Ins and Outs and Same-Sex Marriage

Thanks to those who have told me they have missed this blog. Now that same sex marriage is a reality in this country, I have been off writing a book to help resource a Christian response to its challenges and possibiities. It's an attempt to work out some scientific, moral, Biblical, legal, historical, cultural and missional positives now that gay people can marry.

The church has arrived at another round of shared conversations. In my optimistic moments I'd like to think that after thirty years of going round and round in circles about sexuality we could be getting somewhere. I wanted to produce something grounded in Scripture, tradition and reason, to capture the possibilities as they appear right now.

In my less optimistic moments I wonder why we are so uniquely hung up about sexuality. When I was ordained the Church was a comparatively compassionate and safe place for all. The end of “Don't Ask Don't Tell” has got us to a place where things are actually worse for gay clergy. Every ten years or so of the 35 I have been ordained we have held portentous conversations and listening exercises but nobody seems to heard anything and as the pattern repeats, everyone else has moved on. One wag recently quoted me Proverbs 26:11 about this — "As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools return to their folly." We really do have to punch our way out of this paper bag this time.

Meanwhile, in publication week I experience a phenomenon all preachers do — In the course of your killer sermon on the Trinity you tell a joke about something that happened to you in Croydon high street and all anyone wants to talk to you about afterwards is Croydon. In the book I articulated the drearily obvious and well known fact that a fair number of bishops in the past and present have been, in fact, gay. These people have particular vulnerabilities. This has inaugurated a furious spat on twitter with Peter Ould I have no integrity if I don't report all names to him forthwith. Curiously he's also written a piece pointing out the wrongness and futility of outing bishops, so I've no idea why he's so angry with me for not doing it. So here, for the record, is why I don't and won't out people.

What matters to me is the fact that bishops have a range of sexual orientations including gay, not which bishops have what. Which particular bishops are Saggitarian, left-handed or red-haired? I know not in detail, neither do I care. I can, however, understand that curiosity about this is greater than it would be for a group of people who did not set themselves up as professionally straight whilst behaving in discriminatory ways towards gay people. Why not, someone asked me, just put everyone out of their misery and name names?

(1) Me no expert. I have not undertaken detailed postgraduate research about bishops' sexuality. I have had all kinds of conversations with all kinds of people, including bishops, often on terms that exclude leaking personal information about this or anything else. There are journalists out there with far better and more accurate information than mine which is anecdotal and incidental. But I long for the day we are grown up enough for this to be a non-subject. Let's make it now.

(2) On a Meta level, Outing legitimates assumptions I believe are profoundly wrong. It assumes there's something wrong with being gay. It belongs to the world in which I grew up, of shame and guilt. If being gay is not an objective disorder and there's nothing to be ashamed of, its rationale collapses, inviting the response "your point being..."

(3) Peoples' Sexual identity and orientation is a significant part of who they are — that's the basis for my argument that the Church needs to stop being ambiguous about the full human dignity of gay people. If this is true it is always abusive to disrespect anyone's right to hold their own identity. In a world where people take responsibility for their own feelings and identities, outing is out.

(4) Time was a story about a high court judge, military officer or MP who was gay would have been big potatoes, but those days are gone except for bishops. We set ourselves up for this kind of prurience. The remedy lies in our own hands. As long as the House of Bishops continues to victimise gay clergy and ordinands, we have a problem.

People have asked about the process of shared conversations last week. We were encouraged the share the experience, but of course, to respect the confidences of others by not attributing anything.

The facilitation was excellent and the bishops, individually and in threes, as honest and engaging as any people you might hope to meet. Facilitation was state-of-the-art. En masse, however, the story was different. The oddest part was where four professionally gay (but not in too angular a way) people were lined up to present their stories to 110 professionally un-gay people, as though the human beings involved were some kind of other species. That geometry felt ultimately dishonest and degrading to everyone involved. It doesn't matter the slightest who is who, but the professional pretence that no bishop is gay reproduces in the room the reason the Church, almost alone among public institutions these days, is so stuck about this.

Many drew attention to the cognitive dissonance between pastoral practice and theory right now. One or two even used the obvious "H" word. The Church must be do better if we are to fulfil our overriding mission to bring the grace and truth of Christ to this generation and make him known to those in our care. Right now what's on offer is rather like one of those time share or bank adverts where the small print at the bottom says “Terms and restrictions Apply.” The love of God is bigger than this. You may say it was ever thus. Jesus walked into the room and outcasts were healed, whilst the scribes and pharisees sat at the back being snide about his disregard of the small print and plotting how to get rid of him. I know where I belong in that scene, and where the Church should be. Right now we've got this wrong, and we have to change. We have to follow Christ, not Caiaphas.

If shared conversations are to bear fruit we bishops require a higher degree of corporate truthfulness than we have achieved yet. But if we did achieve it, and the individual truthfulness I experienced at times in Market Bosworth was a great sign of hope, what other good results might come for the Church and, perhaps, the peace and salvation of the world?

Who's fooling who about history?

I wrote today to fellow bishops, along with many academic colleagues more skilled in the field than me, to see if they might care to correct a foolish historical howler in the understanding that informed their recent letter on same-sex marriage.

It seems to me vastly unfair on those who struggled against Deceased Wife's Sister marriages between 1842 and 1907 to suggest that a marriage setup that potentially breaches Leviticus 18:18 should be a minor matter of “accidents” whilst one that potentially breaches Leviticus 18:24 should be a fundamental matter of “substance.”

What really intrigues me about the whole rhetoric of "redefinition" (as developed by the Moral Majority on the West Coast in the 1990's) is how appealing it is to those who don't want to allow gay people to marry, but how completely foolish and ineffective it has been with everyone else. 
 Not only did it pancake seriously in both houses of the UK parliament, but all the right wing websites that swore to carry on the struggle for ever, even lie down in the road in front of the bulldozers, after the legislation went through last year seem to have packed up and gone home. I wonder why?

