by Charlie Bell, Fellow in Public Theology and Medicine at Girton College, Cambridge, and Associate Vicar of St John the Divine, Kennington, in the Diocese of Southwark
Labels are a dangerous thing. We spend a lot of time worrying about them – they’re a marker of identity, both our own and others’, and we fling them around rather haphazardly, often to our peril. Identity itself is always a contested thing – we like to own our own, yet we are also never short of labelling others to suit our own purposes. It’s a great way for us to confirm our prejudices – we are X, and they are Y – X is good, Y is bad, and by constantly reinforcing this, through the power of language, we can ensure that our virtue, and their lack of it, is writ large. Some words take on that meaning within our enclosed groups – think Republican or Democrat in the US – and some are rather more obviously imbued with a meaning specifically derived from how a group has decided to construct its identity. Chief amongst these, in the church and the world, must be the words liberal and conservative – and depending on one’s particular point of view, each of these might be seen as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
They’re not the worst labels out there, of course. In the church, we hear silly monikers like ‘revisionist’ or ‘orthodox’ thrown around as though they are not politically loaded weapons, and I cannot be the only one who is so bored of hearing them that each time I do I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. The use of ‘orthodox’ (and its never-spoken-but-obviously-meant opposite number, heterodox) to describe one’s position on sexuality is so ludicrous that it’s not worth spending any time worrying over, however ‘winsome’ its proponents might think it is, and frankly it’s rather embarrassing that, in this anniversary year of Nicaea, it continues to be used even by some bishops. Get a grip – not least of history and doctrine – folks. Rather than worrying about those kind of insult-based identity markers, though, it is worth thinking a little more carefully about the ones we probably use the most – liberal, and conservative. Are they fit for purpose?
The word ‘liberal’ has an interesting history, not least depending on whether there is a capital L involved or not. That’s a history found within and without the church, and its meaning is far more complex than ‘in favour of LGBTQIA affirmation’ might suggest. In many ways, though, liberal is used in the church more as a term of opposition than as a term of distinctive identity in its own right – to be ‘liberal’ is to not be conservative. Being ‘liberal’ on women’s ministry, being a ‘liberal Catholic’, being a ‘liberal’ on matters of same-sex and gender relationships, is ultimately making it clear what you are not, which is – I would suggest – that one is not steeped in unquestioned cis-heteronormative patriarchal understandings of the Gospel which are entirely unfit for purpose. So, in a sense, whilst I’m quite happy to be called liberal in some ways, I’m not sure that I entirely fit the bill if that term is used in its fullest sense, and nor do I think its use as a catch-all for all things is helpful (for example, it seems to surprise some people that I might be able to hold both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ views on different things, and that there is not a single shopping list of liberal causes to which we all sign up).
But seeing ‘liberal’ as a term of opposition brings us to the much more interesting word: ‘conservative’. Its use is manifold, and it’s often worn as a badge of pride. On occasion I would like nothing less than to be known as ‘conservative’. Yet I think it is well overdue a revisit, because by allowing particular groups to own it, we allow them to set the narrative of our ecclesial conversations and, in doing so, to determine what it is that ought to be conserved. Conserving things – and choosing which things take the primacy in being conserved – is by no means as simple as is often made out. That is absolutely the case within the church. Our failure to name that – and to ask precisely what and why something deserves to be conserved – is very much at the root of many of our current problems. I think it’s about time we did something about that.
At the moment, those things which reward you with the name ‘conservative’ appear, rather conveniently, to fit into the unthinking, unflinching, culture-infused patriarchal bucket that I described earlier. No women in ordained ministry; no gays in dog collars; no this, and no that. Yet many in this ‘conservative’ camp seem entirely happy to jettison much else that we might think needs to be conserved. The Eucharist becomes ‘inherited’ worship, and can be jettisoned at will. The established nature of the Church of England no longer matters, and can be ignored. The concept of the creeds being the foundation of orthodoxy is terribly old hat. The idea of our church being primarily the chaplain to the nation, its role not as purity cult but as local, embedded community of faith, can all be thrown away in the name of some fatuous idea of doctrinal unity relating to the gays. Catholic order – not least catholic, diocesan episcopacy: binned. Baptism of infants: not too sure about that. ‘Those forms of worship authorised or allowed by canon’: not on your nelly. Any basic semblance of being in historical continuity with the messy reality of the church in this land: no need.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time recently talking to people outside the Synodical bubble about the future of the Church of England – people who think us being there is important, even if they might not see themselves as terribly involved in the political struggles of the church. One thing that has really surprised but also encouraged me is that the church that they – almost universally – want to see is the church that has been gifted to us down the ages. They don’t actually want pop-concert-church, or whatever faddy nonsense is the most recent recipient of the magical money pot that will surely solve all our problems. They really, really don’t want a church that is willing to bin everything it has been gifted. And they really do want a church that looks like the Church of England which they imagine might still have a role to play as an established church – one whose parishes are embedded in their communities, one where there is good, theologically informed, preaching, one where the forms of service are recognisably ‘church’, one where the poorest and the most vulnerable are put front and centre, one where the church can be a blessing to everyone in the community rather than to a select few, one which appears to have its head screwed on and isn’t endlessly reactionary, one that is – frankly – just bog standard Church of England.
It seems to me that that this is all actually rather conservative. It’s conservative, because it conserves something of the essence of the Church of England that the neo-puritans currently assaulting our church structures and its very nature are trying to do away with in the name of ‘conservatism’. It isn’t going to be perfect, and there is going to need to be room for the messiness of church life that has characterised the Church of England since earliest times. But it is a thinking conservatism – a conservatism that asks first ‘what, why, how’, and then gets to work.
So I’m going to own that ‘conservative’ title a little more from now on, because to the outside world, those of us denounced as ‘liberals’ by malcontents within General Synod are really the conservatives. We want the Church of England to continue as the established chaplain to the nation that it has been for centuries. We want the Church of England to simply be the Church of England. That will mean some changes – changes that will allow it to fulfil that role better into the future. It will mean interrogating our prejudices and asking how the Holy Spirit might be calling us to proclaim the faith afresh in this generation. Yet it is through doing that, and not holding onto the comfort blanket of conserved externalities, that we might conserve the essence of the great gift that is our church. The fight to do so is more than worth it.