Category: Human Sexuality

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.

September 7, 2023
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?
August 11, 2023
WWBD? What Would Barbie Do?

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?

August 7, 2023
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.

August 4, 2023
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.

July 31, 2023
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.

July 28, 2023
Learning Lessons? Leading a Church Where Abuse Has Happened

by Revd Canon Mark Bennet, Team Rector in the Thatcham Team and member of General Synod

I reviewed a book a while back for the journal Practical Theology. Written by Gail Cafferata, and based on research mainly in the US, it was called The Last Pastor: Faithfully Steering a Closing Church. It was about how to close a church well, and what happens to people and buildings and resources and memories afterwards. Published in 2020, strangely it appears not yet to have appeared on the reading list of any course I am aware of in Church leadership – in spite of the fact that there are in fact many people who do close churches, and closing them well is very much better than closing them badly. If it is a common task – and Cafferata contacted over 130 pastors in five different denominations – then why are we not intentionally learning lessons from those who wear the T-shirt? It is an example of the learning we don’t want to do – we’d rather be (against the trend) growing churches and doing exciting things rather than attending to what is actually in front of many of us.

None of us want to face a major safeguarding issue in our context – my own context is a parish. But if we do face such an issue, it would be good to have some deep research which goes beyond crisis and reputation management. Within six months of taking on my role of Team Rector I had to deal with two situations involving two different youth leaders in the parish, one of whom ended up spending time in prison. I mentioned an outline of my issues in a speech at the July 2023 General Synod in the debate on safeguarding reviews. ‘Lessons learnt’ is a term used all the time in these reviews, but I mentioned in passing the learning we apparently don’t want to do, about treating victims and survivors well over the long term. But my main focus (which the Church Times missed in its Synod report) was on the learning we haven’t even thought of doing: about the impact on, and care of, communities in which abuse has happened. When it happened to me, I had no body of learning to which I could refer to guide me in my unexpected and unwelcome new context.

I hope that such experiences have a low incidence, but over time even a low incidence of scarring and damage unhealed can start to have a substantial impact, as cases mount up. Do you know what it feels like to face the prospect of doing youth work in the face of the “younger and more diverse” agenda when there has been a double betrayal in the parish? That has been one of my questions, but if the damage is low incidence, we must note also that our contexts of ministry are very diverse. Not many will have a single church building serving a parish of over 25,000 people. So I was arguing at Synod that we need, as a church, to capture, consolidate and reflect on the learning from the contexts where abuse has happened, so that people like me have resources which have a chance of mapping onto something like their own situation if the worst happens to them. It may be that reviews are the wrong tool for this work and that ongoing intentional research would capture the learning and the stories more effectively.

What I do know is that if no-one is learning, then mistakes will be made – and no-one has yet put themselves out to learn from me and my experience. It is hard work to be the pastor of a congregation in which abuse has happened. In many cases it seems to divide the community between those who believe the stories are true, and those who would defend a “good person” or the reputation of the church. My journey covered five years, conflict, unexplained decisions and judgments and a serious case review encompassing the church and two schools (I was chair of governors of one – not, as it happens, a church school). The impact lasted for longer than that. Just to illustrate some of the questions which arose for me over this extended period:

How do you preach over time: are there problematic Bible passages?

How do you negotiate your relationship with local schools where you are a governor and parents are getting their best information from the local newspaper?

How do you deal with newspaper stories in those community contexts?

How do you manage a PCC which knows little of the story? And Churchwardens likewise?

How do you manage a team when some can know things that others do not?

What are the considerations about continuing the youth work in the parish (other partners may be involved)?

How do you survive the incorrect comments and factually inaccurate narratives which emerge in your community when you can say nothing to challenge them?

How do you cope with being called “paedo” in the street or in a public place?

The demands and pressures of being embedded in a community where abuse has happened over a considerable period are not comms issues, or problem solving, or even sometimes actually safeguarding issues – they are issues of relationship and trust, and at heart are pastoral issues. As I mentioned in my speech, a community can be strongly divided, with emotion running high – as a work context, it can be demanding and at times relentless.

