I would not like to be a bishop in the Church of England right now. What a pickle they find themselves in when it comes to gay marriage! It’s one of those situations in which whatever solution you arrive at is going to be wrong in the eyes of substantial numbers of people. What do you do when the churches are split down the middle on a question of basic morality? Fortunately the C of E has a tried and tested solution to this kind of problem: it’s called “fudge and mudge”, and I believe that it has come out trumps again.
The Church has had to make moral somersaults before. There was a time when Christians believed that it was OK to own slaves (provided that you were not cruel to them), that certain women were witches and should be put to death for the safety of society as a whole, and that “the Jews” killed Christ and therefore deserved to be persecuted for ever. All these beliefs fulfilled Cyprian’s criteria for orthodoxy: they had been believed always, everywhere and by all. Furthermore all of them could apparently be validated from Scripture. Yet none of them is taught by any church today.
So how does the Church change her mind about such things? Actually in much the same way as scientists do. There’s an old scientific joke that new theoretical understandings triumph, not because the old guard is somehow persuaded that they are true but because, over a long period, the old guard retire or die and are replaced by younger men and women who have absorbed the new theory at school or at college. Similarly a change in the Church’s moral understanding takes at least a generation, sometimes two or three, and does not usually involve any kind of volte face by individuals.
I can remember a time when no mainstream church had any kind of tolerance towards gay people. The Christian consensus was that gay sex was wrong and perverted, and that Christians who were unfortunate enough to have been born homosexual must live in strict celibacy if they were to have any chance at all of entering heaven!
The next stage was the appearance of a few small campaigning organisations consisting mostly of gay Christians. One early one in the UK was the Gay Christian Movement which popped up in 1976. It has changed its name a few times since then, mostly accumulating extra initials, and is now known as One Body One Faith. Bit by bit, decade by decade, more and more Christians (especially lay Christians) who were not themselves gay began to say that they could no longer see any logic in the traditional view of sexuality.
But at the same time, a sexual revolution was taking place outside the Church. For perhaps the first time, the world led the Church on a moral issue. Previously it had always been the Church that was recognised as more moral than the world. Whenever the standards of Christians and non-Christians differed, most people had agreed that Christians had a higher standard, even if they didn’t always live up to it. That is no longer the case. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was horrified to find, during the debate on equal marriage in 2013, that he and the other bishops were the only people in the House of Lords to oppose the bill (which had not been the case when Tony Blair’s civil partnership legislation went through). “They looked at us,” he said afterwards “and saw what they did not like.” Not, you will notice, that they did not like what they saw; that could have been a way of saying that darkness does not like light. In fact Welby clearly understood that the secular Lords actually saw the Church position as an immoral one.
Meanwhile there were changes within the Anglican Communion worldwide that went flatly in the opposite direction. While the old “white commonwealth” churches are static or shrinking in numbers, there has been an explosion of church membership in developing countries, especially in Africa. It is actually unusual in these churches not to have a few adult baptisms before a communion service. But these churches, like the cultures that surround them, are fiercely homophobic. They claim that toleration of gay Christians in the US and UK is actively harming their evangelisation efforts, particularly in countries where there are a lot of Muslims. They may well be right, but one could equally well argue that their homophobia is actively harming any attempts at evangelisation that we might undertake in our own countries.
It’s actually rather amusing to see how the “woke brigade” deal with the conflict between their fervent anti-racism and the homophobia of black churches, including majority black churches in the UK. It turns out that on their scale of values, gay trumps black just as Muslim and trans both trump gay. So in this conflict, the African Christians have to be wrong, and the imposition of our views on them, which would otherwise be called “cultural imperialism”, miraculously becomes OK after all. If they were Muslims and not Christians, then of course the reverse would be true. Go figure!
The bishops in the Church of England cannot afford to express this simplistic view because they are not just bishops of the Church of England. They are also part of the management of the Anglican Communion as a whole and responsible for holding it together. Parish priests don’t have to worry about the views of Nigerian bishops but Justin Welby certainly does. So the complete disconnect between what most people in this country think and what Christians elsewhere in the world think is a serious problem for him and his bishops.
Clearly the Living in Love and Faith project was an attempt to find a way out of the impasse. All the bishops must have been aware that some kind of change had to take place if the Church of England was to survive at all, but they probably hoped they could get away with something minimal that existed more on paper than in practice. The 2021 census results, which showed that less than half of the English population now identifies as Christian, probably provided the final warning that something more than the minimum was needed.
What they have done (very cleverly in my opinion) is to separate the moral issue entirely from the issue of what is or is not a marriage in the eyes of the Church. The traditional doctrine that sexual acts between two people of the same sex are intrinsically wrong and immoral has been abandoned in favour of the view almost universally held by the rest of the country that the morality of sexual acts depends on the way the people involved treat each other (including in the long term) and not on the shape of either partner’s genitalia. This is a 180 degree shift which allows the church to bless publicly what previously could not be blessed.
At the same time, the vital religious status of marriage between a man and a woman as a sacramental model of the relationship between God and His people has been carefully preserved. In this model, the difference and complementarity between male and female is an essential part of the symbolism and therefore not negotiable. Some people have argued that this fudge alters the moral teaching that sex outside marriage is always wrong, but actually it doesn’t, because the C of E (as the national church) has always had to accept legal secular marriages as valid in their own right. For example, converts who have previously been married by a registrar in a secular place do not have to remarry in church to make their intercourse lawful in Christian eyes. Similarly, those who have remarried following a divorce are regarded by the church as married for moral purposes. They cannot remarry in church during the lifetime of the other partner, but they are allowed to have sex. They can even have what is commonly called a “church blessing” after their civil wedding. All that has happened now is that gay civil marriages have now been aligned with the straight ones to which they are legally equivalent.
A further nice touch (or a further fudge depending on how you look at it) is that the blessing ceremony can include the renewal of the couple’s vows and the exchange of rings. This satisfies the desperate need of religious (not just Christian) gay people to say what they actually mean when they make their vows. Up till now this has been prevented in practice by the state-imposed rules concerning civil marriage, which do not allow the use of religious symbolism or language during the ritual.
Whether the wider Anglican Communion can still be kept on board is uncertain. If not, we might well end up with two Anglican Communions, each insisting that it is the only lawful one and that the other is an impostor, and the non-Christian world will have a good laugh at our expense. But in the circumstances I really don’t see what else the bishops could have done. Preserving the status quo ante would probably be a formula for the eventual rejection of the Church of England by the English people as a whole and its slow disappearance.
In view of that, it might have been better if the Church had brought in this change immediately after the passage of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act in 2013. After all, the bishops had made a big parade at the time of their sudden and unexplained change of heart about civil partnerships, so why not simply announce that they were now willing to offer a “church blessing” after a civil partnership ceremony but not after a civil marriage, because the latter would cause confusion about the Church’s teaching on what marriage actually was. It was pretty obvious that with full civil marriage available, gay unbelievers would quickly lose interest in civil partnerships, but a civil partnership ceremony followed by a church blessing could easily have become the recognised equivalent for Christians. Sadly it is much too late for that to happen now.
Readers might also be interested to read Theo Hobson’s Spectator article on this subject, which I discovered after writing this ramble. It’s always nice to know that someone else agrees with you!
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