27^th February 2014 

Dear Bishop, 

Error in the Bishops Guidance on Same Sex Marriages 

We write to alert you to the fact that an important statement in the Bishops Pastoral Guidance on Same Sex Marriages issued on 14th February is wrong.The guidance claims that: "There will, for the first time, be a divergence between the general understanding and definition of marriage in England as enshrined in law and the doctrine of marriage held by the Church of England and reflected in the Canons and the Book of Common Prayer." - House of Bishops, 14th Feb 2014, Appendix, para 9. 

This is inaccurate. Civil law and church teaching have diverged before, on at least two occasions. The first was in relation to the marriage to a deceased wife's sister, the second in relation to the remarriage of divorcees.There has been a robust discussion of this topic between experts on ecclesiastical history, law and sociology which Dr Scot Peterson summarises here. We are all in agreement that the statement in the Bishops Guidance is mistaken and misleading. Since it forms an important part of the case which is being made, we felt it was right to draw the mistake to your attention. We respectfully ask that it be corrected. 

Our attempts to resolve this matter by writing to Mr Arora and Mr Fittall have failed. There is growing concern amongst the academic community about the situation. 

Looking to the future, some of us are anxious to improve channels of communication with the Church, so that our research and scholarship can be used constructively. If you would be interested in a meeting to discuss this issue, we would be very grateful if you would reply to Professor Woodhead. 

Yours truly, 

Professor Callum Brown FRSE, University of Glasgow  

Professor Arthur Burns, King’s College London 

The Revd Dr Mark Chapman, Ripon College Cuddesdon 

Professor Grace Davie, University of Exeter 

The Revd Duncan Dormor, St John's College, University of Cambridge 

Professor Kenneth Fincham, University of Kent 

Professor Sarah Foot, Christ Church, University of Oxford

Dr Matthew Guest, University of Durham 

The Revd Dr Carolyn Hammond, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge (member of FAOC) 

Professor Gerard Loughlin, University of Durham 

Elizabeth MacFarlane, St John's College, University of Oxford  

The Revd Dr Judith Maltby, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford 

Professor Iain McLean FBA, Nuffield College, Oxford  

Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch FBA, Saint Cross College, University of Oxford 

The Revd Professor David Martin  FBA, London School of Economics 

Dr Charlotte Methuen, University of Glasgow (member FAOC)  

The Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, King’s College, University of Cambridge 

Dr Scot Peterson, Balliol College, University of Oxford  

Professor Alec Ryrie, University of Durham 

The Revd Dr Robert Tobin, Oriel College, University of Oxford 

Revd Dr William Whyte, St John’s College Oxford 

The Rt Revd Dr Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham  

Professor John Wolffe, The Open University, President of the Ecclesiastical History Society  

Professor Linda Woodhead, University of Lancaster 

We come in Peace — Shoot to Kill?

SLIDING ON THIN ICE
John Tenniel, Punch 1869
It is understandable that the anonymous author of the latest letter from House of Bishops (of which I am not a member), must, like Agag, “walk delicately.” Perhaps the best they could produce is what one early tweeter, retweeted by John Bingham of the Daily Telegraph, called “a masterclass in doublespeak, obfuscation and internal contradiction.”

The real issue was articulated by a member of the General Synod,  Simon Butler, who asked the following question at its recent session:

My question requires a little context and a large amount of honesty. I’m gay; I don't have a vocation to celibacy and at the same time I've always taken my baptismal and ordination vows with serious intent and with a sincere desire to model my life on the example of Christ simul justus et peccator. Those who have selected me, ordained me and licensed me know all this. My parish know this too.

My question is this: at the end of the process of facilitated conversations will the College of Bishops tell me whether there is a place for people like me as licensed priests, deacons and bishops in the Church rather than persisting in the existing policy that encourages a massive dishonesty so corrosive to the gospel? For my personal spiritual health, for the flourishing of people like me as ministers of the gospel and for the health of the wider church I think we will all need to have a clear answer to that question..

Clarity will need to emerge, then. We haven't got it yet. Is the answer to Simon’s question, “yes”? Well, apparently so. Recommendation One of the Pilling report states “We warmly welcome and affirm the presence and ministry within the Church of gay and lesbian people, both lay and ordained.” Surely the existing policy, with all of the moral drawbacks Simon enumerates won't continue, then? Well, apparently it will. Abiding by traditional teaching is the watchword. The massive dishonesty of which Simon speaks was not intentional. It was the only way kind hearted people could maintain what they understood to be traditional teaching in the real world.

As it was in the disputes of the 1860’s the way things pan out will largely be settled by what people do, not  policy statements or sabre rattling. Whilst a great fan of facilitated discussions I am still fuzzy about exactly who will talk to whom about what and why. Also, if it is axiomatic that nothing will change, what exactly will the point be? We may be far gone in the hypocrisies of past years, but why add to them? Jesus had far more to say about hand wringing Pharisees than he did about gays.

If facilitated conversations are to mean anything, it's important not to derail them by what bishops do to the people with whom they are supposed to be talking in a safe space. Whoever wrote the new document is plainly out of their depth. Even after twenty years of listening, nothing much has been heard and the watchword remains “Life, Jim, but not as we know it.” Captain Kirk’s next line was “We come in peace, Shoot to Kill.” Adopting that now will not facilitate honest or productive conversation.

But where do I want it to end, I am asked, and where are the Bishops really coming from if the chips are down? two quotations came across my desk, by sheer chance, this morning:

One is from Sister Simone Campbell, a Roman Catholic Nun.

The Catholic hierarchy has done very poorly at engaging the issues of sexuality, period—their own, or anybody else’s... what we need is a real spiritual renewal among our leadership because for me, following the gospel means be not afraid—welcome everyone, hug them, welcome them close, and live and love.

 The other is the gospel for the Third Sunday before Lent, year A, on which I am preparing a homily for tomorrow morning. St Matthew 5, and verse 37:

Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

Genuine Unity — How to focus it

A bishop is called to be a focus of unity. But how?

Unity matters. Here’s the theory, according to St Paul. The whole created order is emerging into Unity through Christ whose death has reconciled everything and triggered a viral process of reconciliation that takes in every human dimension. the Church is a new people, the firsfruits of the whole creation. Nobody is left out. It takes a whole world to know Christ.

