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.

Airbrushing out Women

The US Secretary of State sat in the war room as her troops closed in on Osama, monitoring developments carefully with senior operational chiefs including the Director of Counterterrorism. The manner of Osama's taking off has raised moral concerns, but the fact that the US secretary of state, being female, “doesn't have a wee tail like little boys do,” (as a recently seen Edwardian manual of nursery management says) is a matter of fact that would, you’d think, raise no religious or moral concerns.

But you'd be wrong. The sight of Hillary Clinton in role as Secretary of state and Audrey Tomason as Director of Counterterrorism so offended Der Zeitung, a Brooklyn based hasidic newspaper, that it airbrushed them out — a time-consuming operation, but necessary to protect their readers from the dreadful sight of women in positions of authority.

I am sure the newspaper notionally admits these woman exist. Some animals have to cover their eyes so they can't be seen. In that spirit, the paper airbrushed the women out of what soon became one of the most famous images in the world. This was a crass and obvious thing to do, presumably because the satisfaction of the few in their silo outweighed for them the millions beyond their silo who would find their behaviour reprehensible.

Der Zeitung’s reaction was a real give away:

Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive.

In other words, if we don’t consider it disparaging, it isn’t, because we say so. What tosh! The newspaper went on to say its photo editor did not realize he was violating White House copyright conditions.

“We should not have published the altered picture, and we have conveyed our regrets and apologies to the White House and to the State Department,”

So hang 0n, DZ still does not acknowledge its journalistic sin of manipulating the truth, let alone its somewhat medieval attitude to half the human race. As one is usually told by Unreconstructed Discriminators in every sphere of life, this had, of course, nothing to do with women being women — a piece of self-deception that always gives the game away from the start. The reality is that discriminatory is as discriminatory does. All else is self-deception.

Instead Der Zeitung took refuge behind a screen of faux-religiousity. I say “faux” because I take it from the fact that back in the Iron Age there was no need to airbrush the judge Deborah out of the Book of Judges, that the Eternal himself does not feel the same collywobbles about this as his more zealous minders.

So we see the capacity of Religion to become part of the problem, a smokescreen to cover unreality rather than a means of engaging with Eternal reality, including that of the present. Soon those who take this path are safely tucked up in their own religious disneyland in which the thing they most fear is kept out of sight. Their religion thus becomes a cover for fantasy, an alternative world, ultimately an insanity licence.

And just as all of us this side of the pond smirk away at the gormless folly of Die Zeitung, perhaps we need to reflect on our own more ingrained cultural sticking points about women. 30 years after equal pay legislation came in, womens’ earnings still lag significantly behind those of little boys with wee tails, the British Boardroom is still largely a male preserve, and, dash it all, we have all just enjoyed a lovely wedding in which the only female voice in an hour of liturgy was that of the Bride, as though that were normal. We all still have some way to travel ourselves before we arrive at the world of Ephesians 2.

Discriminatory Louse on Lady’s Bonnet

As Buckinghamshire experiences its annual Burns Night Kilt Hire peaktime, recitations will roll of Robbie Burns’ poem To a Louse, on seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church, 1786:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:

At a recent confirmation, I saw a louse in Church... It was a bonny evening with many candidates of all ages and a congregation of several hundred, and great joy and celebration. As I sat in the hall afterwards signing gifts and cards, a candidate in his late 20’s came up to me and, as often happens, we began talking about about his coming to Christ.

Formerly an atheist, he had found faith in a flourishing Evangelical church, but the biggest obstacle in his way had been what he called the Church of England’s sexist senior leadership structure and poor record on human rights. If his workplace behaved like that they'd be closed down. Here was a national institution claiming some kind of moral authority, but behaving in a way which he, and everyone in his office, found morally disgusting.

Steady on, I thought, and trotted out a line about tradition and variety. How could I say that? he asked. Everybody knows that in the workplace discriminatory is as discriminatory does. It’s no defence in an Equalities case to say you didn’t consider your discriminatory behaviour to be so, far less that the Pope told you to do it, or that you’d always done it, or that God does it. Anyway there was a happy ending, he said, because after four years’ delay, he had eventually found in his local Church a genuinely open and apostolic community. But when was the institutional national Church going to catch up?

As legislation for female bishops goes out for consultation, everything will be framed in terms of the problems experienced by a tiny minority of churchy dissidents. I don’t suppose anyone will speak up for those who don’t yet go to Church, like my confirmation candidate and his work colleagues. They don’t show up on our radar. Maybe that’s why there aren’t more of them being confirmed.

Great Soapy debates will be held in the next day or so, with much lather produced in good faith and many croc tears about mission and why congregations fail, and how sad it is that the average English Anglican is 61. It’s not going to change, though, is it, until we accept the hard truth that some of our cherished behaviour and attitudes can be a real stumbling block to those on the threshold of faith. The problem is with us and either we don’t really care that we are blocking the gospel, or we have to do something, perhaps the obvious, about it.