by David W. Congdon, senior editor at the University Press of Kansas. His most recent book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, is available now from Cambridge University Press.
For outsiders like me trying to make sense of the Church of England’s recent Synod debates over Living in Love and Faith (LLF), the official church resources on identity, sexuality, relationships, and marriage, and the corresponding Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) that are seeking to make the church a more inclusive space without changing canon law, the last half-year has been rather bewildering. With another General Synod coming up on 5–9 July, the bishops are once again preparing for another round of debates over the church’s relationship to LGBTQ+ persons.
The conversations are of interest to me as an American, not only because of my affiliation with the Episcopal Church, but because I wrote about the Church of England’s views on trans identity in my recent book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024). I devoted one section of my book to the way Anglican theologians—especially Oliver O’Donovan and N. T. Wright—connected trans identity to gnosticism, showing how their rhetoric has influenced, however unintentionally, American evangelicals and far-right conservative activists. I argue that conservative Anglicans and American conservatives form a “discourse coalition,” meaning they participate in a shared discourse that associates transgender persons (and LGBTQ+ persons more generally) with heresy.
O’Donovan’s views were given official sanction in the 2003 Church of England document, Some Issues in Human Sexuality, and one significant aspect of the LLF materials is the effort to replace the theological certainty of the old guidelines with a new approach “marked by provisionality and humility, recognising that we are in a time of corporate not-knowing, where mystery remains as to our humanity and how we are to live our lives in a world that we do not always understand, and where God often acts in surprising ways” (GS2328, LLF Annex H, 4). This in itself is something worth celebrating—but many internal tensions remain.
While the attempted association of trans identity with gnosticism was problematic for a number of reasons—including a misunderstanding of both gnosticism and gender dysphoria, among other things—I was most interested in the way it assumed an ahistorical and timeless understanding of doctrine and ecclesial identity. Gnosticism, if such a term has any meaning, referred to various ancient sects that understood God to be so transcendent that a demiurge was necessary to bridge the infinite Most High with the finite cosmos. Once unmoored from its original historical setting, with its corresponding metaphysics, a term like “gnosticism” quickly becomes a rhetorical weapon that one can use against almost anyone and anything that one wishes to brand as “anti-Christian.” And that is precisely what has happened in North America, and especially the United States.
The conservative political theorist Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) claimed that gnosticism is “the essence of modernity,” while the Canadian Presbyterian pastor Philip J. Lee asserted in his Against the Protestant Gnostics (1987) that gnosticism is essential to American Protestantism. In 1992 the conservative Presbyterian scholar Peter R. Jones published The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age, where he blamed gnosticism for environmentalism, feminism, and homosexuality. More recently, American evangelical theologian Peter Leithart warned of “invasive Gnosticism” in the government prohibitions against transgender discrimination. The Catholic natural law theorist and Princeton University professor Robert P. George declared in 2016 that all modern social liberalism stems from gnosticism. The atheist and right-wing activist James Lindsay attributes all “woke” identity politics, especially LGBTQ+ identity, to gnosticism. This past week, conservative evangelical radio host Erick Erickson published his new book, You Shall Be as Gods: Pagans, Progressives, and the Rise of the Woke Gnostic Left.
While Church of England leaders no doubt want nothing to do with this bigoted, antiliberal rhetoric, my concern here is, in part, to highlight the danger of letting our theological concepts run free of any historical context. Moreover, it is not enough to keep our “heresies” grounded in history; we also need to keep our “orthodoxies” historically rooted as well. And this is where the current LLF runs into trouble.
The supplementary annexes for GS2328 include explanations of the thought process behind the new guidelines, including the theological rationale. A consistent theme throughout is demonstrating how the new PLF remains consistent with Canon B5’s requirement that “all variations in forms of service and all forms of service used under this Canon shall be reverent and seemly and shall be neither contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter” (emphasis mine). If the definition of “essential matter” seems impossibly vague, the bishops and clergy readily acknowledge as much. Annex A points out that the words “in any essential matter” were included in the Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure 1974 (No. 3, Section 4), and that there was a proposal to omit these words on the grounds that they “seemed otiose and it would be difficult to decide what matters were essential.” Indeed! In response, the Revision Committee for the Measure retained the phrase on the grounds that “if they were omitted it became equally difficult to determine what issues were or were not contrary to or indicative of any departure from the doctrine of the Church of England” (Annex A, #19). This makes little sense, however, since the mere word “essential” hardly gives any guidance on what doctrines count as essential. It only empowers those in the church to fight about it. A further explanation stated that these words “enable the Synod to make small changes in matters which are regarded as doctrinal, provided that the essential doctrines of the Church of England are safeguarded” (Annex A, #20)—a circular claim if there ever was one.
