ViaMedia

Year: 2023

  • Trans Theology Conference – The Pastoral Care of Transgender, Intersex and Non-Binary People

    A Reflection by the Revd Jane Speck, Chaplain to the Conference; Jane is the Chaplain at York St John University, where she works with staff and students and leads a multifaith team.  She is also a member of the Iona Community.

    This September, York St John University was privileged to host the second ever Trans Theology Conference. Inaugurated in Oxford in 2022 by Revd Helen Garton and Chrissie Chevasutt, the conference seeks to give voice to trans people of faith, to create community and to share research and best practice.

    As the Chaplain to the conference, I was invited to offer the Conference Reflection at its end. Myself a cisgender trans-affirming feminist woman, it was a huge honour to be invited to address the conference in this way. The following is an edit of the reflection I offered, in the hope that it will sum up the main issues of the conference and even inspire some of you to sign up for next year!

    Attendees at the conference travelled a long way together in those couple of days, plumbing the richness of trans lives and experience, sharing wisdom, offering poetry, performance and song to express experiences more fully. It was emotional for many, as we looked both at how very far the Trans community has come, and yet how far there is still to go.

    Chrissie Chevasutt began the conference with the image of the Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s such a favourite with me, as a metaphor for all kinds of life journey, that I keep a couple of copies on the Chaplaincy bookshelves for people to read.

    However, I realised during Chrissie’s talk that Eric Carle made a huge omission when he wrote his book, and it’s one that Chrissie addressed. It’s the page depicting the caterpillar’s cocoon. Carle drew the cocoon, then we flip the page and – ta daaaa! Butterfly! Which is exactly how easy transition is, right?!

    Well, of course not. That time in the cocoon can last a very long time. On the second day of the conference, Professor Susannah Cornwall showed us data on NHS waiting times for Gender Clinics. The average wait for a trans person to rise to the top of the waiting list and start to receive treatment is 69 months. The struggle to be taken seriously; the pressure to submit to a medicalisation that may or may not feel helpful, and meanwhile the striving to live an authentic life within a patriarchal society and what, for many, is also a patriarchal church denomination, all take their toll.

    Not for nothing did Dr Nicolete Burbach draw profound parallels, in her session, ‘What Does the Cross Mean for Trans People?’, between the experience of transitioning and the cross of Christ. Many trans people will have felt crucified by their experiences, as the data around trans people’s mental health tragically shows.

    However, there was a broader theme that I saw peeking out around the edges all the way through the conference. And that is the theme of hope. Dr Burbach spoke of the hope encapsulated in the cross as we look back with the benefit of hindsight and see the light of the resurrection. This is not a blind or Pollyanna-ish hope. This is a hope which bears the scars of crucifixion, which transforms its suffering into the understanding, compassion and love of redemption.

    It’s hope that keeps trans, intersex and non-binary people on their paths, and hope that keeps them battling to save themselves and one another. It’s hope that leads people like Jack Woodruff, speaking of his experience ‘Navigating the Church’ to believe that for trans people to find a place in a church that affirms them is a distinct possibility – and, in some places, actually a reality. It’s hope that keeps so many of us within churches that are experiencing the pushback we explored at this conference against the equality and inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people, as trans people gain confidence. Chrissie helpfully named the forces that seek to keep minority groups ‘in their place’ as the Old Empire, rising out of our colonial past and refusing quite to die.

    We heard that hope sung by Naomi Orrell in her astonishingly beautiful, prize-winning ‘Antiphon for the Blessed Trans Body’ in the Spoken/Written Word competition. We saw it enacted in Jo Clifford’s ground breaking ‘Queen Jesus the Play’, and experienced its rhythm and power in the poetry of Jay Hulme. This hope is real, and weaves its way through all our lives.

    Hope, however, is not an easy thing. A Buddhist friend tells me that one of the things Buddhists seek to let go of is hope, as it is tied in to desire and is therefore a form of suffering. Hope is a risk. Hope courts rejection and hurt, which many trans, intersex and non-binary people will know too much about.

    But hope also gives strength for the struggle. The gloop inside the caterpillar’s cocoon struggles to rebuild itself, then fights to be free. Without the fight, there would be no strength. Without the struggle, the butterfly will never fly free.

    This does not, and cannot be allowed to, justify the pain inflicted on trans, intersex and non-binary folk by others. Perhaps it can give meaning to the hard paths they walk, as they head towards the light, but it can never be used as an excuse. This is why the non-judgmental, positive pastoral care on which the conference was focussed is so vital in enabling people to re-member themselves in the re-telling of their trauma, and in being given the space to grieve, to process and to move forwards again. Alex Clare-Young addressed this in their talk on ‘Queer(y)ing Narratives’, noting that pastoral care can never be a ‘one size fits all’ model, but must be nuanced for each individual, the stage they are at and the needs they bring. Perhaps Eric Carle should have inserted an extra page in his storybook, showing the struggle of the butterfly to get out of the cocoon and fly…

    In the Christian faith we are particularly and uniquely placed, I do believe, to embrace people of all gender expressions. We believe in a God who transcends the gender constructs we ascribe to. We teach a God, as The Venerable Dr Hayley Matthews noted in her opening remarks, who spoke that word Vav or ‘and’, not ‘or’, in creating humanity – male and female; who chose a model of infinite variety for creation. A God who reminds us that we never, ever get to say, ‘you’re made in the image of God, and you’re made in the image of God, but I’m not so sure about you…’ And we believe in a God who gave us Jesus, to experience human suffering, give himself to the process, and show us that suffering and even death are not the end of the story. As it says in the Psalms, by his wounds we are healed. And so we wear our own scars, however we have come by them, as symbols of our hope and badges of our belonging to the One who touches our wounds and says, you are still here. You belong.

    This conference was a gift, both to us at York St John and, I hope, to the attendees. It is, I hope and pray, one that many more people will open their arms and hearts to receive next year.

  • Are Churches Safe?

    by a member of the Anglican Survivors Group

    I write this small piece as a survivor of a clergy sexual abuse ring. I was a core participant in the Anglican IICSA inquiry and it took me over 30 years of fighting to get my abusers jailed.

    One of the recurring memories of the abuse was desperately trying to report it and not being heard. The lack of ability to effectively report meant the abuse continued for many years.

    The church has a long history of covering up abuse and allowing it to continue in order to protect the reputation of the church. Many instances were revealed publicly at IICSA, yet still to this day no one has been disciplined or sacked for their part in allowing our abuse to continue.

    It was for this reason that many years ago a number of survivors, among them myself, approached the then-new head of the National Safeguarding Team, expressing how important it is for safeguarding to be clearly visible both on parish websites and in church buildings. When the Parish Safeguarding Handbook was published it included on p.2 the need to CLEARLY display on the FRONT page of parish websites the parish’s safeguarding arrangements.

