by Professor Helen King, an authorised preacher in Oxford Diocese and an elected lay member of General Synod
As soon as I typed this title, I could see what is likely to happen. That allusion to Genesis is going to bring out the usual comments about how it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve; the assumption that Adam and Eve were “married”; and no consideration at all of the questions raised by scholars like Diarmaid MacCulloch about whether there was any sex at all in the mythical Garden of Eden. So be it. I want to look back at an earlier period of our history, well before Living in Love and Faith began in 2017, and to ask how far that history is still influencing our discussions.
I’m writing in the aftermath of this July’s Synod’s near-unanimous decision to end the use of Issues in Human Sexuality and replace it with Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of the Clergy in the process of vocational discernment. Issues was published in 1991, as a “Statement by the House of Bishops”. As the paper supporting Synod’s recent debate, GS 2413A, noted, Issues was never intended to be used in the process of discernment and ordination. It used some very strange terminology which seemed to date to the 1950s, with much of that period’s thinking. It included not only the assumption that someone bisexual must by definition be incapable of a faithful relationship, and advocacy of conversion therapy, but even the hope that in time homosexuality could cease to exist, if science could “eliminate that orientation in future generations by genetic engineering” (paragraph 4.4). And now this “Statement” has not only been recognised as misguided and toxic but has also been removed from the role it had come to play in the discipline of Church life.
But before we celebrate, let’s remember that there’s an influential booklet that’s even older than Issues: Sexuality and the Church, aka The Higton Report, published in 1987. My copy last came to the top of the pile of books on my desk back in 2017, when I wrote this. Where Issues was a “Statement”, Sexuality and the Church looks somehow more formal; its subtitle is A Report to General Synod and, as it bears the embargo stamp which was used in those days when documents were sent out to Synod members (embargoed until 29 October 1987, so two weeks before Synod met) it looks like an official part of the Synod paperwork. Looking back, I find this confusing. It’s not an official Synod document, unlike Issues which carried a GS identifier (GS Misc. 382). The Higton Report was printed not by Church House but by “Action for Biblical Witness to Our Nation”, a charity run by Tony Higton and his wife. I can’t remember, thinking back, whether it came with other Synod mailings or arrived separately; perhaps the latter. But there’s some boundary-blurring going on in the way the booklet is presented.
I want to reflect on my reading of the document when it was published, when as a Synod member I made some notes in the (very tiny!) margins, but also to look at it from my perspective now. Some of it seems very much of its time, but there is much that is still being repeated or – more dangerously – lies behind what is actually being said out loud.
Synod and sex in 1986-87
So let’s backtrack to 1987, when I was on Synod as one of the five youngest members. Who was I, in 1987? I was a sexually inexperienced straight cis-woman who had recently completed a PhD on ancient medicine. Despite my research interests, I initially found Synod’s apparent obsession with sex, with who is doing what with whom, somewhat alarming. I had spoken in a debate in November 1986, when I successfully had “virginity” replaced by “pre-marital chastity” in a motion around Victoria Gillick’s campaign to prevent doctors prescribing contraception to under-16s without parental consent. My rationale here was that “virginity” was a loaded word, rather too technical; my research had made me aware of the complex cultural history of what counts as “virginity”, and of the concept of “technical virginity” when someone has avoided penis-in-vagina sex but has enthusiastically experienced pretty well every other option that exists. It was because of this that I preferred the term “chastity”, focusing on an attitude rather than a (disputed) female body part. Clearly, I wasn’t afraid of standing up in debates of this kind.
Tony Higton’s Private Member’s Motion became available for signatures at the July 1987 Synod. Did I sign it? I don’t remember. It’s perfectly possible that I did, because I would have been interested in such a debate. As Higton tells us proudly in the Introduction to Sexuality and the Church, “168 members signed it during the four days of the Synod, more than for any other Private Member’s Motion, which means it took priority for debate at the next Synod”. The Report says it is “background material” to the imminent debate, which could be a deliberate misrepresentation, presenting it as an official document which formed part of the PMM. While these days we are urged to write such supporting documents with a maximum of four pages, this ran to 79 pages. I’d add that the label “Report” is misleading, as it wasn’t really a “report”, but a collection of essays by an all-male line-up: Higton, David Holloway (on Synod’s Standing Committee at the time), Gordon Wenham and David Wright, with a reprinted piece by two psychologists, John Green and David Miller.