Annex A seeks to reassure the conservative wing by stating in a matter-of-fact manner: “We consider that the essential doctrines of the Church of England are safeguarded” (Annex A, #25). What counts as an “essential doctrine”? The question naturally follows from the wording of the Worship and Doctrine Measure, and yet we look in vain for any guidance. The LLF documents all assume that the “doctrine of marriage” is one of these essential doctrines, but the grounds for this assumption remain opaque. The Theological Rationale in Annex H acknowledges that some in the General Synod view marriage as “a secondary matter, because it does not touch essential beliefs as reflected in the creeds,” but then responds to this by saying, “we disagree.” If asked about which doctrines are essential, the average Anglican would almost certainly point to the Nicene Creed, where of course we will find nothing pertaining to marriage and sexuality. Even the Thirty-Nine Articles mention marriage only in the context of stating that priests are permitted to marry (Art. 32). So on what basis do the other bishops and clergy make marriage as essential to the church as the doctrine of incarnation?
Even if we allow for marriage to be an essential doctrine, the alterations and adjustments to this doctrine make it difficult to sustain the conviction that the essence has not changed. Annex H provides a rather remarkable history of the ways the “doctrine of marriage” has been modified, in what it says are admittedly “significant” ways. These include accommodating divorce and remarriage, removing the claim that marriage is a “remedy for sin,” embracing the use of contraception, and allowing for couples to live together in sexual union before committing to marriage. Perhaps most important is “the move away from the primacy of procreation and increasingly making room for the expression of sexuality as a good” (Annex H, 7). Procreation is one of the three “goods” of marriage as defined by Augustine of Hippo in his famous treatise on the matter. If this does not count as an essential change in the doctrine of marriage, it is hard to know what does. Another significant change is the ethical requirement of “consent, both to the marriage and within marriage,” which broke with the patriarchal paradigm of marriage as a property transaction toward a recognition of both spouses as equal agents. As a result, “marital rape is now recognised and condemned, in law and in the church, which again marks a significant change in how sexuality, marriage, and gender relationships are conceived of” (Annex H, 8). Significant, but apparently not essential.
The authors of Annex H correctly observe that “teaching on marriage does not just reflect theology and Scripture, but the interaction of theology and liturgy with wider cultural mores, whether consciously, or not” (Annex H, 8). This recognition that culture and history play an indispensable role in constructing and interpreting the teachings of the church sits in uneasy tension with the notion of “essential doctrine.” Even the most essential doctrines, like incarnation and trinity, are not immune to cultural and historical changes. The metaphysical assumptions of even the most conservative Anglicans today are radically different from those held by the bishops who gathered at Nicaea in the fourth century. Our creeds and doctrines give the illusion of being in unchanged continuity with the past because we say the same words (though even this is not technically true, since we are working in translation), when the reality is that the historical context, including our assumptions about divinity and our mental picture of the cosmos, gives these words a substantially different meaning.
To their credit, the authors of Annex H acknowledge the problem I am raising here: “Some have asked, quite appropriately, whether routine accommodation/provision then becomes a de facto change in doctrine. The challenge has some weight: doctrine is not simply produced by official pronouncements but in an iterative process of dialogue between conceptual formulation and embodiment in practice.” Their response to this question is to claim that “pastoral accommodation” has always been part of the church, and—here is the crucial point—they do not want to give up “on the idea of a proper or fuller configuration of relationships altogether” (Annex H, 17).
Put another way, the Church of England leadership still wants to say there is a normative way to be human—a “proper” or “full” form of life that is superior to other forms that deviate from this norm. Without saying so, the bishops still hold on to a moral hierarchy, much like Augustine and others throughout church history. The only difference is they have switched out who is at the top of the hierarchy. For Augustine and most everyone in the ancient church, unmarried celibate Christian men were at the pinnacle of the moral ladder. Today’s Church of England places straight monogamous married Christians at the top. The ladder is a lot longer now and accommodates many more people in the higher rungs than it used to, but there is still a ladder.
We are now in a position to understand what is essential about essential doctrines. The essence is not any particular doctrine or interpretation of doctrine. As we have seen, these can change in quite drastic ways without apparently violating the “essence.” Instead, the essence is the normative hierarchy itself that places some Christians closer to the divine rule than others. If there is a universal truth to be found here, it is this: whenever churches talk about “essential doctrines” or “essential matters,” they are constructing the rhetorical framework for reinforcing social hierarchies.
“At the beginning of the twentieth century,” according to the Living in Love and Faith book, “the Church of England still had a clear, global hierarchical structure that stretched across much of the world” (Chapter 7, 147). Much has changed since then. But if the emphasis on “essential doctrine” is any indication, a certain nostalgia for “a clear, global hierarchical structure” remains.
Living in Love and Faith represents genuine progress in the Church of England. But if the goal is to create the conditions for a more just and equitable commonwealth, then it is not enough to change the church’s essential doctrines. The church needs to rethink its adherence to the essence itself.