    The reason for it to be on the front page was so that the search engines would pick it up. Research from the NSPCC and evidence given to IICSA both confirm that many teenagers (and younger) have access to mobile phones and the first place they look for information is via search engines.

    If the parish website just has a small hidden link to a document that only gives your policy, with no contact numbers, then you have missed the entire point.

    Sadly, even to this day many parishes have nothing on their front pages, and many still have nothing at all.

    Several years ago now, the same group of survivors started trawling through some 12000 websites. We found compliance with this basic requirement to be under 50%. We emailed and telephoned many parishes, most of whom weren’t even aware of the requirement. Very slowly, compliance started rising. But some parishes just refused.

    Some used the “due consideration” loophole where they said they had given safeguarding requirements due consideration and decided not to do it. That led to a further campaign by survivors to close this loophole.

    Eventually, after much chasing, we were left with just over 600 parishes against whom we issued CDMs. This was the wake-up call many needed. We agreed to withdraw the CDMs if the parish became compliant. Many however simply put up a copy of their policy. hidden on page 28!

    Some parishes have the clergy as the Parish Safeguarding Officer or contact, which is totally unacceptable. Some churches share a safeguarding officer with other churches and at a parish level the officer is never present at church.

    Sadly, there are some very evil people out there, including clergy, who will do the unthinkable. A successful DBS check may just mean that a person has not yet been caught. A DBS check doesn’t stop abuse: but good Safeguarding practice may. And one of the keys to that is that people are able to report things as soon as anything inappropriate happens.

    Posters need to be clearly visible to all. They need to be understood by a child. They need to be at a height where children can read them.

    The campaign led to some excellent diocesan responses. The Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser at Salisbury came up with a simple poster that simply said:

    “Is someone hurting you?”
    “WE CARE. Please call 01234 567890”

    Safeguarding is NOT about an admin exercise. It’s not about traffic lights on a Diocesan dashboard. It’s about putting yourself in the shoes of a vulnerable child or adult.

    We ask, as survivors ourselves, one simple question. If YOU were 10 years old and trying to report abuse, could you?

  • Young Christianity Today

    by Sorrel Christian, a student and a multiply-disabled queer Christian. They enjoy writing and are particularly interested in crip theology and ecumenism

    My name is Sorrel Christian, I am a student in my early 20s, and I am a queer disabled Christian. I became a member of the United Reformed Church a few years ago. However, due to the only URC in my area not having approved same-sex marriage, it having been allowed on a church-by-church basis since 2016) when I’m not at university I’m currently worshipping with a local independent church community. I also attended a Roman Catholic sixth form college, and have had both helpful and harmful experiences in the Church of England in my ongoing journey to a committed faith.

    It will come as no surprise that the established church as a whole tends to have a poor reputation amongst my peers. Years of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-disabled rhetoric and action from powerful churches has led to a deep mistrust and fear within these overlapping communities in all age ranges, particularly when it comes to the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England. And it often seems like the powers that be do little to help themselves. Sex education and compulsory RE in Catholic sixth form was entirely heteronormative, with no mention of any other type of potential sexual encounter, gender non-conformity, or even an acknowledgement that the many LGBTQ+ youth at the college existed. One of the most powerful and well-known Church of England churches in my university town does not accept same-sex marriage or women in ministry. Such experiences give a strong impression, even amongst young people who are not part of the LGBTQ+ community, that organised religion is backwards looking, limited, and not in sync with anything they care about.

    Having said all that, I have found my non-Christian peers to be largely respectful of my personal faith, if somewhat baffled on occasion. Many would also describe themselves as spiritual in some form, and mutual respect and understanding goes a long way. Despite this, I find myself “caveating” my faith when meeting new people. “I’m a Christian but…”. As I’ve started expressing myself using queer fashion and rethinking the binary concepts of gendered clothing, it’s becoming less and less necessary – yet at the same time, the Church of England is in the news for still not having approved same-sex marriage. I pray for a world where I don’t have to consider “how queer” I look to my peer group before deciding if I need to justify and explain that my faith is not one of exclusion and hatred. Maybe it’s partly egotistical. I don’t want people to think, even for a moment, that I’m exclusionary. Maybe my sense of self-worth is too much based in how people may judge me. I feel the need to caveat my faith, even as I am aware of how God knows me. A more charitable view of this need to caveat would be that I do it to protect others. Whenever I try online dating, I state my religion on my profile. Whilst it’s true that this is partly for simple reasons of compatibility, there’s more to it than that. Being non-binary, if the apps do their job, my dating pool is entirely made up of LGBTQ+ young people. I haven’t met a single person of faith in the LGBTQ+ community who does not also hold religious trauma. Many more have left the church and their faith due to spiritual abuse and hostile churches. Still others have never held deep convictions, but associate church schools with a place they were never safe to be themselves. For the sake of both parties, I choose for the cross around my neck to not come as a surprise on the first date.

    Speaking of surprises, my first experience of an exclusionary church when I moved to university came as a complete shock. My experience of the Church of England up until then consisted of occasional services at the parish church in my small hometown. It was a fairly standard semi-rural set up, family-friendly, with a primary school attached, and also happened to be a part of the Inclusive Church network. With a family tradition of non-conformist churches, I naively assumed that all Church of England churches were much of a muchness when it came to societal viewpoints, if I considered it at all. I wasn’t even out to myself at that point. I was mostly just desperate for somewhere to belong. I started attending a popular church in my university city without even thinking to google it or find out it was a conservative evangelical branch of the CofE. I knew that the “party line” at the CofE didn’t include same-sex marriage, but I had no idea of the strength of anti-gay and anti-woman sentiment that could be found in some churches; something which SCM’s Honest Church campaign is trying to make visible. The wake-up moment was an anti-abortion rant from the pulpit. I kept going until the end of term though, because I didn’t know how to leave. Eventually, in the holidays, a family friend from the parish church explained the wide spectrum of belief in the Church of England, and how I needed to use critical thinking to find a church which aligned with my values of how to treat others.

    What confused me at the time, and frankly still baffles me today, was the popularity amongst students of a church which doesn’t accept female ministry and whose rector has openly written that same-sex relationships are sinful. All the students I met outside the church seemed to be in favour of the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people, and yet, this narrow-minded preaching attracted enough devotees for an entire separate student congregation. My theory is that is that it’s a question of resources and priorities, and a question of connections, of insidious roots throughout the university structure. Right from freshers’ week, the church works with a large Christian Union to attract new students through the tried and tested formula of free food. The promotional materials promise that everyone’s welcome, no strings attached. The leadership structure is carefully designed to disguise their views on women preachers at first glance. Once in, the usual mechanisms of organised religion slide greasily into action to keep you there. Guilt, shame, fear. A cult of personality around the rector. Upbeat music and a free student lunch. If you leave now, you’re going to Hell. By the time you discover the anti-gay rhetoric, you’re supposed to have bought in to believing everything the rector says as gospel truth. This dangerous machine is funded and legitimised by the powerful institution that is the Church of England.