Disunity is all in the mind. Some Christians believe gayness is within the purpose of creation; some against it. Much of our official history has taken the anti-gay line, and much of our unoffcial practice has behaved differently. Some believe in women’s senior leadership, some not. According to the last Archbishop, bishops could only be a focus of unity by resisting change in order to reassure traditionalists, in public anyway. The price of unity was rejecting gay people, largely paid by gay people. Ditto with women. They were to calm down and accept being diminished in ministry, as the price of unity.

This policy has failed, on every level.

The dwindling number of Traditionalists were not reassured and gay people continued to be diminished, patronised, bullied, and rejected. Meanwhile the Church became the only UK public body left allowed to discriminate against women in its senior leadership. What seemed even-handed was actually taking sides and has kludged up real dialogue, parking the issues in a siding, but guaranteeing an increasingly guilty and untenable paralysis. Meanwhile society got on with sorting both issues without the Church.

Bishops sat on the fence for the sake of unity in the name of even handedness, trying to slow everything down and keep order. The result was disunity, frustration and chaos.

In reality there was no fence to sit on. In effect, doing nothing was siding with the decreasing majority who believe gay people are wicked, stunted, sick or disabled, or the one that believed women were made by God for non-leadership roles.

As the numbers who believe gay people are just people and women are equal grew and became a majority in England, even the Church of England, the game was up.

You can't build unity in a family by excluding any members of it. If your children fall out it is not even handed to ignore the one who's stepping out of line, to build fellow feeling between the others who aren't, sacrificing the black female, or gay member “for the sake of family unity.” Doing that actually destroys the family, not unites it. You can only parent a family on the supposition that all its members are equally valid. Thus Bishops, by trying to be nice to gays whilst siding with anti-gays have not been a focus of unity, but have actually stoked a bigger crisis over gay people in the church than was experienced in education, politics, the military, the law, commerce, or any other area of life.

If bishops want to be real focuses of unity they have to stop trying to be nice, in effect siding with anti-gays. Both sides act out of conviction. Good. It's time to stop trying to calm everybody down and synthesize them. A working model is actually in the New Testament, and we need to wake up and follow it.

Romans 14 deals with Meat sacrificed to idols. This mattered to early Christians not as animal lovers, but because meat came from pagan temples. Eating it was either subsidizing idolatrous cults or defying them by proving Christians were immune to their products. Eat or refuse, you couldn't do both simultaneously. The issue was black and white. If St Paul ate meat he sided with those who think their faith is strong because they eat meat. If he refuses he sides against them with those who refuse, on grounds of conscience. There is no middle ground.

At this point St Paul could come running on, saying "Calm down, dear! Nobody eat anything because that will upset the vegetarians! Let's all discuss what we all have to do before we can do anything! And then when we're ready to move, we must all move together!"

What St Paul recommends is the exact opposite. He tells every Christian

• to be convinced in their own mind, each one personally.
• to get on with doing whatever they do, meaty or veggie, 100%, but to do it for faith reasons, for Christ, not fear reasons. What comes from faith is faith.
• When doing this produces passionate disagreement, to view it as an opportunity to accept the other as is and love them, not an opportunity to tribalise
• To judge nobody else before the time
• When people see you doing this, they will be amazed, and God will be glorified. Nobody has to pretend. Every particularity praises God's works, not its own, in its own language. Nothing is judged or synthesized before the time.

Fake Unity is basically about what's going on among the officers on the bridge. Its aim is keeping everyone as happy as possible. Driven by fear of everything falling apart, the captain becomes what Walt Disney called Mickey Mouse, "a little guy trying his best."  Its aim is a world tamed and homogenised, where everybody calms down, and each particularity curbs its enthusiasms whilst every anomaly is synthesised out.

Real unity is concerned with where the ship is going as well as how the ship is running. Its comes from the Cross, powered from within by a shedding of blood that bridges every contradiction in heaven and earth, even life and death. Its aim is a world reconciled, not homogenised, where every particularity believes and does what it does to the utmost and so becomes fully itself in a new, emergent, diverse, chorus of praise to God.

The coming days, for the General Synod, could be make up your mind time between these two visions of unity, cheesy or real. At last.

Perils of the Aristocracy: A Political Scientist Writes...

Where does the Lords debate on equal marriage leave Lord bishops? The Telegraph reckons that “top officials” have told them to stay away on Tuesday, to avoid a constitutional showdown on the subject:

Officials in Church House are said to have urged bishops to limit their numbers to around six at the most for the controversial debate. It is thought that up to 10 of them could defy the advice and vote against the bill.

This may well be sage advice. An interesting analysis of the constitutional implications came my way recently from an impeccable source, Dr Iain McLean, Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Fellow of Nuffield College, and Vice President for Public Policy of the British Academy. 

There are reports that the Lords Spiritual, or some of them, will support Lord Dear’s “fatal motion” to deny the Bill a second reading. This would be disastrous to the mission of the Church of England. The Bishop of Leicester, as Convener of the Lords Spiritual, should do all in his power to ensure that at least a majority of the bishops present do not support the fatal motion. 

The Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Tim Stevens, who has led the bishops in the House of Lords on the issue, said: "We clearly cannot support the Bill because it is contrary to the Church's historic teaching on the nature of marriage." He said, however, that he would want to recognise "that the Government has done a great deal to accommodate some of the Church's concerns, and to make it clear that individual clergy cannot be proceeded against by anybody". "Hard work" had been done "to ensure that the Canons of the Church of England will not contravene the civil law of England"…. Bishop Stevens said that the House did not traditionally take a vote at this stage, but that this might happen. Individual bishops would then have to decide how to vote (Church Times 24.05.13) 

The Bishops of Leicester and Chester have put their names down to speak in the debate, as have Lord Carey of Clifton and Lord Harries of Pentregarth. 

Six reasons why supporting the fatal motion would be disastrous for the C of E’s mission.