The Higton Report is clearly out to shock its gentle synodical readers and have them clutching their pearls. In the first essay in the booklet, Higton tells us of a visit to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) office at St Botolph’s Church in London where, among other things, he found leaflets describing various sexual practices and how best to prevent AIDS while doing them; he calls these sexual practices “homosexual acts” but those he names here have nothing intrinsically homosexual about them. I’d never even heard of some of them before; whoever would have thought Synod debates could be a source of my sex education? Higton’s assumption seems to be that heterosexuals have access to a far more limited sexual menu, as well as having far less sex; he positively luxuriates in detailing how much sex per hour can be had in “the baths”. Today, we still hear claims about “the homosexual lifestyle” which are shorthand for assumptions about inevitable promiscuity, which are somehow supposed to be absent from “the heterosexual lifestyle”. Here and elsewhere, Higton’s statistical claims are, frankly, a mess; when he discusses rising abortion rates in young girls he can only see this as evidence of promiscuity among (heterosexual!) teenagers, rather than considering that some of these pregnancies may have been the result of girls being exploited by much older men. He really doesn’t get the relationship between power and sex.
In its original wording, Higton’s PMM began by asking Synod to reaffirm “that sexual intercourse should take place only between a man and woman who are married to each other” (interestingly, the other Canon B30 phrase, “for life”, didn’t feature because this was all about sex, not about marriage). The motion condemned “fornication, adultery and homosexual acts” as “sinful in all circumstances”. This assumed that everyone understood the term “fornication” to mean the same thing, which it doesn’t. The motion was passed in an amended version, in which the fornication – still undefined – and adultery occupied one clause, with a separate clause using the more specific phrase “homosexual genital acts [my italics]”, which incidentally would mean that at least one of the “homosexual acts” named by Higton would be entirely blameless, no genitals being involved.
The original PMM also asked Synod to affirm that “Christian leaders are called to be exemplars in all spheres of morality, including sexual morality as a condition of being appointed to and remaining in office”. That is a precursor of the wording of Issues. And that may have been the main intention; to drive out any ordained men (remember this was pre-ordination of women) who were homosexual. During Higton’s speech in the November 1987 debate, this was certainly his main focus. However, Higton’s PMM was amended to “all [my italics] Christians are called to be exemplary in all spheres of morality, including sexual morality, and that holiness of life is particularly required of Christian leaders.”
Throughout the Report there’s a not-entirely-convincing attempt to do the “hate the sin, love the sinner” thing. The original wording of the PMM ended with a call for “Christlike compassion to those who have fallen into sexual sin” but also for “the ministry of healing to all who suffer physically or emotionally as a result of such sin”. I assume we are talking “conversion therapy” there; but it didn’t make it to the motion as passed.
Sex in the time of AIDS
As Higton notes in his section on visiting the LGCM office, the Terrence Higgins Trust was sending mailings to Synod about AIDS, and it’s AIDS which is clearly one of the main drivers of the PMM. Its first mention is on page 4 of the Report. While accepting that it could be spread by any form of sex, Higton claimed it is spread “primarily by sexual promiscuity”. I noted in the margin of my copy, “So far.” He insists (again) that “homosexuals tend to be more promiscuous than heterosexuals”. David Holloway’s chapter goes further and blames the spread of AIDS on the Church’s failure to speak out on homosexuality. Demonstrating a dangerous ignorance he writes that, except for “a very small number of cases”, he does not think mother to child transmission, nor “contaminated blood”, are relevant. I wrote in the margin, “these 2 points [church silence/AIDS cases increasing] are not related.”
And here we come to another aspect of how my life in 1987 intersected with these debates. As someone with an interest in the history of medicine, I had been following the emergence of HIV/AIDS since 1981 and I clearly remember a friend who had just returned from the USA telling me about the news stories that were emerging there in the earliest days. But in 1987, I was also undergoing tests for a familial blood condition, and at the time of the Higton debate I was seeing some of the panic at first hand. During tests at St Thomas’s Hospital, some of my blood was spilled and the staff went into the sort of official protective drill that leaves the patient terrified. While Higton’s “primarily” may have been accurate at the time, I thought it was still unhelpful to make out that sex was the problem when there were so many other possibilities.