    And yet, there is hope. The following term, just down the road, I found a wonderfully inclusive URC church. We’re smaller, less well funded, and much less powerful than those that can afford an entirely separate service for the student congregation. But by working with the other local non-conformist churches, we’re making changes in the city. I believe ecumenism is key in youth Christianity. I don’t understand the strict divides between denominations, the ‘us’ versus ‘them’. At the Student Christian Movement National Gathering this year, there were Quakers, Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans and more, all coming together to share ideas and theology and inclusive Christian love. Of course, there were differences in theology. But not rigid divisions. No one young person seemed convinced that they were more in the right than anyone else. That’s the spirit we need to take forward into the future.

     

  • Love Came Down at Christmas – For Some

    by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford; his book Sex and the Church: a History, is scheduled for publication in Autumn 2024

    Picture credit: Barry Jones

    Western society’s acceptance of homosexuality as one accepted variant in social relationships has been a breathtakingly fast process in comparison with most societal changes: it has been contained within my still not excessively venerable lifetime. Not surprisingly, the transformation has left some folk behind, for a variety of reasons, particularly those Christians for whom it disturbs particular views of biblical or ecclesiastical authority. It is easy for those who have got beyond such preoccupations to mock or belittle them, without realising the unexpressed depths of such negative feelings. Often that is because we (and they) do not know enough about the Christian past and what it contains. Here is one little story about the history of the Christian West and its homophobia.

    ‘Homosexuality’ is a very recently-coined word, the invention of a mid-nineteenth German/Hungarian journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny to describe what he regarded as a medically-defined behavioural disorder (another such disorder he named ‘heterosexuality’). While Kertbeny’s science now looks, well, mid-nineteenth century, his coinages have persisted to our own time when other nineteenth-century attempted word-inventions have fallen by the wayside; they have become central to some of the most bitterly-fought disputes in Christian Churches.

    Previously, the main Western Latin word for a variety of unusual sexual activities, some of which were between people of the same sex, was ‘sodomy’, a medieval coinage with an Old Testament reference. The word sodomia was popularised in the eleventh century by the reforming monk Peter Damian in his polemic ‘Book of Gomorrah’ (Liber Gomorrhianus). It was an inescapably negative theological term, on the analogy of the older Latin word blasphemia; thus Peter paired ‘sodomy’ with the sin of denying God, in the process ‘thinning and condensing’ the wrongdoing of the ill-fated biblical city of Sodom from malpractices that were originally much more various.

    Ivo Bishop of Chartres, Damian’s contemporary and the major influence on Western Christian canon law in his time, evolved the concept of ‘sins against nature’, in which same-sex acts were ‘always unlawful and beyond doubt more shameful than to sin by a natural use in fornication and adultery’; at least fornication and adultery were not active obstacles to the continuation of the species. All this marched in step with the developing Western Christian doctrine that marriage must necessarily involve the potential for reproductive sex. Any obstacle to reproduction was ‘against nature’, so the same acts committed between men and women, or solo masturbation, fell into the same category of sodomy.

    Most bizarre and extra-biblical of Western Christian claims about ‘sodomy’ was that the baby Jesus killed all sodomites, simply by being born in Bethlehem; he would not come into a world where there were people doing things ‘against nature’. This story is to be found in a couple of standard texts read or heard by the devout throughout the medieval West, and medieval England in particular. First was the thirteenth-century Latin anthology of saints’ lives by Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine known as The Golden Legend. Second was the Festial, a fourteenth-century compilation of vernacular sermons for English parish priests to use throughout the liturgical year, by an Augustinian Canon John Mirk, who drew much of his material from de Voragine. They cited authorities from the Early Church for their malevolent fable – Jerome and Augustine of Hippo – which is good evidence that it started life in learned and clerical circles before moving out to instruct the wider public.

    Distorting a remark in a sermon attributed to Augustine of Hippo, de Voragine and those echoing him claimed that at the birth of Christ all the ‘sodomites’ in the world had suddenly died, as committing ‘sins against kind’ [nature]. Christ delayed entering the world till they had all gone. Yet evidently this mass Christmas extinction proved not to be permanent, needing continuing vigilance from all right-thinking people. As I have explored the history of sex, gender and the family over two millennia of Christian history, I have noticed how casually medieval Westerners would allude to the Christmas sodomite massacre in writing about other spiritual matters. Moreover, the story has not been forgotten. The more unpleasant corners of the Internet persist in gleefully reminding the right-thinking of medieval Christ’s view of sodomy by repeating the tale, though anachronistically relating it to that nineteenth-century word ‘homosexuals’. I will not dignify such Internet sites by naming them, but if you want to try it for yourself, have a go at Googling ‘Christmas all sodomites died’.

    This is what modern Christians are up against as we struggle to come to a balanced view of how to deal with developments in sexuality over the last three hundred years: a background of fear and hatred based on clerical paranoia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. We can do better than that, surely? Or we may have to order a new set of Christmas card designs.

     

    Further reading: M.D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997), from whom comes that useful phrase ‘thinning and condensing’. For the original texts: R.W. Granger (ed. and tr.), Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: readings on the saints (Princeton NJ, 2012), legend no. 6. The Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ), citing Jerome as well as Augustine; S. Powell (ed.), John Mirk’s Festial (Early English Text Society 334-35, 2009, 2011), sermon no. 6, Nativity of Christ, citing Augustine.

     

  • Bodies at Prayer

    by Dr Karen O’Donnell, Director of Studies at Westcott House Cambridge where she teaches Worship and Liturgy. She also teaches Gender and Christian Theology for the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge. She has published widely in trauma and feminist theologies.

    As I’m writing this, I’m recovering from surgery on my spine to relieve a herniated disc that has been causing me serious problems for the last year or so. I’m conscious of my body in ways that are not usual to me; of the slight ache at the bottom of my back and that I’ll need to get up and stretch soon. I’m also conscious of the way in which this relatively minor injury has impacted my ability to pray. Just before Easter, as term was coming to an end, I entered Westcott’s chapel toward the end of a day for Evening Prayer. It’s a ritual I enjoy as it marks the end of my working day and helps me transition into the evening with my family. On this particular evening, my back was really painful. I hobbled down to the chapel and sat down in my usual seat. This evening, however, I found that I just couldn’t sit on the hard pew. I couldn’t stand for any length of time and I couldn’t sit down either. My body was in too much pain to pray.

