by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham and Trustee of the Ozanne Foundation, and Rt Revd Dr Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham
Since the Gloucester Report of 1979 there have been many special C of E consultations on homosexuality. Each had its finer points and limitations.
The latest, Living in Love and Faith, included some moving testimony for anyone who had not actually ever met a gay person before, if indeed there is anyone like that out there. It also proposed some excellent Pastoral Principles for difficult conversations in Church, that would work as well for an argument with the choir as a discussion of sexuality. Good fruitful conversations “acknowledge prejudice, speak into silence, address ignorance, cast out fear, admit hypocrisy and pay attention to power.”
Has the LLF process actually done these things? And if it has, why has its rollout been so scrappy and contentious? Perhaps the honest result was too hot to handle, and the only way the bishops thought they could keep control of their emerging situation was to come up with a fudge. The problem with fudge is that it’s ambrosia to fudge lovers, but an improbable solution to a war between diabetics and sugar junkies. The bishops’ cunning plan might just annoy everyone equally on all sides, and land them up where they started.
Perhaps there’s something about the whole way marriage equality has been framed in the Church of England that has trapped it in a destructive infinite monkey cage? Wittgenstein said the reason his early work stalled and led nowhere was that “a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” The fantasies and fictions the Church of England has indulged in for years about marriage may have driven a self-destructive narrative to vanishing point. Jesus’ paradigm for marriage has been treated as though it were a definition for all time, and it can’t bear the weight.
Step outside the ecclesiastical goldfish bowl and an entirely different perspective dawns. The wreck and the pottery diver who looked as though he was perpetually sitting on the toilet are only pretend — decoration to make the fish think they were living au naturel not in a tank.
Last Thursday at the Oxford Union, three bishops spoke in support of the motion that “this house supports same sex marriage in the Church.” Despite the President’s best endeavours, no Catholic or Anglican bishop could be found to speak against. Of course not. Who would want to go down as “the homophobic bishop”? The Union needed to supply two opposition speakers who made it plain they did support same sex marriage, but wanted the motion voted down on the technicality that people should not expect to get married in Church any more than get a driving licence there. Two speakers sincerely believed gay marriage was wrong. One told us that God was discriminatory and sent those who follow the Bishop of London to hell. The other took us back to Nazi Germany, like Basil Fawlty when a guest complained about a prawn cocktail. The motion was carried by 181 votes to 41. It would seem that gay marriage is unthinkable for people who believe there is something wrong with being gay, but for those who see it as a natural aspect of being human it was obvious.
This being the case, the only choice for a solution now, even a provisional one, would be to facilitate mutual understanding and tolerance, along the lines of the Archbishop’s observation at Lambeth last year that there are churches who could not survive if they didn’t conduct same sex weddings, whilst others could not survive if they did.
But this is where the Pastoral Principle of paying attention to power kicks in. There is an extraordinary imbalance in the way power is being used here. Some gay people want to marry on conscience grounds, whilst others object, also from conscience. Much as those supporting equal marriage would like it to be allowed in church, they realise this would be intolerable to some who oppose it. Of course nobody would ever be forced to conduct a same sex wedding. What couple would want that anyway? That is an acceptable compromise. St Paul commends such an approach in Romans 14. However, this understanding is not reciprocated. Not only do opponents find it intolerable to conduct gay weddings in Church, but they insist on blocking anyone else from doing that. Thus they hijack the integrity of those with whom they disagree, often deploying threats of schism and bankruptcy which feel like blackmail.
So what about synod this week?
Whatever happens the bishops, leading from behind the sofa, have engineered a situation where it matters very little what the synod actually thinks. Perhaps everybody can agree, after more than 44 years of discussion about homosexuality, that the least satisfactory thing to do now would be to kick the can further down the road yet again. There’s a sense that the bishops now know the right thing to do, but feel they can only manage what is politically expedient. Some might call that a failure of leadership, what the RAF used to call “lack of moral fibre”.
The spectre of disestablishment hovers over the whole debate. Hensley Henson is said to have observed to a former Archbishop of Canterbury after the 1928 Prayer Book debacle, “I imagine your Grace has found that a lifetime habit of steering around difficulties rather than facing them has scarce prepared you for such a time as this.”
Back to the future?