I hope I never face the same issues again – my learning is of little use to me. But it could be of huge value to an unknown colleague facing some of the same challenges in a different context. What do we lose by putting ourselves out to learn the lessons?

July 21, 2023
Giving Up Sex? What Macrina Tells Us About Choosing Celibacy

by Professor Morwenna Ludlow, a historian, theologian and priest, specialising in historical theology. She is Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Exeter and Canon Theologian at Exeter Cathedral

On 19 July, Anglicans remember Macrina and Gregory of Nyssa. Their family story reminds us of the richness and complexity of early Christian practices of marriage and celibacy. Gregory’s biography of his sister Macrina tells that she was engaged in her early teens. When her fiancé died before they could be married, Macrina promptly declared herself a ‘widow’ and dedicated her life to celibacy—first on her own, but eventually turning her whole household into a community for celibate women. This community included her mother Emmelia who, we are told, would have preferred to be a nun herself but agreed to the marriage arranged for her. She had ten children. Macrina was the eldest; the second child, Basil of Caesarea, lived for a while as a celibate in a small community of men in the grounds of the family estate. Basil later founded an important monastery at Caesarea (where he was Bishop) and his monastic “Rule” was an important influence on both eastern and western monasticism (via Cassian and Benedict). Macrina and Basil’s younger brother Gregory married, but was a widower by the time he was elected Bishop of Nyssa. He was supportive of his siblings’ monastic projects and several of his writings address the spiritual graces and challenges of a life of voluntary celibacy.

Why do I think that we need to reflect on celibacy now? First, because it was celibacy, not marriage, that was counter-cultural in the early church. An arranged marriage was the way those with property ensured its orderly transfer to the next generation. Aristocratic, wealthy or middling families (whether Christian or not) married their daughters off at the age of around 12 to 14. The marriages of Christians were frequently blessed by a priest, but a Christian marriage service was very slow to emerge, especially in the west. To judge from grumpy sermons on the subject, Christians’ weddings would have been difficult to distinguish from others’. We have many stories of Christian women and men rejecting their families’ expectations to marry, instead taking up a life of celibacy dedicated to prayer and service of God. Those who chose to reject marriage in this way could easily paint themselves as taking up a Christian stance against their society—even if it was a society in which most people were Christian. Their decision to choose celibacy was frequently met with incomprehension and suspicion, not least because it often diverted wealth away from influential families to the church.

Secondly, this decision in favour of a life of celibacy was not understood narrowly as ‘giving up sex’. Voluntarily celibate men and women saw themselves as following a calling to dedicate their whole lives to God. Whether they pursued this alone, in small groups or a larger community, they were dedicated to a life ordered by regular prayer and the singing of the psalms. Their lives were marked by simplicity in food and dress. For Macrina, this certainly meant giving up the comforts of her aristocratic upbringing. For the orphans she took into her community, or the homeless men who were trained in Basil ’s monastery, it meant a more stable life and a better diet. Many monks and nuns took up a life of regular work as well as prayer, working either for their community (growing vegetables, making clothes and so on) or serving the poor and sick who came to them.

To be clear, there was a very strong strain of early church theology which was suspicious of the body, fearful of sexual desire and keen on the strict preservation of sexual purity (especially for women). But this was never the whole story and many monks and nuns were sexually experienced. Some were widows/widowers. Some married couples individually joined celibate communities after producing ‘an heir and a spare’. Very many people were sexually active outside marriage and some of these later turned to voluntary celibacy. Augustine of Hippo wrote about his concubine and son with great affection. This was not a period of his life which he repudiated in any straightforward sense; his relationship was even condoned by his pious Christian mother until such a time as she had found him a suitably aristocratic wife.