1. The core proposal is to allow same-sex civil marriage. The elected house of Parliament supports this by a majority of 2 to 1. The people support it by a stable majority. Although religious people are less supportive than non-religious people, Anglicans are close to evenly divided. The unelected house needs to move very cautiously in the face of these figures. The statutory regime for civil marriage in England & Wales was created in 1753 and has been changed numerous times, with civil divorce being permitted since 1857. The civil marriage regime is not a creature of canon law, despite a recent mistaken claim by the Archbishop of York.
2. Success of the fatal motion would violate the religious freedom of those who in conscience wish to solemnize same-sex weddings: currently the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Unitarians, Liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism. All of these have suffered from religious discrimination in the past. British Quakers came to unity in 2009 in support of same-sex marriage in Meetings according to the usage of Friends. The Quaker method relies on discernment of the inner Light, not on majority rule. If there is not unity as to the leadings of the Light, Quakers do not take a position. Their position on this matter should therefore be given considerable deference. An explanation of the Quaker theology behind it is here.
3. As the bishop of Leicester’s reported remarks acknowledge, the Government has put very substantial protections in place for the religious freedom of those whose conscience does not permit them to approve of or take part in same-sex religious weddings. If the fatal motion succeeds, the Lords Spiritual will have no further opportunity to improve the protection of conscientious objectors because the bill will be enacted under the Parliament Act without Lords’ consent (see below).
4. The Church of England often states that the role of the Lords Spiritual is to provide a religious perspective on current moral issues. But on this subject religious opinion is divided. See above; also the recent letter from the Bishop of Salisbury to Lord Alli. When religious opinion is divided, the only proper course for a religious representative in the legislature is to plead for freedom of conscience. That must mean, equally, the freedom of Quakers to conduct same-sex marriages, and the freedom of Anglicans to refuse to conduct them.
5. Opposition to the will of the Commons (on this matter, and on the matter of women bishops) imperils the future right of bishops to sit in the legislature. If the bishops, or their convener, support the Dear motion, it is extremely likely that a proposal to remove them from the legislature will be in both the Labour and the Liberal Democrat General Election manifestos for 2015.
6. If carried, the Dear motion will lead only to the Commons’ use of the Parliament Act 1949 to pass the Bill without Lords’ consent. Even if the Prime Minister does not want to invoke the Parliament Act, there is a sufficient majority in the Commons to ensure that it will be invoked if needed. The Lords Spiritual should consider what happened in 1832 and in 1911.

Heeding Professor McLean’s advice, however sensible, will annoy irreconcilables who want the Bishops to be the last ditch against the destruction of civilisation. It will at least prevent a situation where the bishops run the whole establishment onto the rocks in the name of a policy many of them didn't really believe in anyway, but were too afraid to say. It's a historic dilemma. 

Premium Members of the English aristocracy have faced Gay Juggernauts with equanimity in the past, and lived to tell the tale:

Letter to a Saloon Bar Moralist

Thank you for your letter. The more people apply their first principles to this question, the closer we will come to a way forward so thank you for trying. I am sure many people, especially those of a certain age will share it instinctively, driven by a primal feeling of disgust about gay sex.

What I am finding also, however, is that your views appear anything but natural to vast numbers of people who simply see gay people as people, not defined by their sexual practices. The opposite answer is as clear to them, as yours is to you and the minority of my correspondents your letter represents.

So what are we to do?

1. Please note that I have said absolutely nothing about sexual practice. The honourable expression of the sexual dimension of our lives is a challenge to everyone, gay or straight, I would add, regardless of where we find ourselves on the various scales that define what we call orientation, with their various fluidities and rigidities. It is a fact that every population ever has contained, among others, a small minority whose orientation is irreducibly homosexual. We have tried criminalising them, especially since the 1880's, treating them as mad, or bad, or deformed, or inverted, or, stunted. We have chemically castrated them, locked them up, exiled them, even, in some Muslim countries stoned them. None of this makes ay difference to the basic biological fact of the matter which is a given, and a part of the way God made us. Full stop. The question is how would a holy relationship be between members of this tiny minority?

2. Please notice that "Love your neighbour as yourself" is not the same thing as "go and sin freely." It is, however, the cornerstone of both Jesus' and St Paul's teaching and neither you nor I are free to cast it aside because of our feelings of sexual disgust.

3. Jesus also taught us to beware the leaven of the Pharisees within and among ourselves. Indeed, whilst he said absolutely nothing about what we call homosexuality (hardly surprising, since the concept was not defined until 1892) he said an enormous amount about using the law to lay burdens on others harder than they could bear, not treating others as you would have them treat you, failing to see the human being in need for the child of God they are, erecting the small matters of the law into crucial shibboleths that confound the purpose of the law, thinking that searching the scriptures in itself will bring life, supposing that people were made for the sabbath not the sabbath for people, and so I could go on. St John tells us that it is futile to think that we are loving the God we have never seen, if we do not love towards the person we have seen.

4. Jesus also taught that by its fruits you know the good of anything. Our commission is to be good news to the whole creation, not Pharisees. Our conventional silence and implicit condemnation based on disgust has borne fruits of depression, hypocrisy, self-loathing and even suicide. It cannot be good enough, against the basic duty of love to which Jesus calls his disciples.

5. There is no single biblical concept of marriage. There are seven in the Hebrew Scriptures alone, including some that are far from ours (like 1 man and 700 women). Indeed there actually is no root in Hebrew that expresses the concept of "marriage" as we know it. People "take" or "procure" their women according to the custom and definition of the context. Similarly there is no link between marriage and procreation which, in the Hebrew Scriptures, as in the rest of life, can happen entirely separately. What is judged is not the definitions of their marriages but people's behaviour within them. We have to work with the Bible we've got, not the one we would have written, given our own prejudices.

What I do find is that many people who begin with a saloon bar approach find that when they try to apply it to real people they love in their own circle of friends and families, its inadequacies soon reveal themselves for Pharisaic cant. An ethic that cannot be applied to people you actually love is sub-Christian by the standards of the Good Samaritan. The sermon on the mount is not a discussion starter, but a way of life. We all have to try and engage with it, as Nelson said in another context, more closely!

