The Anglican Schism

The Anglican Church, some 450 years after the Elizabethan Settlement, looks like it's finally splitting because in the chapter before it condemns trimming ones beard, the book of Leviticus also says that "You must not lie with a man as with a woman". I'm not sure whether this clear commandment is a ban on lesbians as well - it would seem strange for God to mean that only one form of homosexuality is a sin, and nowadays we do tend to believe that things said about "men" in ancient books should really apply to people as a whole. But then, we are not to interpret the Bible in a modern context just to suit our liberal whims. Clearly God did not mean to outlaw lesbian relationships at the same time or he would have said so.

True to form on this tragic day, the "News" section of the Church of England's official website carried the momentous headline "Church Commissioners in discussions to sell residential properties". It's very moving, especially if you grew up in a Church of England residential property.

Of course, the Church is not splitting and nobody's being asked to leave. Not yet anyway. It's all very much more subtle and complex than that, and the press simplifying things just shows that they really don't understand the terribly poised niceties of the situation. What's happened is that the American and Canadian branches of the Anglican Church (the American branch, like the Scottish, is called Episcopalian to avoid any lack-of-independence stigma) have been asked to voluntarily withdraw from the Anglican Consultative Council, one of the four Anglican "instruments of unity" (the other three being the organ, the piano, and the guitar). They are allowed to voluntarily rejoin sometime around the next Lambeth Conference in 2008 if everybody agrees that we're all suitably wretched sinners and repents. This may not sound very newsworthy to the rest of the world, but let me assure you that George Bush invading your country is comparatively mild compared to the wrath the Anglican Church must be feeling to not invite you to a committee meeting.

For those who don't normally follow my sense of the cynical (not that I'm likely to have acquired any readers who don't know me personally), I'm a lot angrier than I normally am, and you only have to look at the spineless peace of crap that the Anglican Church has released to see why. (For the majority who have better things to do than to go looking for this, it's here.)

There is some kindly and gracious stuff that reminds us of the pastoral Jesus at his Victorian Christmas Carol best, such as the following:

"Section 6. The victimisation or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us. We assure homosexual people that they are children of God, loved and valued by him, and deserving of the best we can give of pastoral care and friendship (vii)."

Skip the crucial sections listing the committees and working parties the Archbishop of Canterbury is going to convene to get us out of this crisis, the dates they are going to report back, the process of election and confirmation of the Church hierarchy, etc. etc., and you find the following:

"Section 18. In the meantime, we ask our fellow primates to use their best influence to persuade their brothers and sisters to exercise a moratorium on public Rites of Blessing for Same-sex unions and on the consecration of any bishop living in a sexual relationship outside Christian marriage."

We get the picture loud and clear. The Church will withold God's blessing from you, and then give you all the bedside manner pastoral care you could possibly need to get over this slap in the face. And by the way, treating any human being with diminishment is anathema.

There are times in the past when I've been quite proud of the compromise capability of the Anglican ideal. Thanks largely to the Elizabethan Settlement, for centuries during which countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Scotland, and Ireland suffered large-scale religious conflicts, England remained a country in which differences of religion were not a justification for killing someone. But in the modern world we have backed ourselves into a corner in which compromise isn't saving lives, it's forsaking your belief in a fully loving God. What happens is that the fundamentalist wing of the Church screams loudly about what it will and won't put up with, and the rest of the Church has to put up or shut up in case the fundamentalists walk out.

The solution proposed is that the Americans and Canadians have to go to their room and think about it for three years, after which they had better come downstairs and say that they're very sorry. The Church has become one of those frightening family reunions where there is some gun-toting lunatic of an Uncle who keeps making sexist, racist and violently threatening remarks about anyone who doesn't agree with his entire agenda. Then one of the children who doesn't realise the subtlety and complexity of the situation commits the abhorrent sin - he contradicts the gun-toting Uncle and suggests that he be a bit more reasonable and get with the picture. All hell breaks loose, and of course it's the child's fault. "Little Timmy, don't you realise that you have really upset gun-toting Uncle Nutcase and if you don't let him yell at your friends and throw them out of the house then the family may not be able to stick together. I know, Timmy, it's very sad that your friends can't come here any more without being threatened and abused, but let's not worry about that right now, please please please say you're sorry to Uncle Nutcase or Grandma will be terribly terribly upset." You grit your teeth and play along with the farce, because you too bow to the subtleties of the situation, but for the sake of your kid's sanity and protection you'll find just about any excuse to go to your partner's family instead next time Christmas rolls around.

A very biased cartoon, of course, but then I am quite fed up with reading about the poor Nigerians as the injured party, the backward Third Worlders who can't be expected to understand basic human dignity. Why doesn't the Church stands up for the Nigerian homosexuals? And don't go and tell me that there aren't any because it's not culturally acceptable in Nigeria. If it's culturally unacceptable then you can bet your life that Nigerian homosexuals exist and are just the kind of marginalised people who Jesus came for.