Thirdly, and most importantly, this kind of celibate life was voluntary. Holy men and women were praised for their choice—a choice often made against the wishes of their families and friends. Macrina is a good example of this. It is true that these men and women often felt their calling as a kind of compulsion. Many, like Augustine, undertook it after deep and long struggles. Those called to ministry today might recognise that grappling in response to a calling. In time, celibacy was expected of priests and bishops (in the west) and bishops (in the east). But even if celibacy was experienced as a challenging call imposed by God and connected with a call to ministry, it was never required by the church of certain sets of people simply because of the way they were born. Indeed, there is clear evidence of rules designed to prevent certain people being pressurised into celibacy. Families were not to send a young girl off to a nunnery against her will. Husbands or wives could leave a marriage to pursue a life of celibacy, but only with the agreement of their spouse; if they did leave their marriage, they could not force their husband or wife to join a community of celibates too. This is not of course to say that these rules weren’t broken. The hierarchical society meant that women and slaves were vulnerable to cooption (and there were rules forbidding slaves to join communities without their masters’ permission). But the point is that the Christian doctrine of celibacy clearly taught that it was a voluntary dedication of one’s whole self and one’s whole life to God and a rejection of society’s pressure to accumulate wealth, improve one’s status and pass both down to the next generation.

So was this just a fourth-century development in response to the coming together of Christianity and the Roman Empire? Ordered patterns of voluntary celibacy clearly predate Constantine. The earliest texts of Christianity witness to two kinds of leaders: the settled hosts of ‘house churches’ and others, like Paul and the disciples who travelled with Jesus, who were itinerant preachers and teachers. These wandering apostles were probably the first Christian voluntary celibates. Out of their practice grew more formalised traditions, like the wandering pairs of celibate men and women in the Syriac tradition (some scholars argue that very early narratives like the Acts of Paul and Thecla preserve a folk memory of this). In other words, the earliest evidence of consistent forms of Christian voluntary celibacy come from outside, or on the fringes of, the Roman Empire, well before the Empire was Christianised.

A common Protestant narrative sees the Constantinian period as beginning all kinds of decline in the church and the Protestant Reformation did indeed criticise the corruption of monastic institutions and reverse the expectation of priestly celibacy. But those following Protestant tradition today have to grapple with the fact that Paul declared that it was ‘well’ for the unmarried and widows to remain unmarried as he was and that voluntary celibacy was one ‘particular gift’ among others (1 Cor. 7:7-8, 25). Early Christians reflected deeply on Scripture when teaching about voluntary celibacy. Works like Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity are heavily indebted to 1 Cor. 7, advocating integrity in whatever life is chosen. Arguably, the early church’s favouring of celibacy is more Pauline and more biblical than the Reformation’s declaration that celibacy and marriage were of equal value. In any case, early Christian celibates constantly expressed their calling in biblical terms, most vividly the idea that celibacy was a marriage with the heavenly bridegroom: just as each Christian was held to be the uniquely-loved adoptive son and heir of God through baptism, so each voluntary celibate—whether a man or woman—became the uniquely loved bride of Christ. They expressed this relationship using imagery from the Song of Songs, the parable of the ten bridesmaids (Matthew 25:1-13) and other New Testament texts (e.g. Matt. 9:15/Mk 2:19/Luke 5:34; John 3:29; 2 Cor. 11:2-4; Eph. 5). In other words, the biblical use of marriage as a symbol for salvation was not just used to validate earthly marriage; it was also—and I would argue was more emphatically and regularly used—as a model for the relationship of each celibate to their heavenly spouse.

Early forms of Christian celibacy were varied. They were adapted to suit individual settings and cultural contexts. But they were united by a strong sense of a voluntary, permanent setting aside of one’s Iife for God, a commitment which was symbolised for women and men as a wife’s devotion to her heavenly husband. Just as marriage was based in both Jewish and Roman law on consent, celibacy was grounded on a voluntary commitment.

Those modern Christians who demand celibacy for same sex couples may think they are defending the Christian doctrine of marriage. In fact, they are ignoring the doctrine of celibacy. Their position is unchristian, it is unbiblical, and it is unkind.