With every good wish and blessing,

+Alan

The Rt Revd Dr Alan Wilson
Bishop of Buckingham

01494 862173
http://www.bishopalan.com

"People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed" — Samuel Johnson

Redefining Marriage (1925)

Kismet

2014: Oh dear, Oh dear. We failed to heed the warning the Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England gave us, and now look what’s happening

Gay Marriage: Must Try Harder

The Lion has Roared. The faith and order commission of the General Synod, no less, has uttered its mind on marriage equality.

Marriage is the faithful committed permanent and legally sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman central to the stability and health of human society

What would happen if we simply substituted "between two people"?

Well, very little has happened, actually, in jurisdictions that have done that.

Belgium remains, after ten years, a drably conventional place, where people are married and given in marriage.

In Belgium, Gay people are not forced to marry people of the opposite sex and pretend to be what they are not. A small number of them choose a life of marital commitment together. Er, that’s it.

But apparently this is what will happen in the UK:

When marriage is spoken of unclearly or misleadingly it distorts the way couples try to conduct their relationships and makes for frustration and disappointment. The reality of marriage between one man and one woman will not disappear as a result of any legislative change, for God has given us this gift and it will remain part of our  created human endowment. The disciplines of living in it may become more difficult to acquire and the path to fulfillment in marriage and in other relationships more difficult to find.

Really? How would that be? Has anyone ever met any couple to whom this happened?

I agree that broadening access to marriage to include gay people and abolishing the unclarity inherent in forcing them to pretend to be heterosexual in order to get married can only reduce confusion, frustration and disappointment all round.

Nobody is proposing gay relationships should be substituted for straight ones, merely treated equally.

Paragraph 8 is pure waffle:

The marvelous ordering of the created world has not lost its force for a generation made more aware than before by discoveries in physics and biology of the dynamic unfolding of the universe, the interplay between innovation and constancy, variation and intelligibility.

If the author of paragraph 26 which states “persons are not asexual” were to explore discoveries in biology they would learn that a tiny proportion, up to 1% of the population are, actually, asexual.

Paragraph 29 makes a clear and helpful claim that

In God's image we bring spiritual creativity to our natural endowment without denying or overthrowing it.

One would expect the author to recognise that for some people their natural endowment is gay. Someone in favour of equal marriage would agree. But hang on, the report goes on to imply that only heterosexuality is, actually, natural.

This is the crux of the argument and exposes its genteel homophobic assumptions. If gayness may be regarded, as a matter of fact, as part of the natural order, the whole argument of this paper works in the opposite direction to what it intended. It does not speak for all Christians, as it claims to, because many Christians do not regard gay people as in any way inferior.
The conviction they are equal arises from primary gospel values.

Whilst agreeing with 95% of what is said in this report about marriage, the whole thing unravels as an argument against marriage equality the moment one accepts that gay people are not freaks, crooks, or straight people being naughty. If you believe they are any or all of these things, most of its arguments stack up against equal marriage. If you don’t, they actually stack up in favour.

I recently met a Lesbian in church who was telling me that her worst experience of Church had been when it posed as the source of some cheesy form of pastoral care whilst continuing its essentially homophobic stance towards her personally.

Thus I quake in my boots when I read in the accompanying press release

this report also underlines the role of the Church in seeking to provide care, prayer, and compassion for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to receive the gift of marriage in the form that the Church has understood it and continues to uphold.

Many of my gay friends will find this tendentious statement wildly patronising and offensive. Offers of comfort from the very people whose homophobia caused the pain in the first place will not be received easily. If the Church wants to provide compassion, it can stop talking about gay people and start talking with them. It can demonstrate the genuinness of its care by ceasing to belittle and patronise them and start taking them seriously. If it wants to pray with them, this institution which cheerfully blesses nuclear submarines, hamsters and buckets of cement can start blessing their often stunning relationships.

My Marriage Equality Postbag

Since coming out on this subject I have received many messages of all kinds — not mainly about marriage but about church people's attitudes to homosexuality. What’s the score?

• just over 500 messages of one sort or another, pretty much all so far as I can tell from Christians of one sort or another. This implies that most others in society have moved on from fretting about this subject, if not to full  acceptance, to an acknowledgment that gay people are just people like them, and what people get up to in bed is their own business.
• about 80% have been supportive. These include some 20-30 deeply personal testimonies from gay couples, telling of love and faithfulness, sometimes against terrible odds over many years. Legal recognition will not make these relationships stronger, but it will de-stigmatise them. Among practising Christians, I have received “Don’t tell my vicar, but...” and “not in my name” messages that imply a need for more openness, confidence and honesty, especially where clergy have attempted to whip others into shape behind a conventional party line. It is inaccurate to characterize all Evangelical Christians as anti. Many of them are far more thoughtful, nuanced and conflicted, with a strong Evangelical instinct that is not about last ditching a particular interpretation of the Bible but striving to be good news to real people. The vast majority of local Churches are personally welcoming to all.
• Of the 20% agin, about 90% can only be seen as expressions of crude prejudice and bigotry. The phrase “I am not  homophobic, but...” sees to mean “soft or hard homophobic statement ahoy! But don't pick me up on it.” Some of these comments are more genteel than others. I have been told that gay people are lice, animals, insects, should be aborted before birth, disgusting, perverted, sexually voracious, mass murderers and sub-human — all these for just being gay. So whether you like your prejudice genteel, hypocritical, or crude, there’s a carousel of possibilities out there... It is simply false to claim there is no homophobia in the Church. There is plenty of it, apparently, and if Church leaders do not wake up and act to tackle it, the Church will become, even more than it already is, a last ditch for soft or hard prejudice that has now faded elsewhere in society. 
• Another anti trope has been “Bishop you are trying to be kind, but you are encouraging BUGGERY!!!” (the last word underlined in green biro till it goes through the paper.) A fair number of otherwise inoffensive Church people insist on defining gay people by what they imagine they get up to in bed, with a prurience and obsessionality that is disturbing.
• Within the 10% of 20% more reflective unfavourable comment, I have made new friends, and discovered a capacity to engage with this among Christians, however reluctantly, that is impressive. Some messages were initially very hostile and angry with me. When I engaged with them on one positive point about which we might agree, the façade crumbled and we were able to have interesting and fruitful conversations. It can be done.
• I have enjoyed about half a dozen really thoughtful, helpful and reflective conversations with very Conservative Evangelical Christians — nuggets of gold amidst a steaming pile of more general railing and abuse.

