For a man who doesn't court controversy, the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams certainly attracts it. Some of the sentences in his famous 2008 "sharia-gate" lecture were so dense they had their own gravity. To get from such Proustian prolixity to the front page of the Sun in less than 24 hours deserved some kind of medal.

Obscurity aside, sharia-gate was genuinely controversial, with even habitual allies questioning his reasoning. It is hard to lay such a charge at the feet of his recent New Statesman editorial. Quite apart from the fact that the article is a model of clarity, it is studiously even-handed. Plagues, albeit restrained Anglican ones, are laid upon both political houses:

"Managerial politics, attempting with shrinking success to negotiate life in the shadow of big finance, is not an attractive rallying point, whether it labels itself (New) Labour or Conservative."

The opposition is not spared direct challenge: "The task of opposition is not to collude with [fear] but to define some achievable alternatives."
Williams's questions are serious and thoughtful ("What services must have cast-iron guarantees of nationwide standards, parity and continuity?", "How … [can] national government underwrite these strategic "absolutes"?), as is his vision of the society to which he believes we should aspire.

Sure, there are phrases that the archbishop, too experienced a public figure to believe otherwise, were bound to have been soundbitten with relish. "Big society" is fast becoming "painfully stale". The government needs to hear "just how much plain fear there is … at present". But these are few and meagre fare.

Why, then, the furore?

The answer lies in a throwaway line early on in the article which is, ironically, targeted not at the coalition but the opposition. "We are still waiting," Williams writes, like a patient parent, "for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently and what a left-inspired version of localism might look like."

This statement suggests that the reason for the reaction is not so much because There Is No Alternative, as some Conservatives have claimed, but that There Is No Opposition or, rather, that the opposition has no (compelling) alternative. And in doing so it reminds us that we have been here before.

Twenty-six years ago, the Church of England report Faith in the City caused ructions that make today's spat look like a media blip. The Conservative response at the time – Thatcher declared herself "absolutely shocked" and one unnamed cabinet minister described it as "pure Marxist theology" – kept the report on the front pages for four days and helped it sell 83,000 copies.

However, it was widely recognised even at the time that the report's popularity, and its controversy, lay less in its anti-government rhetoric (it was equally critical of the church) than in the generally confused and enervated opposition of the time. In 1985, Faith in the City was the voice of the opposition.

Not that the archbishop needs an ineffective opposition to cause a political fracas. Turbulent Priests?, a new and timely report on 30 years of archiepiscopal politics, demonstrates that the archbishop is one of the most consistently controversial figures in national public life.

This is only partly because of the usual suspects who claim that everything he says is self-interested, irrelevant, outdated or superfluous. Indeed, Daniel Gover, the report's author, persuasively argues that, with some relatively minor exceptions, such accusations are entirely without foundation.

The archbishop's controversy rests, instead, on his impressive ability to annoy both ends of the political spectrum. Lefties (or most of them) have cheered his contribution to debates on urban poverty, income inequality, criminal justice, asylum and environment, but booed him on issues of abortion, embryology, sexuality, education and the family.

Those on the right have, predictably, done the reverse. This should be encouraging, if not actually comforting, for Christians. It underlines the idea that the gospel for which the archbishop is such a prominent ambassador cuts rudely across our narrow political mentalities.

One of the platitudes of our age is the call for a "national debate" on a particular subject. It is a phrase that hangs unhappily at the end of many political interventions, as the nation is rapidly distracted by another will-o-the-wisp. It is a testimony to recent incumbents – and perhaps even to the value of church establishment itself – that the one figure who seems able to do so with any frequency is the archbishop of Canterbury.

This article first appeared in the Guardian.