    It is at times like this that we notice the place of our bodies at prayer: when they struggle to conform to our expectations, or when they are in pain. The rest of the time, we’re quite good at ignoring our bodies when we pray. Unlike our Muslim sisters and brothers, we do not have a set pattern of bodily movements to engage in when we pray. It is easy for prayer to become a cerebral thing –something that happens in our heads. Our bodies are (or can seem to be, at least!) largely superfluous.

    This isn’t new and is, I argue, a long-lasting result of the influence of Greek philosophy in the early church. The brilliant Hillary McBride charts the development of this thought in Christianity like this:

    We did not find our way to a disembodied existence on our own: we had millennia of help. Western philosophy and Gnostic religious thought influenced a popular line of thinking that goes something like this: The soul and the mind are distinct from the body (that’s Plato). The mind is where the truth is, but the body has needs, desires, and limitations (that’s Descartes, and some translations of the apostle Paul). Around the same time as Descartes lived, the Christian Reformation happened, which emphasized our mind’s ability to grasp the who and what of God: feminist and liberation theologians have written that this put the body in the straitjacket. (1)

    The result of this understanding of the body is that the body has been feared and distrusted and it is something that many spiritual seekers across the centuries have felt they have to transcend and subdue in order to make spiritual progress. When we bring our bodies to worship it is often as a problem that needs to be solved – a body that needs to be healed, a body that has accessibility requirements, a body that is in some way different to the other bodies around it. What might it mean to come into prayer recognising that we are our bodies, our bodies are not neutral, and that our bodies are not problems that need to be solved before we can really pray?

    In his new book, A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of our Physical Bodies in Worship, W. David O. Taylor takes these questions seriously as he explores the ways in which our physical bodies engage in worship (2).  Christian liturgy – corporate, public acts of worship – is disposed to engaging the body. Not only does liturgy require our bodies in order to engage with worship (indeed, our bodies are the entrances into worship and sacrament), but Christian liturgy has great opportunity for embodied engagement.

    I used to be part of a very charismatic evangelical church and, as a youth leader, would regularly attend youth camps/festivals that included highly produced times of worship – a large rock band, lights, images, projections – all of which were, at times, accused of being manipulative. Perhaps these components were, but more traditional aspects of Christian worship do similar things. Yes, material things like incense, flowers, candles, art, architecture, the sharing of the Peace, participation in the Eucharist all have richly symbolic theological meanings but they also serve to make our worship distinctly sensory. Our senses are deeply connected to our memories, meaning that the way in which we encounter worship in our bodies can be profound. In our olfactory senses, for example, “odors take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory” (3).  The smell of incense, for me, is the smell of the divine.

    In a culture that has a curious relationship to bodies, sometimes acting as if completely disembodied, sometimes treating the body as something to be subdued and tamed, sometimes celebrating bodies, sometimes ignoring them completely, it is important that our spiritual encounters – both individual and corporate – attend positively to our bodies. It is important that we remember that it is only through our bodies that we encounter and come into relationship with God. It is through our bodies that we enter into prayer and liturgy. It’s not manipulative to engage the senses in worship but rather a mode of curating embodied encounter with God. It is important in our worshipping lives that we don’t replicate the dualistic ideologies of Greek philosophy but rather recognise the sense of whole being that is being human. Our bodies are not problems to solve in order that our minds or souls might be able to pray. Rather our bodies are how we pray; the very places in which we meet God.

    Notes
    (1) Hillary L. McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living (Brazos Press, 2021), 215.
    (2) W. David O. Taylor, A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of Our Physical Bodies in Worship (Baker Books, 2023).
    (3) Colleen Walsh, “How Scent, Emotion, and Memory Are Intertwined — and Exploited,” Harvard Gazette (blog), February 27, 2020, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/how-scent-emotion-and-memory-are-intertwined-and-exploited/.

  • Improving Safety in Pastoral Care with LGBTQA+ People

    by Dr Timothy Willem Jones, Associate Professor of History at La Trobe University, and the author of Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857-1957 (Oxford, 2013). He leads a multidisciplinary research project, Improving Spiritual Health Care for LGBTQA+ Australians, funded by the Australian Research Council and the Victorian Government.

    LGBTQA+ people of faith are at high risk of spiritual and psychological injury in the context of pastoral care. They may experience over 8 times higher risk of suicidality than the wider LGBTQA+ population. Simultaneously, pastoral workers frequently lack confidence in their ability to provide appropriate pastoral care related to gender and sexuality, more than any other issue in pastoral care. There is currently limited research into safety in LGBTQA+ spiritual health care, and no research that considers safety across multiple faiths, irrespective of their theological and pastoral positions related to sexual orientation and gender identity. This article introduces some guidelines for improving safety in pastoral care with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, asexual and other people with diverse sexual and gender identities (LGBTQA+). The full guide is available here.

    The guidelines are based on our research with LGBTQA+ people about their experiences of pastoral care, reported in Healing Spiritual Harms. Our research showed that significant religious and psychological trauma can result from pastoral practices that make a person’s sexuality and gender identity incompatible with belonging to their faith, family and community. Being told that unchangeable parts of yourself are incompatible with your faith can create a condition of existential crisis: the feeling that it is impossible to live at peace with the core parts of who you are. Such experiences can feel like a threat to someone’s very existence, and can lead to complex post-traumatic stress disorders, suicidality as well as a host of other symptoms of mental ill health.

    Best practice pastoral care with LGBTQA+ people will support them to accept who they are, and not try to change or suppress their identity. It will support an LGBTQA+ person of faith to explore the possibilities for safety, connection, belonging and self-expression within and consistent with the rules, traditions, and practices of their faith community. If their faith community has mixed views about LGBTQA+ people, it may also involve supporting them to find additional or alternative communities of belonging where their various parts can be valued and affirmed. It will also involve referral to appropriate mental health professionals when that is needed.

    The following guidelines provide principles and ethics of pastoral practice that will help you improve your care of LGBTQA+ people in your community. They frame the principles of safe LGBTQA+ pastoral care in generic terms, not specific to any particular religious tradition. As you read them, consider the best ways that these principles could be applied in your own faith community.

