Liberals Should Tolerate Anglican Views on Sexuality

Great article by James Mumford on “A Truly Liberal Society Would Tolerate the Anglican Church’s Views on Sexuality,” in The Spectator:

Back in 2013 advocates for same-sex marriage argued that the church’s beliefs about sexuality shouldn’t be imposed on the rest of society. That makes sense. But now the church is being told it shouldn’t hold those beliefs at all.

We’ve heard on repeat this week the charge that Welby ‘misreads history’. The Anglican communion’s doctrines are archaic, out-dated, irrelevant to modern Britain. Across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was the charge of ‘backwardness’ that justified government assaults on religious freedom. So, the 1840s saw cartoons flooding German salons representing Catholics impeding the course of history, a depiction Bismarck was able to capitalise on in the 1870s. He launched his Kulturkampf (‘culture struggle’) against Catholicism on the grounds that it was ‘archaic’. In France in 1902, the acceleration of laïcité under the premiership of Émile Combes – in a single year he closed 13,000 of the country’s 16,000 religious schools – stemmed from the Third Republic’s dismissal of religion as insufficiently modern. While in Russia, Bolshevist propaganda, before and after the Revolution, consistently portrayed the Orthodox Church as an obstacle to social progress. It couldn’t happen here, though? Totalitarianism taking root in this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England? What about the quadruple lock included in the same-sex marriage legislation, the series of exemptions for the church from the new law? Well, yes, but consider too Ofsted’s move only last week to ensure that every Sunday school in the country – Sunday schools! – be registered with the government so they can be monitored for what they teach? The aim is to eradicate extremism. But how elastically will ‘extremism’ come to be defined in a society that has moved, without even noticing it, from expecting communities not to compel beliefs to expecting communities not to have them?

See also the great article by Wesley Hill on After the Primates’ Gathering, Whither Gay Conservatives.

What struck me most forcefully, though, reading the Bishop’s statement, is that some of us belong in both of those categories. Some of us, in other words, are both gay andconservative, both gay and conscientiously “traditionalist” in our views of Christian sexual ethics and members of the Episcopal Church. And for us, the question that is uppermost in our minds and hearts isn’t so much how to hold diverse groups within TEC together — the more “progressive” lesbian and gay Christians “over there,” say, with the more “conservative” traditionalists “over here.” Rather, our question is how to hold before God and before our fellow Christians (and indeed our fellow Anglicans, both in TEC as well as in the worldwide Communion), our own identity as gay and lesbian and our hard-won theological convictions about sexuality, marriage, and celibacy. How can we make people notice our existence and the complexity of our position — and, most importantly, how can we offer our lives as a gift to our Anglican family?

Photo from the Spectator article