I got home this week to a toxic postbag; I suppose I should have foreseen it and taken the trouble to install an automatic shredder in the letterbox. This outbreak of contumely occurs because three weeks ago I praised the Government’s intention to set up a legal form of recognition for homosexual partnerships. As well as anticipating a torrent of human rights cases — which have already begun — this change seemed a matter of justice. We need an equivalent of the register office marriage for gay couples, just to affirm security, stability and the rights to property-sharing and next-of-kin status. Since the Church of England was already in turmoil over Dr Jeffrey John, I carefully dissociated this from any decision it might make, asking only that we should have “a clear, decent, respected civil contract, and let the Churches work out their own problems”.
Mild, anodyne stuff: but not as far as my correspondents were concerned. Any mention of homosexuality tends to unleash a torrent of rage, scorn, patronising sarcasm, genuine personal hatred and repulsive and rather overdetailed private physical fantasies (what is the matter with these people?). The term “homophobia” is annoying and etymologically inaccurate, but you can see why it had to be coined. There is a real element of phobic terror in such letters, particularly where gay men are concerned. It is as if the writers were convinced that if you give these vile deviants the time of day, they will storm the capital with their handbags of mass destruction and force on every man, woman and child a terrible servitude to unnatural practices and mid-period Barbra Streisand albums.
“I suppose,” wrote one charming reader, “that you want your children to be defiled, and your country riddled with disease. Do you understand nothing of family decency?” Which is particularly wounding, since the last time I got ranted at quite so shrilly was from the other direction, for opposing the jejune gay “right” to cruise and cottage, and questioning the wisdom of lowering the age of gay consent. We in the middle get shot at by both sides.
More than half of these correspondents, I must report, took the trouble to profess themselves Christians. And since the State now recognises that good and responsible people occasionally commit themselves to members of the same sex, it is Christians we should consider now. For what is happening this week to the Anglican Church is not far short of tragedy. Blame whomever you like — the original backers of Dr John who forced the issue, the stern evangelicals of the parishes, the unforgiving African archbishops, the suddenly weak Cantuar — but between them they are ripping to pieces a useful and kindly Christian Church. The crisis is not over. Evangelicals have tasted victory and will want more, and eventually the liberal wing of this Church will have to let the divide become formal. This could be the real thing: the split, the fragmentation of a Church which over four centuries has spread broad and mainly benign across borders and oceans.
The pity is that the Anglican Communion should tear itself asunder over a matter which is not theological, and barely even moral. A world that badly needs the gentle strength of Christianity is being scandalised and alienated by a prurient, unseemly squabble about genitalia. Worse, an archbishop who seemed to be in the dawn of his greatness, embodying thoughtful holiness, has been forced into squalid, frightened compromise. It is a tragedy. With a thousand evils and sorrows stalking the world, a decent Church is twisting itself to shreds over something that hardly matters. The Old Testament prohibition on homosexual love sits among many other prohibitions and taboos long since discarded by Christians. The later strictures of St Paul are, I think, less binding than what we find in the true core of the Bible, the four Gospels — humane gentleness, forgiveness and an honouring and transfiguration of earthly loves. There is also, I seem to remember, a prohibition on judging one another harshly and casting the first stone.
Maybe, however, there is light at the end of this tunnel. Schism might actually be a good and clarifying thing, for Anglicanism has always been far too adept at fudging. The classic example concerns women clergy. Eight years after women became Anglican priests, they still cannot be bishops; and last year a C of E spokesman smugly said that it was “not a matter of immediate concern, as the synod is still discussing the theology of women in the episcopate”. What theology? This is the same absurdity of thought which lays down that Jeffrey John may be a canon, but not a bishop. Yet Christianity is not, and should never be, about rigid formal hierarchies of holiness. That is the sort of Pharasaical nonsense which the Jesus of the New Testament went to great lengths to debunk. Think of the poor widow, the adulteress, the Samaritan, the robber. But in both cases, the nonsense is more than mere snobbery: it serves sordid expediency. Evangelical purists here and abroad who tolerate women at the altar would stump out and take their money with them if women became bishops, and now they threaten to do the same if even a celibate gay man becomes one. Canterbury groans and stretches and twists itself to accommodate both parties, in the interests of being a “broad Church”; yet its endless weaselly compromises hurt its faithful members and make it a laughing stock to outsiders.
Anglicanism’s great failing has always been its failure to draw a line between God and Caesar, faith and prudence, holiness and expediency. This probably has something to do with its distracting and corrupting status as an “Established” Church, whose leaders must be endorsed by the Prime Minister. A smaller symptom of this identity crisis lies in its attitude to public relations: only this week came the priceless news that to counter the decline in church weddings, the Church of England is marketing its parish churches as “venues” at national wedding shows at Earls Court and Birmingham NEC. There, alongside the florists and the photographers and the purveyors of cancellation insurance and iced cakes, will be real live bishops (not gay or female ones, obviously), catchy slogans and modish assurances that you don’t need to be a regular worshipper any more to get married under tastefully retro grey stone arches. The Bishop of Guildford is quoted as saying that the Church has its “own distinctive brand for this special day . . . the best package on the market”.
Well, good luck to it. But to me, as an unaffiliated but believing Christian, it sounds silly and demeaning: they fiddle while Canterbury burns. A church is more than pretty stones and healthy balance sheets and branding and diplomacy. We live in a culture tormented by materialism, shallow worship of beauty and celebrity, and merciless judgment by economic and bureaucratic targets. There is a great hunger out there for something else, for an alternative view of the Universe and our place in it. There is a yearning for spirituality and transcendence and holy, otherworldly leadership. In the white heat of such faith, and in its central law of charity, all things are possible: issues of gender and sexuality fade into insignificance, as do questions of finance, international alliance and political expediency.
True faith, true Christian charity, goes singing barefoot through the lanes and draws followers not by title and worldly influence but by the sheer magnetism and power and beauty of what it tells and what it asks. Some organisation is necessary for practical, Martha-ish reasons; God knows that the social work done by poor clergy in poor parishes shines out in a harsh world. But the organisation, the bishops and canons and parishes and synod and spokesmen and seminarians, all exist only to serve the central, unworldly, vision of divine Love. Otherwise the tail wags the dog.
It would have been possible for Archbishop Rowan Williams to confirm Jeffrey John as a bishop, pray publicly alongside him for guidance and confide the mystery of human sexuality to the Almighty along with all the other mysteries that plague us. It would have been possible for him to tell the narrow-hearted evangelical rebels (in a kindly, humble and caring way) to go and boil their heads.
I have to say, I thought he might just do that. Rowan Williams seemed like a wild card, an inspirer, a holy man from the West come to revive the faith. Alas, the dreadful suspicion grows that he is just another Archbishop of Canterbury.
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