Church & State: Another fine mess?

The parliamentary reaction to this week’s synod vote tells a powerful tale. Wearing his Garrick Club tie, the Second Church Estates Commissioner answered questions from MP's, all of whom expressed amazement and moral repugnance about the official and institutionalised sexism of the Established Church. (note to overseas readers — The Garrick Club is an exclusive Gentleman's club in the West End).

The Garrick Club Tie Gaffe (if such it was) underlined an important aspect of the problem: the Church claims to be far more than a private organisation like a golf club, masonic lodge, or Gentleman's London hang-out. It claims to be good news for everyone, and the fury of our legislators when they see it acting as though it were a private club, disconnected from society, was unmistakable.

In our present context it appears that institutionalized sexism undermines everything. If a vicar smacked his children publicly, it would radically undermine their moral authority. Saying that corporal punishment was in the Bible, as it is, or parents had a duty to discipline their children, or that it was a matter of sincere conviction that children should be beaten for their own good, would only squander more moral authority.

This is not Guardian reading political liberalism. All theology and ethics are contextual — they only mean anything, as with all aspects of the Word, when they take flesh. A society populated by people bearing the consciousness and identity our great grandmothers had wouldn't find this question urgent, but ours does. This is an assertion of realism not liberalism.

In the light of several conversations this week all round, the realisation is creeping over me, like cold water in a hot bath, that when everything contingent has been talked out, this does all boil down to sex discrimination, no more, no less. Discriminatory is as discriminatory does. We're not fooling anyone, not even ourselves any more by pretending otherwise. The failure of any male headship argument to register in the House of Commons debate implies that, politically speaking, those who hold new model Complementarian views would be better off explaining the moral value of that particular kind of discrimination than pretending it is not what it manifestly is.

Look, nobody actually believes “men are the same as women.” The question is why should we impose an artificial difference on men and women that renders women permanently subordinate? It hasn’t always been so, even in our tradition. In the Bronze Age, Deborah Judged Israel, and that was OK. Unlike possessing a womb, subordination of women is not inevitable or, these days, generally desirable. New model Complementarianism as expressed last week is an elaborate three card trick. You begin by saying (1) everyone is equal, then (2) that they're different, then (How do they do that? watch out for the Queen of Hearts) (3) it's OK if woman are subordinated because that's a difference. Innit.  Ah but you see, it's precisely the subordination that isn't equal, or acceptable to our MP's. They think it's inequality. Because it is.

Another trope that's been doing the rounds is about the state imposing its standards on the Church. This happens all the time when churches are forced to conform to the Charities Act, or fire regulations, or the National Insurance Act.

St Paul met this challenge in Romans 13. When he told the Christians to obey the civil power because it does not wield the sword in vain to accomplish right he was talking about Nero. The man who executed him. But he believed what he said.

Look, if sex discrimination is actually wrong in our context (and all moral convictions can only be formulated or expressed contextually), than for the state to stop it is no more questionable than the state preventing the Church discriminating racially, or beating children, or owning slaves. Those last two, incidentally, also came with a rich Biblical pedigree, in the days they were morally acceptable enough for the largest slave owner in England was the Society for the Propogation of the Gospel. They may have been OK then, but now they are not.

People ask, can't we all just forget this stuff and preach the gospel? It's a lovely thought, but what this parliamentary debate makes clear is that if part of the "Gospel" is treating women as subordinate, incapable of offering service as they are gifted by virtue of their sex alone, it's bad news to the people it is trying to reach, not gospel. Most people hold that sex discrimination is wrong in the Church or anywhere else not because they are wild left Guardian readers or secularists (though they could be either or both of those things), but as the natural consequence of their deep moral convictions, their Gospel as they have received it.

Change comes in such matters not by compulsion, but by a vision. That is how St Peter, on the roof at Caesarea, acquired a new approach to living by Kosher laws. Change will come from a bigger vision of humanity, in which gender is not a means to impose artificial limitations on people, either the body of the Church, or the world, or gifted and called individuals, but rather an aspect of being the way God creates us and equips us to be good news to the whole creation.

Whatever the procedural arcana of the General Synod, politically well-informed people are now saying it's probably a one-clause measure within two years or curtains for the establishment. The Church would lose its implicit broad spectrum engagement with public life but, trying to look on the bright side, could design a catchy club tie for itself.