Sources/further reading

Brock, Sebastian P and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, eds., Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, paperback (Berkeley (CA); Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1998).

Brock, Sebastian, The Luminous Eye. The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Cistercian Studies Series 124 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992).

Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

Clark, Gillian. Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Life-Styles. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).

Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)

Ludlow, Morwenna. The Early Church. (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009).

July 19, 2023
Marriage Law in England and Wales – Some Reflections
by Revd Dr Helen Hall, Nottingham Trent University and Professor Javier Garcia Oliva, Head of Law, University of Manchester
(the third in a series of four: based on a presentation to the June 26th Symposium on Same-Sex Marriage in the Church of England organised by Sir Ben Bradshaw and Jayne Ozanne)

Marriage Law in England and Wales-Current Framework and Proposed Reform

Jurisdiction

Marriage law (and family law more generally) in England and Wales is distinct from that in Scotland.

This is not a recent development arising from devolution, but due to the agreement prior to the Act of Union, according to which Scotland would be permitted to keep its own legal system.

The analysis below relates exclusively to England and Wales, except where otherwise indicated.

Although Anglicanism was formally disestablished by the Welsh Church Act 1914, for the purposes of marriage law, the Church in Wales largely continues to operate as an established Church.

However, it should be noted that disestablishment means that the Church in Wales has no power to amend the civil law framework. It is completely dependent on Parliament in this regard.

Current Framework

For historical reasons, there are four distinct routes to a legally binding marriage: Anglican Marriage; Quaker and Jewish Marriages; Civil Marriage; and Other Forms of Religious Marriage where a faith group has opted-in (hereafter referred to as “Opt-In Marriages” in this paper).

Marriages outside of these four categories are not illegal in the sense of being prohibited, but they will NOT create a legally binding marriage in English/Welsh law.

Marriages which take place in other jurisdictions are ordinarily treated as creating a legally binding marriage in England/Welsh law, provided that they were legally valid according to the rules of the State in which they were celebrated.

Opt-In Marriages are performed by an authorised person, but must take place in a building registered for religious worship.

This means that there is no provision for Humanist marriages, nor any scope for faith groups which do not meet in a registered building, either because they lack sufficient members and money, or because their practices involve worshipping at home or in outdoor settings.

Problems with the Current Framework

As a headline, it is unduly complex and bureaucratic.

Some parties to non-binding religious marriages are unaware that they have no legal protection until their relationship breaks down. It is only at that point that they learn that they were simply cohabiting, and are, therefore, entitled to no financial relief.

Individuals for whom English/Welsh is a second language are at increased risk of confusion.

Local decision making on opting-in may add to the confusion; it is not always enough to ask what faith community performed the ceremony, e.g. a Muslim marriage or a Sikh marriage might or might not be legally binding, depending on whether the community in question had opted-in.

A significant number of non-legally binding religious marriages are taking place. This leads to unequal outcomes should the relationship break down, or one of the parties die without leaving a will. It can also trap vulnerable people in abusive relationships, especially women. The lack of access to financial relief may make it very difficult for a person to leave their partner, if they have no housing and are economically dependent. The situation is exacerbated still further if they are from a cultural background which stigmatises separation, and their families and friends are unable/unwilling to offer support.

Proposals for Reform

The Law Commission has proposed significant reforms:

1)         Regulation of the Officiant instead of the venue (i.e. an end to the need to celebrate Opt-In marriages in a registered building).

2)         Universal rules for ALL weddings

Couples would be able to give notice of their intended wedding online, and to choose the registration district where they would then be interviewed by a registration officer.

Notice of upcoming weddings would be published online so that the information was accessible to the wider community.