One lay comment sticks in my mind. The gentleman pointed out that a positive sense about homosexuality has been building in British society since the 1920’s. The resulting tsunami arrived in the 1990’s in the fields of education, culture media and sport, public life, the law, the military (in which he had been a senior officer), the police. In each of these areas of national life the overwhelming, when it came, was sudden and, surprisingly, almost entirely benign. The Church had parked itself in a siding in the 1990’s, and everyone else, as he put it, was somewhere round Birmingham by now.

The bishops, I was told, had simply taken the easiest way out — try to agree with everyone as much as possible, make generally safe noises about change, be nice to individual gay people whilst constructing fences against their full acceptance, humour reactionaries under a banner of inclusivity, generally treating past certainties as though they still applied as much as possible. As a military man he could say you cannot run any institution, least of all a Church, on niceness, evasion, pusillanimity, cowardice and hypocrisy. That’s one military view, anyway.

I think I am coming towards some general conclusions about the basic subject for most of my correspondents — gayness not marriage:

1. I have during this time returned to my college notes of the tiny number of Bible passages that could possibly bear directly on this subject. Many (many? there are only 5 anyway) are not entirely clear in their meaning, and none are entirely obvious for interpretation and application. I was very struck by a day I spent studying Leviticus in Hebrew in depth with various rabbinic commentaries, by the depth and subtlety of the text exposed by those formed within it rather than constructing a chain of sound bites from it that just happen to reinforce their basic instincts. There is a crying need for more rigorous reading of the text where homophobic readings used to be adequate to the needs of a homophobic society, with whose norms they easily conformed.
    
2. Christianity thrives as good news in the real world. This is not a job for school certificate Biology. Concepts of “natural” and “un-natural” are very fundamental to where people position themselves about homosexuality. There seem to be two basic perceptions from which everything else flows. As clearly and charitably as I can put it
   Either
   Homosexuality is a phenomenon against nature, and defies Creation and/or evolution
   Or
   Homosexuality is a phenomenon within nature, and thus part of Creation and/or evolution

Notoriously, perhaps, the vast majority of people in this country have moved since the 1920’s from the first position towards a more or less grudging conviction of the second. As the first position fades with the generations, simply asserting it louder is in fact driving change forward faster.

In that sense, supporters of marriage equality should welcome every one of the prejudiced comments they receive. The matter speaks for itself. A fair number of MP’s who were wavering on the brink of voting for last week’s bill were certainly influenced to do so by sheer horror at some of the bigoted nonsense they received under a “Christian” label.

I’m with Tutu. Encouraging the Church to be more aligned with the point of the Bible and less hung up about particular interpretations of its small print should be doable, especially as most Church members are there already. For them being a Christian is about loving God and your neighbour as yourself, not culture wars. That’s the good news.

Desmond Tutu:

The Jesus I worship is not likely to collaborate with those who vilify and persecute an already oppressed minority. I myself could not have opposed the injustice of penalizing people for something about which they could do nothing -- their race -- and then have kept quiet as women were being penalized for something they could do nothing about -- their gender; hence my support for the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate. Equally, I cannot keep quiet while people are being penalized for something about which they can do nothing -- their sexuality. To discriminate against our sisters and brothers who are lesbian or gay on grounds of their sexual orientation for me is as totally unacceptable and unjust as apartheid ever was.

The bad news is that, as a matter of shameful fact, the Church does appear to contain noisy minorities of homophobes and bigots who use verses from the Bible as a collection of soundbites to validate their disgust, and it will have to work consciously to prevent itself it becoming their last ditch.

A chink in the walls of Kafka’s Castle?

Headlines scream that the Church of England has “lifted its moratorium on appointing bishops in civil partnerships.”

One can only speculate about the intentions of those who did this deed, but they do not appear to have expected  a vigorous media response. It may be that they were quite unaware that they were doing anything of great significance.

They weren’t.

Whoever the framer of this tweak was, he almost certainly thought it a minor administrative tidy-up, bringing policy for bishops and clergy into line.

It could, perhaps, be intended to protect the institution from legal challenge. It could even, who knows, impart a shred of alignment into official opposition to equal marriage. This has seen bishops trumpeting a strange, new-found, enthusiasm for civil partnerships that they never certainly never showed when they were voting like cattle (only +Richard Harries didn’t) for an amendment to wreck the original legislation.

No individual is willing put their signature on the new policy, so there can no personal animus in those who say they look like confused and anxious landlubbers trying not to rock the boat so hard they almost capsize it. They'd be better off to conquer their fear of the unknown gay forces of nature enough to hoist the sails like every other boat on the river has done in the past thirty years.

This change leaves intact all fictions and fantasies of a new and unique approch — “Do ask, Do tell — but only if you're gay.” This has been honoured more in the breach, mostly because it is impracticable, tacky and discriminatory.

All that has changed is a grudging recognition of civil partnerships for celibates. The headlines have, however, stimulated vigorous kicking and screaming by people. Lynette Burrows on yesterdays PM programme (18 minutes in) shared with the nation her “instinct that people like me have which is revulsion” about gay people. The role of the Church, she implies, is to validate her instinctive disgust, which she imagines is shared by everybody.

I almost crashed the car as I heard her speak. Usually people with such views are careful to preface homophobic or racist comments by saying they are not being homophobic or racist. Years ago, somebody told me they were not, of course, being racist then explained that black people were "deteriating" her community by being black, and who would not feel sorry for the children of racially mixed marriages? By this diseased scale, there was a magnificent honesty about Lynette Burrows’ views, however revolting.

At least she was expressing what this argument is actually all about. Dread of a notional gay tsunami is driven at a level way beneath that at which rational discussion is possible. Fear, disgust and revulsion have indeed characterised societal responses to gay people, right up to the late twentieth century. The Church can, and must do better than that, or it simply debases itself into a bunker for bigots, where they can feel comfortable about their abnormal revulsions.