Just is case you were in any doubt as to who is in the majority here, you can turn to the following:

"Section 12. We as a body continue to address the situations which have arisen in North America with the utmost seriousness. Whilst there remains a very real question about whether the North American churches are willing to accept the same teaching on matters of sexual morality as is generally accepted elsewhere in the Communion, the underlying reality of our communion in God the Holy Trinity is obscured, and the effectiveness of our common mission severely hindered."

The rest of the Church clearly accepts a unified collection of teachings on sexual morality, which presumably includes the outlawing of homosexuality. If you're an Anglican from anywhere else in the world, you accept that homosexuality is a sin and you're very upset by your wayward North American cousins.

This is utter rubbish, and is a typically lame Anglican trick to silence the progressives because you can't silence the fundamentalists but you must have unity somehow. In the next few months we will hear about many North American churches who want to split from their diocese and demand to be overseen by a Bishop from somewhere else. These conservative churches will have no compunction at all about splitting from their local Anglican communities because they're just "doing the right thing". On the other hand, the liberal Anglicans in the Church of England and elsewhere will meekly stand by and accept the category in which Section 12 places them, because they don't want to upset church unity or cause pain for their poor Bishops or dear Dr Rowan Williams who is doing the best he can in very difficult circumstances. This is all part of the fundamentalist plan - keep the American conservatives loud (not difficult), keep the English liberals quiet (again, not difficult because they're so terribly nice and will just go on saving souls with cups of tea for all eternity), and the prediction that gun-toting Uncle Nutcase was in the right and Little Timmy was out of line will come beautifully true.

Dr Williams, you have failed us. Yet again, the Church has marginalised the mainstream by pandering to the extremists, to the extent that mainstream people with true Christian values are now firmly outside of a shrinking church. No wonder that of your remaining flock, the intolerant group is in the majority. They've been allowed to dictate the "beliefs" of the church for years, not by being persuasive, not by appealing to Christian values, not even by presenting a proper analysis of the Bible as a whole, but just by being loud and threatening. Every public discussion on this topic I've read has the same pattern. About 1 out of 4 people says "I'm glad, it's about time the Church stood up for God's incontrovertible Law as expressed by the Bible, gays are wrong and will be punished", and about 3 out of 4 people write in to say "Are these people meant to be loving? I'm glad I'm not a Christian, they sound like a horrible lot."

This situation is not delicate. It is not complex. The only delicate complexity is the handwringing and headshaking that the Anglican councils are going through in their desperate attempt to fudge the simplicity of the issues and pretend that we're all on the same side really.

Let me put it very simply. My own point of view, of course. There are those in the Church who believe that civilization has moved, and moved largely in the right direction. They condemn slavery. They abhor genocide. They don't believe that polygamy is a good thing. They don't believe that's it's a sin to eat shellfish or to strike a match on the sabbath. They don't believe that women and everything they touch should be treated as unclean for 7 days during their period. And they are honest enough to accept that these beliefs are in some conflict with a literal interpretation of the Bible, that many parts of the Bible are in contradiction with one another, and that a Law governing nomadic tribes attacking Canaan from the East in the 2nd millenium BC has to evolve.

On the other hand, there are those in the Church who claim that they haven't budged and inch from what the Bible commands. They still condemn slavery, abhor genocide, don't condone polygamy, eat shellfish, strike matches on the sabbath, don't believe that menstruation is unclean, etc. etc. And by the way, they hate gays. And they hate the idea of Christians neglecting the verse in Leviticus that says that being gay is wrong. In fact, they hate the idea of Christians suggesting that any part of the Bible may not apply to the present day. Except for the vast majority of the Bible that they have not read, choose to ignore, or claim is "only ceremonial". Of course, it's not for mankind to choose which parts of the Bible to follow: however, this group does claim a monopoly on choosing which parts of the Old Testament count as "ceremonial".

You cannot live strictly according to Biblical law without breaking the law of every civilised country. You cannot today insist that if a woman's husband dies, she passes by right to his brother. The nearest recent attempt to live strictly and only by scripture was the Taleban regime in Afghanistan - remember that many Muslims treat the pre-Koranic scriptures with as much if not more respect than Christian fundamentalists treat their "Old Testament". Suppression of women, public executions, closure of schools that teach anything beyond scripture, destruction of priceless cultural monuments (a.k.a. graven images). These are not only sanctioned, but demanded by the Bible.

I propose the following action, quite seriously. The document released by the Church today requests of the Americans and Canadians "that both churches respond through their relevant constitutional bodies to the questions specifically addressed to them in the Windsor Report as they consider their place within the Anglican Communion." During the same period, I want the self-proclaimed Biblical party to respond through their constituational bodies to the questions I'm specifically addressing to them. How is it that "following the Bible" means following the one verse about homosexuality and ignoring the vast swaths about polygamy? Or about any number of other issues? And don't come back and say "it's the Bible, you can't pick and choose" unless you really mean that you're going to stop picking and choosing, in which case the rest of the world will have to send in UN peacekeepers to prevent mass rape and even genocide. I demand an explanation, not a repeat of the self-righteous denial.

One silver lining - I am at least in the part of the world that's being outlawed for its outreach. I might even go to Church on Sunday.