Memory is a funny thing. I knew that Synod had also debated a report (GS 795) from the Board for Social Responsibility on AIDS; indeed, I remember speaking in that debate, from my experience of my own blood condition, reflecting on the unhelpful emerging terminology of the “innocent” victim. Another speaker, Dr Jim Somervell, talked about being a surgeon with the risk of pricking oneself on equipment during an operation. But until this week, I hadn’t remembered that this was on the day before the Higton debate (yes, November 1987’s Synod was quite the experience). With AIDS and the Higton Report featuring on consecutive days, the spectre of the first of these very clearly hung over the second. How could it not?
How far can you go?
The question of what counts as “sex” is something on which I’ve written before, so I won’t go into graphic details here. But in the margin of my copy of the Higton Report, responding to Holloway’s chapter’s characterisation of “the Biblical tradition” being that “full sexual relationships are exclusively for heterosexual marriage”, I wrote “does this imply ‘partial sexual relationships’ are OK?” I was reminded of this last week when reading an account of the trial for rape and sexual assault of Chris Brain of the now infamous, but once thought to be missionally cutting edge, Nine O’Clock Service, where his “open relationship” with his wife meant that everything other than “full sex” – those words again – was considered fine; at least, by him.
Looking back on this now, I am again struck by our doomed attempts to divide physical pleasure into neat categories of what is acceptable and what is not, carrying on the proud tradition of the medieval penitentials. Even the heterosexual/bisexual/homosexual division doesn’t work for everyone. From the “How far can we go?” questions which I remember from church youth clubs, to supposedly adult relationships, we seem incapable of getting away from these imagined categories and lists. Full/not full… Acceptable/going too far… Can a kiss be just a kiss? How long should a hug last? As if these things can easily be quantified! Assumptions about these categories also hover behind the convenient fiction that civil partnerships don’t involve “sex” and so are OK where civil marriages are not. Our attempts to construct classifications mean that we miss the big picture of what relationships are about: equality, consent, fidelity, commitment.
The wrath of God?
So where does this lead us? Of course, the title of this blog post is misleading because 1986 and the debate stimulated by Victoria Gillick’s campaigning, followed closely by the AIDS and Higton debates, and then Issues, were not ‘the’ beginning; Christian churches had been failing to come to terms with human sexuality for a long time. But something was happening in those five years. In the early days of AIDS, with the level of fear matched with the level of ignorance, the Church of England’s statements of the 1950s and 1960s, when “the Church was in many ways ahead of much of the wider society”[1] in supporting decriminalisation of homosexuality, were forgotten. Led by the evangelical wing of the Church, the general panic about HIV/AIDS was used not only to support the view that homosexual promiscuity was the underlying cause of the pandemic, but that HIV/AIDS was God’s judgement, sent to punish gay men.
Anthony Petro, author of After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (2015), noted that the conservative right supported the “wrath of God” approach to HIV/AIDS because they were already convinced that the 1960s had led to “an epidemic of sexual immorality”. He observes that it was in the mid-1980s – the era of Gillick/Higton – that mainstream Christian writers in national USA magazines like Christian Century and Christianity Today called for attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis. That’s not to say that all Christians thought the disease was the result of “the wrath of God”: responses differed. But research has shown that, in some quarters, the idea persists that HIV/AIDS is not the result of people’s behaviour but is God’s judgement on homosexuals; as, for example, in a 2011 study of a Christian university in Nigeria.[2]
I suspect that these ideas of judgement continue to lie beneath some people’s approaches to Living in Love and Faith today. HIV/AIDS continues to feed into the language of homophobia. Staying with Nigeria, in 2021 the Primate of Nigeria, Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, described homosexuality as a “deadly ‘virus’” or as “a Yeast that should be urgently and radically expunged and excised lest it affects the whole dough”. The language of the virus cannot avoid evoking HIV/AIDS. The Nigerian Anglican Church is of course part of GAFCON, but Archbishop Justin Welby wrote to criticise the language used by Ndukuba. And it was the same Archbishop Ndukuba who was predictably quick to condemn the Church in Wales for appointing Cherry Vann as their new Archbishop, calling on church members “to denounce, reject, condemn and expel the rebels in our midst”.
I believe that we should recognise how the debates of the past, with the language of disease, surgical excision and judgement, continue beneath the surface even today. We can ask for “more theology” as much as we like, but there is far more going on here than simply theology, and it needs to be named.
Notes
[1] Mark Chapman, ‘Living in Love and Faith: The Failure of History’ in Theo Hobson and John Inge (eds), Created for Love (2025), p.85.
[2] Surveys such as this, carried out in a Christian university in Nigeria in 2011, try to break down these views by the sex, age and educational level of the respondents.