Corrupting the Church into a vehicle for disgust against any group of people on the grounds of how they are created is unspeakably wrong-headed. The witness of the Bible and history is that the Church’s purpose is the precise opposite — to embrace all people in a redeemed humanity that embraces every particularity God has created.

As to the chances of a bishop in a civil partnership, Kafka fans may see this announcement as an anonymous note to the surveyor at the inn, K. (or shall we call him J.?) removing another notional barrier to his invitation to dine in the Count’s Castle. Experience of what happens next, as well as the mystifactious manner of its delivery, will not cause anyone's heart to flutter too wildly.

But here, below the fold as it were, is a plot summary of The Castle that resonates with people journeying towards a church that practices what it preaches about equality. It is richly reflected in this, and other recent anonymous announcements bearing the "Church of England” moniker: I dream of the day it won’t be. For now, Enjoy!

The Council Chairman informs J. that, through a mix up in communication between the castle and the village, he was erroneously requested but, trying to accommodate J., the Council Chairman offers him a position in the service of the school teacher as a caretaker. Meanwhile, J., unfamiliar with the customs, bureaucracy and processes of the village, continues to attempt to reach the official Klamm, which is considered a strong taboo to the villagers.

The villagers hold the officials and the castle in the highest regard... Even though they do attempt to appear to know what the officials do, the actions of the officials are never explained; they simply defend it as being absurd any other way.

A number of assumptions and justifications about the functions of the officials and their dealings are enumerated through lengthy monologues by villagers. Everyone appears to have an explanation for the officials' actions that appear to be founded on assumptions and gossip. The descriptions given by the townspeople often contradict themselves by having very different features and routines within a single person's description, but they do not try to hide the ambiguity; instead, they praise it as any other action or feature of an official should be praised.

One of the more obvious contradictions between the "official word" and the village conception is the dissertation by the secretary Erlanger on Frieda's required return to service as a barmaid. J. is the only villager that knows that the request is being forced by the castle (even though Frieda may be the genesis with no consideration of the inhabitants of the village.

The castle is the ultimate bureaucracy with copious paperwork that the bureaucracy maintains is "flawless". This flawlessness is, of course, a lie; it is a flaw in the paperwork that has brought J. to the village in the first place.

Other system failures are occasionally referred to. J. witnesses a flagrant misprocessing after his nighttime interrogation by Erlanger as a servant destroys paperwork when he cannot determine who the recipient should be.

The castle's occupants appear to be all adult men and there is little reference to the castle other than to its bureaucratic functions. Particular functions of the officials are never specified. The officials that are discussed have one or more secretaries that do their work in their village. Although the officials come to the village, they do not interact with the villagers unless they need female companionship...

“Etcetera, Etcetera,” as the King of Siam used to say. How long, O Lord?

Beam me down, Scotty...

Apparently the whole Church of England (actually an Archbishop's Council staffer called, perhaps, Fred Bloggs — s/he didn't say) now officially believes in “Complemetarity”

One implication of this, for Fred anyway, and s/he says for Lucy and me, is that our gay married friends, simply by being married, are actually diluting our very happy marriage of 27 years, like damp rot in the basement.

We may not realise this is happening but that’s how the blighters operate and hey! the imperceptibility only goes to prove it cannot be explained. It’s a mystery.

Complementarity is in danger of a bad press, possibly because of the Sydney Three Card Trick:

1.  All are Equal, of course
2. Women are different from men, thus... (Here comes the Queen of Hearts...)
3. Subservience is not inequality after all. It’s only a difference. It’s complementarity. Anyone who says otherwise is collapsing gender identity. (Hot Dog!)

Could there be mileage, however, in another vision of complementarity?

Genesis does imply God makes people for other people, to find part of the meaning of their lives in relationship to significant others. Is there a (non three card trick) complementarity that might wash?

We have to begin with a basic concept of what it means to be human.

If, in biological naïvité, we assume a simple “Janet and John” sexual binarism, Complementarity means conventional geometry is part of the way we are made. Scotty would agree  — “ye canna change the laws o’ physics” or in this case, o’ Biology. If you really believe this, and you are correct, why worry about gay marriage? Once enacted, it will peter out anyway when people try it and discover it conflicts with the basic way they are made. They will receive in their own bodies the reward of their actions, as someone once said.

But what if the Laws o’ Biology are actually rather subtle and complex? If you discover that God has actually made people with all kinds of grayscale, you would expect people to interact personally and reveal all kinds of complementarities in a broad spectrum of ways germane to who they are. This makes all kinds of complementarity possible. True Complementarity is not a batch concept but a customised, contextualised, lived reality. If so, same sex married couples, like everybody else, receive in their bodies the reward of their actions — as much happily ever after, or not, as heterosexual couples.

Which model is truer? There’s only one way to find out...

Furthermore, if the laws of Biology (or Creation) are complex not binary, knowing what we do about the way human beings are made, it is not good to fly in the face of the purposes of Creation by forcing people with minority identities to act as though they are something they are not. That would be as morally questionable and damaging to the institution of marriage as, say, forcing everyone in a society to get married, regardless of their intentions.

So does it all come down to anthropological truth? How wise,as well as inevitable, is it that Bible characters simply absorbed and developed marriage lore contextually, yielding no fewer than seven different geometries of marriage? Should we not do the same thing? Whatever hufflepuff the “Church of England” (aka Fred Bloggs in Church House) or anybody else puts into this debate on any side, actually, the truth is mighty and will prevail.

“Ye canna change the laws of Anthropology.” In the final analysis, was Scotty right?

Discuss?

Overview and Inner View

Two archbishops wrestle what some insist on calling the Gay Issue to the ground. The overview comes from Nobel Laureates led by former Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The same cultural values, which have fostered and supported our lifelong quests for peace, also command us to speak out against the violence and discrimination our fellow human beings are enduring every day solely because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex. In many of our countries the influence of colonial era laws still makes outlaws of LGBTI people. Recent legislative efforts like those underway in Russia and Uganda could pose even more sinister sanctions on LGBTI people as well their allies, ourselves included. The criminalization of adult, consensual homosexuality in any form is unacceptable. And, we must remain vigilant even in countries that rightly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, to ensure that LGBTI citizens are effectively protected from the hatred and bigotry that persists.”