There would be great accommodation of the diversity of beliefs e.g. It would be possible to have a religious ceremony in a venue other than a place of worship and without having to incorporate prescribed words into the ceremony. It is suggested that there should also be an option for couples of different faiths to have a religious ceremony led by an interfaith minister that contains aspects of each of the couple’s beliefs. Finally, the rigid division between civil and religious marriages would be axed, allowing couples to have some religious elements, such as hymns and prayers, incorporated into their civil ceremony (as long as the ceremony remained “identifiably civil”.)

Implications for Same Sex Marriage and the Church of England

This does not directly impact on same sex marriage and the Church of England, but there are a number of indirect implications.

1)         This supports McLean’s thesis of “marriage” being a legal institution offered and regulated by the State, even though it may choose to delegate the ceremonial and administrative elements to third parties, including faith groups.

2)         Respecting the diversity of beliefs present in contemporary society is a key element of the proposals, and no denomination would be forced to offer marriage ceremonies to all comers on an equal basis. It would clearly violate Article 9 of the ECHR and the rules of statutory interpretation, if any legislation enacted on the basis of the Law Commission proposals were interpreted as requiring all Anglican clergy to offer same sex marriages, or demanding that Roman Catholic priests and Orthodox Rabbis perform wedding ceremonies for non-Catholic/Jewish atheists or members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti monster.

3)         The Church of England (and indeed all faith groups) would have to decide how to respond to the possibility of its clergy being involved in interfaith ceremonies, or providing “religious elements” of a civil ceremony, where the parties to the marriage were of the same sex. Given the scope for considerably increased flexibility in respect of wording and ceremonies, it is easy to see how Anglican clergy could be effectively “performing” same sex marriages hosted by a friendly neighbouring denomination, or conceivably even in the context of a civil ceremony, depending on how the “identifiably civil” part was interpreted. The church would have to decide how it wanted to respond to this.

4)         With a much freer wedding economy, couples would have far greater scope to have a religious/Christian backdrop to their ceremony without going to the local parish church. Consequently, if the Church of England wanted to continue to encourage weddings as potential opportunities for evangelism/outreach, and source of income, then it would do well to ponder how excluding same sex couples would affect perceptions of Anglicanism and Anglican marriage.

It must be stressed that not all proposals of the Law Commission become law, and even those that do often undergo substantial transformation before being enacted.

There is a considerable pressure for reform of wedding law, particularly in light of some recent high-profile litigation in relation to a woman seeking some mechanism to obtain financial relief when leaving a non-legally binding religious marriage. The conclusion of the appellate court was that neither divorce nor nullity could help. For the reasons outlined above, the vulnerability of people in this situation means that there is now an urgent reason to overhaul an idiosyncratic and piecemeal system which has been evolving in a haphazard fashion since the eighteenth century.

The collateral implications of all of this for same sex marriages in an Anglican setting are indirect, but very significant.
July 8, 2023
Equality, Parliament, and the Established Church: Some Recent Close Encounters
Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College, Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England

(the first in a series of four: based on a presentation to the June 26th Symposium on Same-Sex Marriage in the Church of England organised by Sir Ben Bradshaw and Jayne Ozanne)

In February 2023, the General Synod of the Church of England debated and passed by a sizeable majority a paper from the House of Bishops which is intended to move the needle in a positive direction towards equality for LGBT+ people. Such reform impacts on laypeople and clergy active within the Church but also on the wider public the Established Church seeks to serve, chiefly through the parochial system and sector chaplaincies. This wider public turn to the Church for food banks, youth work and elder care and at key ‘life events’, or ‘occasional offices’ of baptism, marriage and funerals. Marriage, of course, is at the heart of the issue. The House of Bishops’ proposals to Synod in February were the result of a lengthy six-year process known as Living in Love and Faith. I know it was a lengthy and careful process – I was a member of one of LLF’s working groups.

In February, before Synod, a group of about a dozen cross-party Parliamentarians met with Archbishop Justin. It was, according to the Guardian and Telegraph, a heated meeting, at which Parliamentarians ‘threatened’ disestablishment if the Church did not change its position to allow equal marriage. The Telegraph reported that ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury has vowed that he will not be told what to do by MPs over blessings for same-sex couples’. Later that month, while at the global Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Ghana, the BBC reported that the Archbishop spoke of being ‘“threatened with parliamentary action” in an attempt “to force same-sex marriage” into the Church of England’.