    1. Recognise: In the diversity of human experience, some people are same-sex attracted or have a gender that is different to what people assumed when they were born. We know from decades of medical research that attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, in fact, only suppress that part of a person. When key parts of a person, such as their faith and their sexuality or gender identity, are put in conflict and suppressed, extreme psychological distress can result.
    1. Protect: As a pastoral worker, you have a role to play as an advocate. If your community is telling LGBTQA+ people that to be a member they are required to suppress their sexuality or gender identity, that requirement will be harmful and unsafe for LGBTQA+ people in your community. LGBTQA+ people should be protected from such unsafe policies and practices.
    1. Accept: Safe pastoral care for LGBTQA+ people involves supporting them to find a path where they can accept and hold in harmony their faith, their inner sense of sexuality and gender, and their relationship with their religious community, and also to explore how they might safely express those aspects of themselves in relation to the rules and traditions of their faith and community.
    1. Explore: Sometimes people have uncertain feelings about their gender or sexual attractions. Safe pastoral practice with such people involves supporting their exploration without predetermining any particular outcome for who they are. While your religious tradition will have rules about sexual and gender expression and behaviour, it most likely also has space for a person to explore and accept their sexual orientation and gender identity, who they are inside.
    1. Support: There are many aspects of being LGBTQA+ in your community about which a person might seek support. Some of these might be: experiences of trauma and discrimination, perhaps even in your community; the social implications of affirming an LGBTQA+ identity on their significant relationships; and their personal safety as they explore and reconcile the different components of their identity.
    1. Refer: Know what your expertise is and be prepared to refer people to others when they need support outside of that expertise. This could include referral to pastoral workers with more experience in your tradition, or appropriately qualified mental health professionals.
    1. Reflect: Pastoral care with LGBTQA+ people provides you with a valuable opportunity to reflect on your, and your community’s, pastoral practice. Do you listen carefully to LGBTQA+ people’s experiences in your community? What are the range of attitudes towards LGBTQA+ people that your community holds? What are the different ways that gender and sexual expression have been valued at different times and places in your faith tradition? Do your current pastoral responses to LGBTQA+ people reflect the core values of your faith?

  • WWBD? What Would Barbie Do?

    barbie1.JPG

    By Anon.

    Above, The Rev. Dena Cleaver-Bartholomew, rector at Christ Church in Manlius, with a Barbie that was a gift from Rev. Julie Blake Fisher in Kent, Ohio. Photograph by David Lassman.

    As you are probably well aware, Barbie is the summer’s blockbuster movie. The premise of the film rests on haemorrhaging stark reality into a tightly engineered fantasy-land. The film immediately summons the paradoxes highlighted in the acclaimed 1998 satirical movie The Truman Show.

    Barbie (the movie) focusses on the most popular of all the Barbies in Barbieland, and begins with her experiencing a serious existential crisis. So, Odyssey-like, she travels to the human world in order to understand herself better and discover her truer purpose. Ken – a kind of boyfriend, albeit struggling with his low self-esteem issues and a sense that he is somewhat surplus to requirement – tags along. In Barbieland, men are, well, non-essential. But Ken and Barbie enter into this human world. Ken, all the while, remains acutely conscious that his own existence depends far too much on Barbie acknowledging him, or even treating him as an equal. She does not need to.

    The film pivots, as one might expect, on feminine nature – and the nature of feminism. Knowing something about the original creation of the Barbie doll is important here. In 1956, an American business developer, Ruth Handler, had observed her daughter (Barbara) playing with paper dolls, and noticed that she often enjoyed ascribing adult roles to the dolls. At that time, the vast majority of dolls were baby-like or toy representations of infants. Furthermore, the clothing with which the dolls were marketed, packaged and sold was often affixed to the doll.

    Handler, with her husband Eliot, who was a co-founder of the Mattel toy company, pitched the idea of an adult-bodied female doll with changes of clothes that gave her different roles. Mattel were initially cool on the idea, and it wasn’t until 1959 that Barbie launched. Yes, there were fashion clothes for Barbie and the inevitable nurse uniform. But there was an astronaut Barbie doll (1965) long before there was any actual woman in NASA’s astronaut corps (1978), let alone a woman in space.

    We forget that the Barbie dolls allowed young girls to imagine future roles that could barely have been contemplated by their mothers, yet had a normative existence in Barbieworld. Furthermore, Barbie’s multiple career possibilities were not subject to any male gaze or masculine censure claiming “such roles are unsuitable for women”. Barbie could be a flight attendant. But she could fly a jumbo jet too, long before airlines hired women as pilots. In Barbieworld, and in the Barbieland film, Barbie rules; and Barbie makes the rules.

    As one might hope, the movie acknowledges Barbie’s unrealistic physical proportions—and the very real body issues that these could create in young girls—while also celebrating her role as a feminist icon. Ken, in contrast, begins with a kind of ‘himbo frailty’ (as opposed to the threat of any ‘bimbo identity’ that some might attempt to foist on to Barbie).

    Yet as the film progresses, Ken goes from being Barbie’s uncertain and needy boyfriend to becoming some kind of advocate for macho-posturing and laddish culture, as he starts to think and act as a real man should behave. Without saying more about the film and issuing spoiler alerts, both Barbie and Ken discover a number of harsh truths and realities along their road to enlightenment. This is a funny, ironic and classy odyssey, and well worthy of the praise it has garnered.

    Well, since there has been a Barbie astronaut long before there was a female astronaut, I had wondered about a sequel to Barbie called Barbiechurch. There have been Barbie priest outfits for some time, and a few homemade Barbie bishops. To the best of my knowledge there has been no Barbie Cardinal, Archbishop or Pope. Yet. But in a more serious vein, I began to contemplate what the Barbie-doll-as-human, and Ken tagging along for the ride, might make of the Church of England at the moment?

    I think our heroine would be surprised and shocked by concepts such as ‘mutual flourishing’ and ‘complementarianism’. Not least because in Barbieland and Barbieworld, Ken is Barbie’s helpmeet and accessory. He is only there to complement her. No doubt he is there to compliment her as well. It is Ken who supports Barbie – and it is she who is the achiever and breadwinner. I think Barbie would be even more surprised to meet real women (human) who have signed up to inequality as being good, helpful and fair – which is still the simplest way to characterise ‘mutual flourishing’ and ‘complementarianism’. Furthermore, some women seem to think Manchurch (an odd kind of Fresh Expression full of ‘liberated’ Kens) is a great place for women to hang out and flourish. A kind of Frat House spiritual community? Women keen on ‘mutual flourishing’ love it, apparently, and find it all very convivial. (Though statistics on women sticking around in or moving to such dioceses suggests otherwise).

    I’m also wondering how this would play out with any potential new outfits available for the Barbie doll range? I can see a promising line of clothes that might draw on the BBC TV series Call the Midwife. But I suspect that the Admiral, Chief Engineer, Jet Pilot, President, Judge and Priest garb will be in short supply.

    The Church of England is currently beset with all manner of knotted and barbed issues it seems unable to address, let alone resolve. Despite Living in Love and Faith (LLF), the conversations and resolutions on human sexuality seem less than honest, and at times bizarrely surreal. Special dispensations for those who hold ‘honoured views’ or have ‘alternative-but-traditional positions on the role of women’ are sanctified.

