before the evening news, just five minutes on a painting each day for a week, and somehow that caught a chord with the people watching and visitors to the exhibition went rocketing up as a result of that. I suspect the understanding of the Easter story also went rocketing up as a result.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I'm sure it did and that's a very good example of people not under-rating their public – both the National Gallery and television producers saying well, actually people are capable of doing this, coping with this, let's not insult them.

Lord Chris Smith:

So the recipe for putting this right, partly education, partly parents, partly community troubadour-like figures...

Archbishop of Canterbury:

And partly this positive high expectation in the media. Don't expect the worst, and take risks of course, which is difficult, and there've been not only television events but of course theatre events which have pushed the boat out. I think of Tony Harrison's The Mysteries at the Cottesloe all those years ago, another big theatrical event which pushed out the boundaries, and of course from the opposite side as you might say, Philip Pullman's Dark Materials at the National Theatre, but gain a tremendous story – though deeply wrong-headed! – but one which gave you the big questions and the big world to live in, but it must have felt pretty risky I think putting that on.

Lord Chris Smith:

You famously of course said actually it's good that a story like this can be told in this sort of way whilst nonetheless clearly disagreeing fundamentally with some of the principles behind it.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

That's right, because I thought it important that a huge bold imaginative enterprise like Pullman's novels deserved to be thought about, dramatised, experienced by lots of people, so that it could be discussed. The worst thing would be if the Church shrank back and said 'ooh! That's dangerous, that's difficult, and that'll upset people' – that's no good at all. We do have, as Christians, a large risky difficult story. We expect people to cope with it.

Lord Chris Smith:

Are there stories which have a fundamentally dark purpose which because of the power of being a story are therefore something that we ought to be wary of, or are all stories good?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

That's a very interesting question. I think there are some stories which, if you like, need somebody to hold your hand while you're listening to them, and some of the Classical myths are of course extremely ugly stories, they're stories about betrayal and destruction, about the erosion of people and things...

Lord Chris Smith:

And revenge!

Archbishop of Canterbury:

And revenge, yes. The story of the Golden Fleece, which begins as a nice fairytale ends with the horrific episode of Medea killing her brother, and that's got to be taken on board. These aren't easy stories, again, and left to themselves – and this is one of the things where I think the last 50 years of European politics might have taught us – left to themselves, stories of revenge and stories of unilateral triumph over your enemies and reversing positions are stories that incite people to murder, just as some stories about being a victim for a nation or a community dwell on those, brood on those enough, and I think they get into your soul, they do something very bad. I speak as a Welshman, with a long national history of defeat. A lot of our stories are about losing!

Lord Chris Smith:

And presumably for young people particularly getting experience of stories and the understanding of stories at an early age then enables them to understand the power of stories later on and to understand when the stories have a less than good purpose.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

That's right. A little bit of distance when you've immersed yourself in a safe environment, which is what you ought to be able to do in childhood, then later on as an adult you know a bit how to deal with them. You know that these are powerful but not imprisoning. That they're not about determined patterns of behaviour, they're about what might be.

Lord Chris Smith:

And about the choices and decisions that human beings make in response to difficult, awkward nasty, grim situations.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Exactly, exactly. They tell you something about the fact that if the world can be different then the choices you make change things, so you're not doomed to go on repeating the same pattern. An extraordinary novel for young adults which I remember reading as a teenager is The Owl Service by Alan Garner, and I read it when I was about 16-17 when it first came out, and it's based on a Welsh myth which I'd grown up with and does some very remarkable things with it. It's three teenagers in the 20th century who find themselves caught up and living out a pattern from this Welsh myth, pattern of inter-relationships, very destructive, and it's only right at the end that somebody realises I have a choice about this. I don't have to do that. I don't have to get into revenge, I don't have to get into locking myself in bitterness, and it's a very good illustration of how stories both enrich and threaten, if you don't have people alongside to say you've got a choice there.

Lord Chris Smith:

I hesitate to ask this question as a former politician. Does Government have a role to play in this? And the last thing that we want if we want to encourage particular forms of behaviour in society for government to tell people what to do, because it's a very counter-productive exercise most of the time. But is there a role for Government in helping to re-establish some understanding of this heritage of stories?

Archbishop of Canterbury:

I think the main leverage is through what people understand by education in government and that's where I want to have the argument and put the pressure. I think you're right that it would be counter-productive to have the Government declaring National Storytelling Day, or having the story from the Prime Minister at bedtime. I'm not quite sure that would have a transforming effect, but you ask where should the energy be put, well certainly into education and perhaps into some of those community projects. We were talking about where really challenging arts enterprises are brought into communities.

Lord Chris Smith:

And perhaps also looking at the things we do with the education system at the moment which tend to push things in the wrong direction. The emphasis on targets and testing and fact, and perhaps lighten up a little bit on that.

Archbishop of Canterbury:

Exactly, it's not just a matter of building on something extra to the system. It's a matter of changing a bit the feel of it, so that some of the huge anxiety and congestedness of that world.