There is a lot of alleged ‘threatening’ going on by MPs as well as the implied criticism that Parliamentarians were somehow out of line to take a genuine interest in how the Established Church serves the nation. I would like to put the Archbishop’s remarks into historical context in terms of the relationship between Parliament and the Established Church of England. I am principally a historian of the 17th century, but you will be relieved that I only want to go back about 30 years to another significant equality issue in which Parliament and Church interacted: the ordination of women to the priesthood in the early 1990s and the consecration of women as bishops in the 2010s.

In 2011, I co-edited a collection of essays with two other Oxford colleagues, called The Established Church: Past, Present and Future. The book came out of a day conference on the same topic. I am a cradle Anglican but moved to England from the United States in 1979 to begin doctoral studies and have lived here ever since. In my 20s and even into my 30s, I thought Church Establishment to be frankly bizarre – who wouldn’t coming from abroad? But over the years, I have become a ‘critical convert’ to it. The day conference came about because whenever I heard a bishop on the radio defending establishment, I wanted to dis-establish it. Surely, there were more robust and creative ways to understand the public good of Establishment than the tired truisms that get trotted out. That is what we set out to do, though not all the contributors were of one mind on the subject.

My own chapter looked at gender and Establishment. The research was prompted by an exchange in Synod in 2010, rather like the one I started with, between the new Second Church Estates Commissioner, Tony Baldry, MP and the then bishop of Durham, Tom Wright. Baldry, characteristically, gave Synod some nuanced and honest advice that the Commons would look dimly on a measure to consecrate women as bishops that was discriminatory – that is, that treated bishops who were women differently than bishops who were men. Tom Wright, in his last speech before resigning his see, attacked Baldry in the chamber, claiming that he had said (which Baldry had not) something like ‘the political winds were blowing this way, and so the church had better get in line’. With rhetorical flourish, Wright said: ‘The day the Church ceases to be able to say we must obey God rather than human authority will be the day it ceases to be the Church.’ His remarks were greeted by thunderous applause in the Synod chamber as it is a statement, on face value, pretty much impossible for any Christian to disagree with.

As I said, this exchange was the motivation for my own chapter in the book. I had a sense, although I had never explored it in detail, that the creation of Provincial Episcopal Visitors (or ‘Flying Bishops’ as they have come to be known) was the result of pressure from the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament, as it was not part of the Synodical Measure that passed Synod in November 1992.

Some of you, like me, will remember that momentous vote in 1992 in General Synod, approving the ordination of women to the priesthood. The 1992 Measure certainly did not treat women priests equally with their male counterparts. It:
- Exempted women clergy from any protection provided by the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act
- Created Resolutions A and B ‘to protect’ parishes from women clergy
- Explicitly excluded women from the episcopate
- Guaranteed that no bishop would be ‘forced’ to ordain women
- Provided financial provision to ‘compensate’ male clergy who felt they needed to leave the Church because of the ordination of women to the priesthood
You might think that that was quite enough compromise and ‘protection’ for opponents.

And you might also be thinking, there is no mention whatsoever here of Flying Bishops – an invention entirely without historical precedent to address an issue on which Anglicans were not of one mind. There is a very, very long list of things about which Anglicans are not of one mind, but never before has an episcopal sub-structure been created to meet the needs of a particular theological constituency.(1) And what a dangerous precedent it set for dealing with disagreement as we now see attempts to apply the model to other theological disputes.

Where did this theological and ecclesiological innovation come from? Well, Parliamentarians, I hate to tell you, it came from you. Hours spent on Hansard, which in 2010 had the slowest search engine I’d ever come across: there it all was in the proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Committee, a committee of both Houses, whose job it is to decide whether a Synodical Measure is ‘expedient’ to go to the Commons and Lords for approval.