    The Church of England would not, today, attempt this on the grounds of skin colour, ethnicity, class, disability or any circumstances where the person deemed to be a sign of social deviance was not ‘at fault’ (e.g., they were born illegitimate, or conceived through a mixed-race liaison, or a wife deserted and destroyed by the infidelity of their husband). The Church of England would not attempt to hold two opposite but mutually incompatible views on slaves and slavery. But the Church of England does do this with sexuality and gender.

    Of course, you are not allowed to draw this historical comparison to the attention of the leadership. It is deemed to be impolite and unpolitic to remind church leaders and bishops that the Church of England used to discriminate against all of these groups, even refusing them communion, holy matrimony, ordination and the like. To do some history homework would, apparently, be “unhelpful”. Nobody wants to be reminded that, back in the day, we discriminated against all manner of persons on the grounds of their colour, class and condition.

    WWBD? What would Barbie do now in a real-world situation where we had two mutually incompatible integrities on slavery, disability, ethnicity or class? It wouldn’t wash in Barbieland or Barbieworld. Just take a brief look at the range of Barbie dolls over the years. “Colored Francie“, a version of Barbie’s cousin, was marketed in 1967,  although Black and Latina Barbies were not available until the 1980s. The medium was the message.

    Church of England double-think is an elephant occupying the chancel, sitting in the sanctuary or propped up in the pulpit. But you are not allowed to say what you see. The ground rules in Churchyworld dictate that discriminatory views have the same equal value as progressive views. And that views and values of the wider public (which are, incidentally, overwhelmingly pro-equality) have no part to play in the doll-world where Ken rules.

    There is no play-world where Barbie supports or submits to Ken. All credit to Mattel and Ruth Handler here. We have never been offered a ‘Submissive Barbie’, ‘Helpmeet-Vicar’s-Wife’ or even so much as a Deaconess Doll. The striking element of Barbieworld is that girls are being given imaginative empowering possibilities: to become what they aspire to be. Furthermore, I am always struck by how many of the Barbie costumes exemplify professionalism and servant leadership (unlike Action Man; or poor Ken).

    There are many stalwart Synod advocates striving for an awakening of the church. For recovering our social and political conscience, albeit with its long history of struggling with a weak pulse, and failing to live out its calling as a full-blooded incarnational entity. But as I observed General Synod discussing safeguarding in July – I think especially of the wigged-up-gowned lawyers, dress-down episcopal garb (bishop Ken beach holiday attire seemed to be in vogue) – I did ask myself how real the Church of England currently is?

    The Archbishops’ Council and their presentations on safeguarding might just as well have come from mannequins or dolls. Theirs was juvenile staged play; a plastic and inauthentic tea party with no genuine humanity detectable at all. Indeed, you’d find more genuine humanity and reality in Barbieworld or Barbieland.

    So, what would Barbie do with the Church of England today? I think she’d conclude that of the two – Churchyworld and Barbieworld – the latter is the more real and far more human than the former. WWBD? Stay at home in Barbieland, where Ken knows his place, struggles with his insecurity and identity, women are free to be themselves and can aspire to anything, and nobody has to pretend.

    Pretence is the key, and that is what makes Barbie such a great, and even subtle-deep movie, recalling the Toy Story trilogy. It is ironic that in the world of play, pretending is meant to be there for imagination and pleasure and, much like theatre, not a substitute for reality. The purpose of child’s play, or staged play, is to hold up a mirror to reality, and help us to perceive our world and imagine it in some better state.

    Yet in the Church of England, pretending – and silly pretence-denials – have now become so normal and fundamental to its everyday functioning, we have forgotten what reality actually is. WWBD?

     

  • Holy Discomfort: Time to Restore the Unity of the Church?

    by Theo Hobson, who has written various books and articles about the  Church of England and theology and writes regularly for The Spectator. He blogs at theohobson.com

    1 Kings 3: 16-28

    One day two women came to King Solomon, and one of them said:

    “Your Majesty, this woman and I live in the same house. Not long ago my baby was born at home, and three days later her baby was born. Nobody else was there with us. One night while we were all asleep, she rolled over on her baby, and he died. Then while I was still asleep, she got up and took my son out of my bed. She put him in her bed, then she put her dead baby next to me. In the morning when I got up to feed my son, I saw that he was dead. But when I looked at him in the light, I knew he wasn’t my son.”

    “No!” the other woman shouted. “He was your son. My baby is alive!”

    “The dead baby is yours,” the first woman yelled. “Mine is alive!”

    They argued back and forth in front of Solomon, until finally he said, “Both of you say this live baby is yours. Someone bring me a sword.”

    A sword was brought, and Solomon ordered, “Cut the baby in half! That way each of you can have part of him.”

    “Please don’t kill my son,” the baby’s mother screamed. “Your Majesty, I love him very much, but give him to her. Just don’t kill him.”

    The other woman shouted, “Go ahead and cut him in half. Then neither of us will have the baby.”

    Solomon said, “Don’t kill the baby.” Then he pointed to the first woman, “She is his real mother. Give the baby to her.”

    Everyone in Israel was amazed when they heard how Solomon had made his decision. They realized that God had given him wisdom to judge fairly.

     

    This story came to mind recently as I pondered what’s happened in the C of E while preparing to speak to the trustees of WATCH, Women and the Church. Maybe it’s a bit self-righteous to put ourselves in the place of the true mother who eschews self-interest and just wants the safety of the baby, and to say that the traditionalists are happy for the church to be cut in two if they can’t have it all.

    But the story does perhaps sharpen our thinking about division and unity. In what sense is division acceptable, a pragmatic way forward? Solomon’s initial solution seemed to be fair on both women, to respect the rights of each – but it forgot, or pretended to forget, the even deeper truth, that the baby’s life mattered above all.

    You could say that the Church has forgotten this – that it has been an anti-Solomon, allowing itself to be divided so as to be fair to both sides. The importance of unity has been sidelined – to bring it up is to question the wisdom of the Church.

    This signals a change of approach that I think WATCH should take. That also applies to other campaigning groups in the Church of England. Their main message should be the unity of the Church. And they should be wary of the language of rights, of discrimination.

    First let me say something about my own engagement with this issue. In my youth I was never very focused on the issue of the ordination of women – it didn’t feel like my business. I vaguely disapproved of the traditionalists being given so much space but when I heard female clergy complaining about this I still had a sense that it wasn’t really my business, and also that their campaign resembled secular campaigns for equal rights.

    When the Church finally decided to ordain women as bishops I had a vague sense of – well, surely it’s all over now, so surely we don’t still need campaigning rhetoric from the women clergy. It felt like they were being sore winners, stuck in campaigning mode, echoing the rhetoric of identity politics.

    On one level I knew that the issue was about the division of the episcopate, and therefore of the Church. But I didn’t really focus on this. Maybe because the issue of episcopal unity felt rather Catholic, and I’m not very high church so maybe that’s not my concern. Also, most Anglo-Catholics seemed ok with alternative episcopal oversight, so maybe it wasn’t a problem.

