Watch Out

As for the parishioner he “harassed”, Robinson simply put his hand on his shoulder during counselling — the “victim” eventually admitted this. “Well, if that’s sexual harassment . . .” Robinson trails off, still amazed. “I don’t know why. Other bishops took it up and had it investigated. The most superficial questioning would have shown complaints were bogus. It’s McCarthyist.”

With help from the church, a “worried” Robinson had guards at the convention where he was voted a bishop in Minneapolis and extra security at the house in rural New Hampshire he shares with Mark, his lover of 16 years. He has received several thousand e-mails from around the world, “98% positive”, he claims.

He has also had to fend off accusations that he left his wife Isabella for Mark. “I met my partner two months after my wife remarried,” he says. “My relationship with my wife continues to be wonderful,” he smiles, forgetting to add “ex”. “I would say our relationship is a model for divorced people to treat one another. I speak with her almost every week. She called to wish me well and to say she hoped I would be the next bishop.”

So was it while he was married he realised he was homosexual? “Yes, the last few years we were married my former wife and I dealt with this and worked with a therapist. We came to this mutual decision that the best way we could honour each other was to let each other go.”

But surely you don’t wake up one morning gay? No, he admits, during adolescence Playboy never did it for him, and right back in 1972, before marrying, he says he told Isabella of his confusion.

The marriage produced two daughters. How, I wonder, did they take his gayness? “My relationship with my children is simply wonderful. We had joint custody. They have known Mark for the 16 years I’ve known him and they absolutely adore him; they turn to him for advice and consider him their other dad. Our younger daughter Ella is living with us this summer.”

When his daughter Jamee married, Mark walked Robinson’s ex-wife down the aisle and the three “parents” sat together in the front pew. Modern or what? The “gay lifestyle” has been used to attack Robinson. This is as much a dig at the supposedly promiscuous lifestyle of gay men as the sex of the people they are having sex with. So does he believe his current love is “it”? “It’s very strong. The character of our marriage — not our marriage, our relationship,” he checks himself, “is that I have every reason to believe this is the man I will grow old with, and either nurse at his deathbed or he at mine.”

He insists his agenda is to be “a good bishop not a gay bishop”, but he will swing by London for a gay Christian conference later this year. Poor Rowan.

Does he not feel the weight of the Anglican church on his shoulders? “Very much. I pray about it every day.” But praying, it seems, for opponents to come round to his enlightened view. When I suggest that his so-civilised divorce and gay “marriage” will simply be beyond the ken of many Christians in Africa — about the only place where Anglicanism is a growth industry — he says: “I can’t believe this will make much difference to someone sitting in his pew in Nigeria. Going to church next week will seem pretty like going to church last week.” Perhaps, but their bishops might not agree.

And in a swipe at the priorities of his opponents (particularly, perhaps, those African bishops) he says: “My goodness, we all have terrible social problems, people who are lost, who are hungry. We have enough to do in our own vineyards without casting aspersions on other provinces. So while I want to be mindful of Anglicans around the world, I’m really not willing to be completely bound by their criticisms.”

Reactionaries blame declining church attendances on the “trendy vicar” tendency, of which the gay bishop is the most extreme manifestation. Is that fair? “Frankly, most young people I’ve talked to have resolved the issue of homosexuality and think the church is hopelessly irrelevant fighting about it. Are we winning anyone to Christ with these battles? I think not.”

What would God make of this row then? “I think it breaks God’s heart.” But that is as speculative as those haters who claim that God would be horrified by gay bishops. To the non-religious it seems outrageous anyone should be discriminated against for being gay. But as soon as gays call on the goodness of God to defend them, they are lost in an argumentative wasteland.

Would a gay bishop be welcome in heaven (the real one, not the club)? The problem is heaven is like Atlantis; a construct to which we ascribe any qualities we admire. A long time ago, Christians decided God didn’t like homosexuality, purely because they didn’t like it. Which is totally unreasoning; but that is the nature of religion.