In 2008, University of Edinburgh theology professor Oliver O\u2019Donovan published a series of essays online, which were intended to clarify the issues at stake in the controversy over gay marriage and gay people within the Anglican Communion. Several people whose opinions I greatly respect urged me to read this book, Church in Crisis<\/em> (and boy, the bitter laugh with which I have to greet that<\/em> title should caution me against any triumphalism in what I\u2019m about to say\u2026), and I finally did. I found it somewhat similar to Fr. Hopko\u2019s book on Orthodoxy and same-sex attraction<\/a>, or even Fr. Groeschel\u2019s book The Courage to Be Chaste<\/em><\/a>: Its underlying theology is often true, useful, and well-put, but it\u2019s at its weakest whenever it intersects with specifically gay life and questions. Some notes follow.<\/p>\n # I should say up front that I am on the outside of a lot of O\u2019Donovan\u2019s theological vocabulary. The chapter on nature was nigh unintelligible to me; it might be a lot more incisive for someone versed in this dispute within Anglicanism.<\/p>\n # O\u2019Donovan relies heavily on dichotomies. Like, I know he didn\u2019t write the back-cover copy, but it starts out, \u201cWhat if the challenge gay men and women present the Church with is not emancipatory but hermeneutic?\u201d and I think that\u2019s a fair representation of what you\u2019ll find in the book. And it\u2019s\u2013this is obvious, no?\u2013a false dichotomy.<\/p>\n Dichotomies done well are a kind of argument I really like. At their best they can be the satirical reductio ad absurdum, provoking rueful recognition that you need to back up and check your map. Or they can be a compressed form of dialogue, a way of transforming abstractions into characters. Philosophical dialogue is badly neglected in our era of the treatise, and a good dichotomy can bring back some of that Dostoyevskyan extremism, the shock of seeing ideas or systems present themselves as choices. Good dichotomies can remind us that the way we rank-order goods, which virtue we privilege over which, can dramatically change our lives.<\/p>\n But confronting a false dichotomy feels like negotiating with a hard-sell salesman. It\u2019s frustrating, and it makes people feel like the real way in which they\u2019re living their real lives is simply unimaginable to the dichotomist. A bad dichotomy uses loaded dice but thinks it\u2019s playing fair. Often bad dichotomies are the result of asking the wrong question\u2013thinking you\u2019re coming up with answers to the question your interlocutor is asking, but getting their question wrong so that both answers are sort of irrelevant.<\/p>\n # And this is really the thing I felt throughout the book: that O\u2019Donovan imagined a gay person and sort of speculated on what such an odd, foreign being might be like. There\u2019s very little evidence in this book, for example, that O\u2019Donovan could think of examples of Christian homophobia, or has wondered how growing up in a church with no models for gay futures might affect gay children. Gay Christians appear in this book solely as hypothetical adults.<\/p>\n # Many of the best passages in the book only sharpened my awareness of this lacuna. I really liked the phrase, \u201cobedient practical reason,\u201d as one aspect or definition of discipleship. I completely agreed with O\u2019Donovan\u2019s point that, far from being an imposition, a Biblical truth-claim is \u201ca welcome handhold that we may grasp in our struggle for deliverance,\u201d because we as trapped people need to know who our Savior is and what we must do to be rescued. And you know me, so you know that I loved<\/em> the line, \u201cCommands are events that occur within a relationship.\u201d O\u2019Donovan cashes this out later: \u201c[B]ecause any act has a certain intelligibility in its context, and the context of God\u2019s acts is his constant will to bless and redeem the world, God\u2019s commands will always have implications for other times and circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n But in a culture which has forgotten every form of adult love other than marriage and parenting, gay people often grow up feeling that there is no way for them to be obedient. All the commands seem impossible and so the relationship seems broken from the start, as if relationship with God means isolation and fruitlessness, an unimaginable blank silence<\/a>. As if love is on one side of the dichotomy and God is on the other\u2013but only for gay people, everybody else gets both. So many gay people grow up in the churches learning that the handholds lead nowhere for them. That the only way they can be blessed and redeemed, and climb up into their future, is to become straight. Without real, vivid experience of forms of love other than marriage<\/a> (especially same-sex love<\/a>), and celibacy as an arena for love<\/a> rather than a deprivation of love; without an honest reckoning with Christian homophobia<\/a> and silence, and the ways these evils have distorted<\/a> gay people\u2019s understanding of both God and love\u2013without these things, everything you say about Christian sexual ethics will be interpreted to conform with the deadly untruths gay people learned in church.<\/p>\n None of this stuff is easy to see. I did a lot of writing on Gay Catholic Whatnot before I\u2019d realized how central these questions are to gay people\u2019s life in the churches. All I\u2019m saying is that O\u2019Donovan, in this book, hasn\u2019t realized it either.<\/p>\n ETA: In fact, the stuff I was writing in 2008 doesn\u2019t sound all THAT dissimilar from what O\u2019Donovan was saying at that time, even though I knew stuff about real lesbians and not imaginary ones. But yeah, I definitely should call out my own earlier writing here as well as his.<\/p>\n # There are a lot of good passages, e.g. the paragraphs about the role of narrative in teaching us the meaning of God\u2019s commands and showing us how they flow from our ongoing relationship with Him; or the reminders that our own experience is mysterious to ourselves, anything but self-interpreting. (Although the danger with that line of argument, which I\u2019ve relied on heavily at times<\/a> and do think is accurate, is that you can easily come across as the abuser in that Bikini Kill song<\/a>, whose victim could see but [was] taught\/What you saw wasn\u2019t f\u2014-g real<\/em>.)<\/p>\n