    A few years ago my attitude changed a bit. I visited a local parish where the priest is Forward in Faith but the parishioners seemed mostly unaware of their allegiance. It felt like a hindrance to the C of E’s identity, that this dissenting body was tolerated.

    Also, I didn’t like the idea of a big theological issue – the unity of the Church – being off-limits, just because it was so contentious. I became suspicious of the idea that both sides had agreed not to re-open the wound, not to question the other side’s right to exist. The Church had decreed that it was virtuous to accept this form of disunity, and unhelpful to re-start the old painful debate by questioning the Act of Synod.

    I began to think – why don’t WATCH come out and say that alternative episcopal oversight should be ended? The reason, of course, is that the Church has de-legitimised that position – to speak of re-unifying the Church has become taboo, for it means wanting to exclude a portion of one’s fellow Anglicans. But what a strange situation – that a Church should strongly discourage the desire for unity, treat it as a subversive desire.

    So that’s my analysis of where we are – WATCH has a dilemma. Should it demand the repeal of the current arrangement, and sound aggressive and un-Anglican? Or should it accept the basic set-up, but call out instances of discrimination? If so it is forced to sound like a marginal campaigning group, complaining about the status quo, but not daring to try to change it.

    The current approach, it seems, is a half-way house: it says that the whole set-up is discriminatory, but doesn’t quite follow through with this and call for its repeal. And it stays within a rather secular framework of rights, when its approach could be more boldly theological.

    How can we get out of this rut? I suggest we need a new narrative.

    It comes from seeing that since 1993 we have not been living in normal times – and acknowledging this is only slowly growing on us. In normal times, the moderate centre of the Church defends its unity from factions on each side. But in recent decades the moderate centre of the Church has condoned disunity.

    So, the old idea is still ingrained in us, that bringing unity is what the moderate centre does. We are still not really used to the new era, in which the moderate centre gives its blessing to disunity. And of course so do the traditionalists. The conservatives and the moderate centre have agreed to define unity in a spurious way – to say that it means peace between separate factions – but no church has ever really survived with that idea of unity, with a divided body of bishops. And the Church is now being asked by some conservative evangelicals to do this again over the gay issue.

    It’s a weird state of affairs, that the ideal of unity must be reasserted, but now from the fringe. And I suggest that WATCH has not quite grasped this, in its campaigning – it still sounds like it is representing the interests of a minority, a faction.

    The real task is to launch a new sort of campaigning rhetoric. To say, let’s restore the unity of the Church. It’s the rhetoric that used to be owned by Anglo-Catholic traditionalists, but they have now lost ownership of it, by condoning a divided episcopate – so it’s for liberals to own it.

    This means moving away from the rhetoric of rights, and instead for liberals to present themselves as the champions of unity. The language of rights is unhelpful, because the traditionalists also have rights, according to the official policy of the Church. For liberals to assert the superiority of their rights, because they align with general human rights, sounds secular, and allows the traditionalists to sound more boldly Christian.

    Such a move will attract criticism – that this approach is aggressive, that it seeks to kick out the traditionalists. But this will wake people up to the reality: that the desire for unity has been de-legitimised.

    Is this what a movement such as WATCH is for? I think it could be said that if WATCH doesn’t make this move it is contributing to the status quo. It endorses the official view that unity has been redefined, that a united episcopacy is an illegitimate goal. To put it more provocatively, WATCH can be seen as obscuring the issue of the Church’s disunity. For the average liberal thinks, Oh that’s the job of WATCH, to challenge alternative episcopal oversight, it’s their issue. But of course the unity of the Church is the concern of all.

    If WATCH does move in this direction, its name might be a problem, for its name ties it to the rhetoric of minority-rights-campaigning. To go back to my engagement with the issue, I assumed it wasn’t really my business – because of the word ‘women’. But a campaign to re-unify the Church would have got my attention, drawn me in.

    In conclusion, I think that WATCH has a fascinating challenge. Today, it has a special role in re-unifying the Church. Why? Because the rest of the Church has drifted into accepting disunity as normal, inevitable. Only here is there a real discomfort at disunity – a holy discomfort that can lead to renewal.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Missing, Between Synods

    by Professor Helen King, lay preacher in the Diocese of Oxford, member of General Synod and vice-chair of its Gender and Sexuality Group

    This is a funny old month. It started with what many members regarded as one of the worst Synods yet, and is ending in gloomy cold wet weather which makes those five very full days seem like a long time ago. So much at Synod was left unanswered, unresolved, and now here comes August – the month when the Church of England, along with other churches, seems to stop. In my parish, the choir has the month off, and the various groups take a pause from their activities. Sunday services remain otherwise unaffected, and we pray for those on their holidays, not always thinking of those who for whatever reason remain at home. At national level, too, it all stops: no more meetings of the assorted councils which run the Church of England until September.

    But maybe that’s not entirely the case; maybe the Archbishops’ Council meets, otherwise I am not sure how to understand the response from the Bishop of Stepney to a Question in July about the review published by the Independent Safeguarding Board just before it was dissolved – the Spindler report into the handling of the case of Mr X. She said that the outcome of a July meeting of the National Safeguarding Steering Group would be presented to the Archbishops’ Council (Q.108 here) and, since the Spindler report was expecting a response within 4 weeks, her response wouldn’t make much sense if the Archbishops’ Council won’t say anything until September. The most recent meeting of that NSSG listed online is dated 11 April 2023 (!) and I am not aware of any list of dates when the Archbishops’ Council meets or any record of what it does at its meetings.

    And that’s part of the feeling of ‘missing’. We don’t know who is meeting, we don’t know what they are discussing and we don’t know who makes the decisions. And yet here we are with – apparently – nothing happening.

    The contrast with the time at Synod couldn’t be greater. Synod feels frenzied, this July particularly so with both Living in Love and Faith and Safeguarding on the agenda, and with some days timetabled until 10 p.m. It’s all so intense: the two sessions of Questions, where various bodies of the C of E respond to questions sent in by Synod members, attracted a record number of questions – 237 – many of them, too, around those timetabled presentations on LLF and Safeguarding. The press release on the LLF presentation summarised it as ‘Synod members scrutinise work since February vote’ but I would hardly call listening to a presentation ‘scrutinising’. In answering one of the Questions on the LLF documents, the Bishop of Lichfield assured us that ‘we are working to bring draft guidance to the November meeting of the General Synod’ but then in the LLF presentation itself the Bishop of Guildford cast doubt on that timetable. So, even within the July Synod, it all depended on how you interpreted what was said.