A cross-party group of MPs, chiefly Frank Field, Simon Hughes, Patrick Cormack, and John Selwyn Gummer pushed for even greater concessions to those opposed to the ordination of women than were already in the Measure. In fact, the vast majority of time spent by the Ecclesiastical Committee in 1993 was on how to provide even more ‘safeguards’ for those opposed to women in the priesthood. Such involvement by Parliamentarians was entirely appropriate, as Frank Field maintained, as it was part of their:

… function as parliamentarians … to protect the interests of constituents who may be adversely affected by a [Church] Measure …. we are quite rightly … much concerned with, and will no doubt spend much time on, how the position of minorities is protected.(2)

Going back to this material recently to prepare this piece, I was struck by the extensive use by Parliamentarians in the early 1990s of ‘safeguarding’ language – that male clergy might somehow be ‘victims’ of some sort of ‘abuse’ merely by the existence of women clergy. It is very chilling language now in the light of the recent series of catastrophic and real safeguarding failures in the Church that are piling up. But in the early 1990s, while Bishop Peter Ball was committing terrible abuse, somehow it was women priests who were seen as the people from whom other Church members needed ‘safeguarding’.

The bishops, I’m afraid, caved in to this Parliamentary pressure and these ‘threats’ and produced the Act of Synod of 1993, putting it in place for the Ecclesiastical Committee to deem it expedient for the Measure to go to Parliament for a vote in October and November 1993. The Measure passed handsomely – 10:1 in the Commons and 7:1 in the Lords – and several hours of parliamentary time was set aside for debate. Thanks to the Ecclesiastical Committee, even more ‘safeguarding’ was provided and the equality of women clergy even more eroded. Both Field and Hughes spoke in the debate in the House, proudly outlining how the Ecclesiastical Committee had been key in the creation of Flying Bishops.

I have time to touch only briefly on women in the episcopate, but we can see significant culture change from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. MPs used Early Day Motions from the early 2000s onwards to raise the question, with increasing impatience, of when the country can expect the Established Church to have women bishops. In their remarks, MPs often praised the public good provided by the Church’s parochial system and the women priests who were serving the wider community through it.

Reflecting on this history challenges any notion that Parliamentarians taking an interest in the affairs of the Established Church is in anyway improper or unusual in the modern era. In the early 1990s, Parliamentarians ensured there was even more discriminatory provision against women priests and gave us Flying Bishops. By the early 2000s, MPs were repeatedly raising questions about the exclusion of women from the episcopate of the Established Church. You will remember the outcry in the Commons when the Measure narrowly failed to achieve a two-thirds majority in the House of Laity in 2012. As the Church of England obsesses with its narrative of decline and lack of relevance, it is ironic that when the members of the public legislature of the country actually take an interest in the Church because they believe it to matter, such interest is perceived as ‘interference’ and ‘threatening’. In a way, I agree with Frank Field when he said it was their function as Parliamentarians: ‘… to protect the interests of constituents who may be adversely affected by a [Church] Measure’.(3)

In 1993, the ‘interests of constituents’ were understood to mean providing yet more discriminatory measures against women. In the past 20 years or so, the attention of MPs to ‘the interests of [their] constituents’ is about promoting equality in the way the Established Church orders its life and serves the wider community. The modern relationship of Parliament and the Church of England is more complicated than accusations of ‘threatening’ behaviour support.

Notes

(1) See Judith Maltby, ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, but Two Integrities?’ in Monica Furlong, ed, Act of Synod or Act of Folly?: Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993 (SCM Press, 1998).

(2) Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 64 (19 April 1993).

(3) Reports of the Ecclesiastical Committee, p. 64 (19 April 1993).

Further reading

Judith Maltby, ‘Gender and Establishment: Parliament, “Erastianism” and the Ordination of Women 1993-2010’ in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby & William Whyte, eds, The Established Church: Past, Present and Future (T&T Clark, 2011).
July 6, 2023