The bigger context is persecution and violence LGBT people face around the world. We must hang our heads in shame where anyChurch leaders  have colluded with or even promoted it. The kind of “unity” you purchase with one brother by spitting in the face of another, or even turning a blind eye, is not worth having.  It is sub-Christian.

Also last week, Archbishop Rowan was hobnobbing with young people at Lambeth Palace and observing with painful accuracy the tangles the Church has got itself into over the status of women and marriage equality. He went on to say:

What’s frustrating is that we still have Christian people whose feelings about it are so strong, and sometimes so embarrassed and ashamed and disgusted, that that just sends out a message of unwelcome, of lack of understanding, of lack of patience. So whatever we think about it, we need, as a Church, to be tackling what we feel about it.”

This is no complex theological puzzle with little silver balls in it. All we have to do is apply the Golden Rule, the Lord's summary of the Law, the call from St John to love the God we have never seen by loving the person we have, in other words, the basics. The Church is not a place these apply differently, or even do not apply, but the place they should be so vibrantly applied that the world may believe.

That, not liberalism or missional credibility is the issue that calls for the courage to name cultural embarrassment, shame and disgust for what they are — cultural foibles — rather than reading them into the Bible, reading it back out again and using our conclusions as a soft cosh against gay neighbours.

Our dirty little secret is that there is no gay issue. Our embarrassment and secrecy is a symptom of our own, oft unacknowledged, yuk factor and hypocrisy — something Jesus warned us about all along. He defied the stranglehold of any obsession with ritual purity, and teaches us the rules were made for people, not people for the rules. The Sermon on the Mount is not given us as a Postdoctoral proposal, or a discussion starter, but a way of life. Just do it. Then people will hear the voice of Jesus in our Churches, instead of the scribes and pharisees. Then the appearance we give will be the one we can't help giving, given the reality of who we are and how we see things.

When we stop believing gay people are an issue, and start seeing them as people, anyone will find a genuine welcome not hand-wringing, deep seated prejudice masked by niceness, and cheesy grins to get ’em in, applied with cheap theatrical gum.

Beyond Sneering

We need words to communicate, but we also use them to consolidate the tribe. On the Day of Pentecost God used words to include everyone as they are in the tribe. It was the end of tribalism.

Back in the eighties the great ra-ra sneer was “Fundamentalism.” All it meant was “something unpleasantly Conservative better rubbished than understood.” The more Conservative noughties brought a new ra-ra term — “Revisionist.”
The give away is always that the person being described thus wouldn't use it of themselves. It may one day become a badge of honour, like “Methodist”, but until it does, whenever you see it used you know all that is going on is mindless sneering.

Then there’s the L-word. At a meeting in 2004 about the Windsor Report, our Diocesan Registrar told us of a young man he saw in Sierra Leone when he was a missionary there in the seventies, necklaced for being gay. He supposed “most of us here were more Liberal than that.” A hand shot up — “Why are you accusing me of being Liberal?”

Since the 1830’s “Liberal” has been the Napoleon of ra-ra words.

Served up in a tasty ad hominem all it means is “if you’re one of those people who believes in say, not hanging people, voting, ending Apartheid, rehabilitating criminals — well then... splutter... you’re just one of those people who believes in...” Preached to the choir, the name-calling combats tribal insecurity, oft reinforced as howler monkeys do, by bouts of furious mutual masturbation that, unlike the simian version, is mercifully mainly verbal.

But what lies beyond? Why, for example, do I believe passionately that women and gay people are equal apart from a mere irrational attachment to a social agenda and a drably conventional theology of Creation that says “whatever God has made is good?”

It struck me yesterday how the cacophony of language on the day of Pentecost says difference is good and unity is emergent. God respected the people’s varied cultural idioms, but the ensuing chaos told the mighty acts of God. To receive the word people didn’t need to divest themselves of their cultural particularity, as would have been necessary if God were a merely tribal deity or mascot. One mark of toxic Pharisaism is scouring land and sea to make people like yourself.

The mightiest act of God is his commandment to love him as we love our crooked neighbour with all our crooked heart. It’s shockingly unconditional. Someone wrote to me last month to say it beggared his belief that a bishop should think that “Love thy neighbour as thyself” applied to homosexuals. It beggars this bishop’s belief that anyone should think that it doesn’t.

“Yes,” I hear some say. “We love people, of course. We welcome all. But that doesn’t mean endorsing what they do.” On one level this is obviously true. Best of luck to you, say I. But make sure you really are welcoming people, not just laying a grinning veneer over a subtext of disapproval. It doesn’t work because, I find, people who have experienced oppression have an almost psychic radar about that kind of hypocrisy. And please remember two other primary truths of the Gospel —

1. I am in no position, as one sinner, to endorse or not endorse what another sinner does. The Lord does that bit. In God we trust. All others pay cash. I therefore have to be very careful and critical of my own perception. Only when I have removed the plank from my own eye can I help my neighbour see more clearly. It is comical if I, as a Pharisee prone to anger, contentions, party spirit and self-righteousness, all things Jesus taught are evil, rise up and denounce anybody for things Jesus said absolutely nothing about.


2. We need to assess, ruthlessly, our impact and its fruit as well as our intentions. The good Samaritan teaches us that our actual performance with real people matters more than our good intentions. This is the hardest discipline of all, perhaps. A second sign of toxic Pharisaism is laying burdens on others’ backs too heavy for them to bear. If our welcoming strategy is experienced as oppression it doesn’t work and we need to repent of our hypocrisy ten times more than the object of our welcome needs to divest themselves, even if they could, of whatever it was about them that disgusted us in the first place. By their fruits ye know them. Any policy of the Church that produces scarred, broken self-loathing or even the anger of feeling oppressed in the people it is designed to help needs to change. because either God has given up on all that “Love thy neighbour as thyself / do unto others...” stuff, which is unlikely, or it’s a pretty useless policy.

This, not some notional tendency called Liberalism is the root of the matter. Blessed are those who hear the word of God and do it. That’s all.