    On the key topics of the July Synod, we kept hearing answers on the lines of ‘We don’t know but it may all be clear by Sunday’ or ‘We don’t know but we are working on it’. In fact on Sunday, the day of the Safeguarding presentation, the general atmosphere of mistrust came to a head. The presentation was due to have been by the members of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) but changed because the Board had just ceased to exist. The two members of that Board who were no longer able to present to us were in the public gallery and, after some convoluted attempts to find an appropriate standing order, were allowed to address us briefly. It remained unclear what had gone wrong and how it had been decided that the Board should cease to exist.

    And the confusion didn’t stop when we went home from Synod. In the days immediately afterwards, both Meg Munn and Maggie Atkinson published their own statements about what went wrong with the ISB. Then Archbishops’ Council met, and later on 20 July it was announced that Professor Alexis Jay, who had led IICSA, was going to come in to develop proposals for a fully independent safeguarding structure. Clearly, she hadn’t been approached the day before. Was this the plan all along? Who invited her to take this role?

    Thinking back to Synod, for me the low point was the attempt by Gavin Drake to bring to debate his motion asking for an independent inquiry into our Safeguarding structures. It failed, due to a requirement for a 75% majority to suspend the relevant standing order (SO 8 (1)). This was one of the many technical points which Synod members have to grasp. The standing order states that “Where a member in his or her private capacity tables a motion arising out of business specified in the agenda, the motion is to be subject to the time allowed in the agenda for the consideration of that business.” But the agenda had ‘timed business’ – business which has to start at the time specified – and this standing order meant that Gavin’s motion ran out of time. Many members of Synod were not in the debating chamber and so could not vote to suspend it and thus to allow his motion to be discussed, and there was no warning bell to bring them back in. And then Gavin resigned: a real loss to the House of Laity.

    As my fellow member for Oxford diocese, Mark Bennet, has commented, “The 75% rule is there for a reason, of course, but given the extraordinary circumstances, the instinct of so many members of Synod to deal with the issue rather than leaving it hanging had a great deal to commend it. There is now anger not addressed which will spill over into November and perhaps beyond.”

    And that’s the problem. Much is unresolved. Much remains unclear. We don’t meet again until November – a ‘bonus’ meeting, as usually we manage with two residential meetings, in February and July. Is the hope that all the upset, the confusion, the mistrust of July will have been forgotten by November? I somehow doubt it. And my own hope is that the many unanswered questions will be remembered rather than falling into the black hole of the month when everything stops in the Church of England.

  • Equality, ‘headship’ and authority: drawing the line in schools and churches

    by Rev Martine Oborne, Chair of WATCH (Women and the Church), a group that works for gender equality in the Church of England

    It should go without saying that all schools in this country want to teach children that all people are equal and should have equal opportunity. And it is important that schools should do this, as young people may be picking up other messages in society, in their home lives and from religious leaders.

    A couple of weeks ago I was at a Church of England school giving a talk to a group of sixth formers, who were studying Religious Education for A level, about gender equality and how equality is at the heart of the Christian faith. The class was a mixed group of boys and girls, Christians, Muslims, and others of other faiths or none.

    After the talk, I opened the floor for questions and was a bit shocked when one boy put up his hand and said, ‘It’s God’s will that men should be in authority over women.’ A couple of boys sitting next to him smirked and a number of the young people shifted in their seats uncomfortably. I challenged what he was saying, arguing that scripture can be and has been interpreted this way, but it also can and should be interpreted differently. Christian or Muslim, I strongly believe that it is God’s will for us to all see each other as equal – that there is no one lesser or greater than ourselves.

    The boy pushed back, quoting scripture, and explained why he believed women need to be controlled by men. I saw the teacher give him a look, but I calmly responded to his questions, giving alternative interpretations to the scriptures he referred to. He and I could have continued back and forth all day, but I tried to involve others who might have different opinions.

    At the end of the class, when the young people had gone, I had a chat with the teacher. She said that it is a problem that some young people are being taught by faith communities that it is men’s role to lead and women’s role to submit to that leadership. She said that in RE, a few years ago, she would have given some input about the interpretation of different texts regarding gender in scripture and then allow the students to discuss in small groups. She says she can no longer do this, as it causes so much upset and abuse. Another RE teacher I later spoke to about the experience confirmed that, more and more, boys are goading girls at school that they are the superior sex.

    As Chair of WATCH, a campaign group for equality for women in the Church of England, and as a vicar in West London, I spend a lot of time arguing that equality is at the heart of the Gospel and that we shouldn’t be discriminating against people on grounds of sex or other protected characteristics. WATCH calls for an end to the institutional discrimination, whereby it is still permissible for parishes to advertise just for a male vicar or to refuse the authority of a female bishop. Personally, it troubles and upsets me that our church is divided and some priests won’t receive communion from others because they are female and some of my colleagues don’t believe women should be vicars or bishops, or even preach (other than to women and children.)

    Nonetheless, I had not realised that the theologies that underlie these positions, especially headship (or ‘complementarian’) theology, are having such an impact on young people – at least, as evidenced by my visit to that Church of England school.

    Recently there has been some discussion about whether schools, particularly Church of England schools, should be teaching children about the ‘white supremacy pyramid’ and systemic racism. Some dioceses already recommend using the ‘pyramid’; for example, Derby. Whether this is a good idea or not, we all accept that schools should be teaching that it is not right for anyone to consider themselves greater or lesser than anyone else on the grounds of skin colour. But what about gender? How should schools respond to young people who are being taught in mosques or churches that men need to have power over women? Not only is this situation unpleasant and offensive for girls to contend with in schools, it is also dangerous. There is much evidence that in cultures that teach and accept male privilege over women there are higher levels of violence against women and girls, than in cultures which promote equality between the sexes.

    The day before my school visit, I was in York at General Synod and had a number of conversations with Conservative Evangelical Christians while I was there. I was campaigning, along with the Student Christian Movement, for an ‘Honest Church’ where, if we are going to continue with institutional discrimination against women, then we should at least be transparent about this, and churches that limit women’s roles should be clear about their position. Talking to one man, he admitted that his church says nothing about its headship theology on its website, but he said that they do teach headship theology in the church at least once a month, so anyone going to the church for any length of time should soon realise this. When I heard this, I thought that this was probably a good thing so that at least people knew the situation and could choose whether this church was for them or not. But now, having gone into the school, I am not so sure.

    Religious leaders have a lot of power and influence, especially over younger people, and headship teaching is possibly being accepted without any critical analysis or any acknowledgement of alternative approaches. As a result, some men may be hearing that they need to control women; indeed, that it is their role to show authority over women. I’d like to see the Church of England give a clear edict to our schools that it is not God’s will that one sex should have authority over the other. But, given that we allow this teaching in our churches and that we state in recent legislation that we want such churches to flourish, then that currently seems impossible.

    And the goading, or worse, seems set to continue.