A comment posted on Thinking Anglicans last Saturday quoted a passage from a book by Ken Leech. A following comment wanted to know who Ken Leech was - never heard of him. I was surprised; I knew Ken back in the day. Born in 1939, Ken was an Anglican priest in the Anglo-Catholic tradition and a Christian socialist. He trained at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, was curate at Holy Trinity Hoxton, then at St Anne’s Soho and established the charity Centrepoint while there. With Rowan Williams and others he founded the Jubilee Group and in turn became Race Relations Field Officer of the Church of England's Board for Social Responsibility, director of the Runnymede Trust and community theologian at St Botolph’s Aldgate.
Honest to God people, mostly gay
I began to think about the other priests I knew from that era, the 1960s, 70s and 80s, who shared a similar ethos, their names etched in my consciousness but quite possibly mostly unknown now: Mervyn Stockwood, Nick Stacey, Donald Reeves, Derek Tasker, Eric James, Malcolm Johnson, Ernie Southcott, Bill Kirkpatrick – and two women, one lay, one ordained, Gwen Rymer and Una Kroll. They were all from the dioceses of London or Southwark. I don’t know whether Ernie Southcott, Provost of Southwark Cathedral, was married. I do know that all the others bar Una were gay. That realisation struck me forcibly. All of them influenced my understanding of what being a Christian meant. In their different ways they exemplified an independence of mind and a lively awareness of the divine, sacred, holy essence of life and committed themselves to model this life. They were around me in life, wisdom people laying the foundations for my vision of God and the ministry to which we are all called, lay and ordained, male and female, gay and straight, black and white. They formed a body of people in the Church of England who inspired me.
There is not an equivalent body of people in the Church of England today, straight or gay, who are committed individually and corporately to a healthy vision of God as the energy source of life in all its fullness.
The Closet
The is the passage by Ken Leech quoted on Thinking Anglicans:
“The movement (Anglo-Catholicism) is deeply affected by sexual confusion and dishonesty. The growth of Anglican Catholicism and the growth of male homosexual subculture in Britain occurred at the same time. The closet and the sacristy were historically coincident. And for many years Anglican Catholicism provided a form in which gay people were able to be themselves in an oblique way…..
However, since the gay liberation movements of the 1970s and the spread of honesty about sexual identity, the Anglican Catholic movement, which had once been a place of safety, has become a zone of untruth and denial. So it is all too common to find Anglican Catholic priests and spokespersons in the forefront of hostility to homosexuality while following a closet homosexual lifestyle themselves. The contradictions of the closet have become endemic within the movement in a way which is really very serious.”
The quotation presumably comes from The Sky Is Red: Discerning the Signs of the Times published in 1997. Leech is writing about the post-war decades when the Church, and not just Anglo-Catholicism, “provided a form in which gay people were able to be themselves in an oblique way.” Would he find the state of the Church and gay people in the Church any better today? Is it no longer a place of untruth and denial? As the various reports into abuse show, both Anglo-Catholics and conservative evangelicals have lived and still live in deep, unhealthy states of denial and repression. All but one gay bishop is in the closet and the total number of gay bishops is in decline. The place of LGBTQIA+ people in society has been utterly transformed since Leech was writing in the 1990s - and is being transformed in the Church, for better and for worse. For LGBTQIA+ people with a confident faith in their identity the Church can be a more open and welcoming environment, but the existence of the Open Table Network and the agenda of conservative evangelical organisations show that for many, the Church is experienced as a homophobic institution, unwelcoming and unsafe.
God’s influence diminishes
If you want to be anthropomorphic (which mostly, I don’t) you might say that God’s influence in and through such people as Ken Leech has diminished in the Church. The number of gay bishops may well be zero within a decade – the current attitude of the Church of England may eradicate gay bishops from their ranks. This is already having the effect noted above – our awareness of and our ideas and experience of God are impoverished. Gay and non-binary people have always fuelled and inspired new visions and depths of wisdom in the life of the Church. Discovering that you are gay can open a whole new world of challenges and gifts, a world amply demonstrated on TV in dramas, documentaries and entertainment programmes like RuPaul’s Drag Race. We gays bring life to a greater degree of sparkly outrageous fabulousness.
And so I pursue the question – What kind of God do we believe in?
A member of Changing Attitude England posted a comment in response to my previous blog . She asked:
“How can there be a concept of God independent of the collective wisdom, understanding, beliefs and culture of individual human beings? All that we collectively know of God is what individual human beings share about their lived experiences. Whether that sharing is through written testimony or through personal affirmation is less relevant than people’s acceptance of the outcome. It is only through communal conversations that we can find out what we all agree on about the nature of God. Any arguments about exclusive access to the truth about God or a singular culture purity of thought ignore this one basic fact.”
Archbishop Rowan Williams
I was also struck by a question posed by Archbishop Rowan in a review of Jordan Peterson's latest book, We Who Wrestle With God in the Guardian Saturday Review, asking what traditional language about the "image of God" in humanity means. Peterson, he says, seems to waver as to whether we are actually encountering a real "Other" in the religious journey. Peterson remains ambiguous about what many would consider a fairly crucial issue:
"when we talk about God, do we mean that there actually is a source of agency and of love independent of the universe we can map and measure?"
Rowan doesn't answer his question! But he raises the point that troubles me in everything that I'm writing about "What kind of God do we believe in?" Is there a source of agency and of love independent of the universe? I would answer yes, there is a source of agency and of love, except - independent of the universe? To that I cannot say yes. I am unable to think of what that might mean. It takes me beyond the awareness of God planted in me by the Church of my earlier years, of Ken Leech and men and women of wisdom and vision.
How is it that we want to know and not to know?
The question of what we believe as Christians and is it true has always been an open one for me. I was drawn to read another book review at the weekend, of Mark Lilla’s book Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. Lilla is an American political scientist, historian of ideas and professor of humanities at Columbia University in New York City. The central premise of his book relates to the challenges faced by the Church of England in dealing with abusive in the Church and people’s ideas about God (which can underpin abusive ideas and actions). Lilla asks: “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” He is an acute observer of human behaviour and thought and of our tendency to self-delusion in particular. We are in the middle of an epoch when “evident truth” is cast aside in favour of all sorts of imbecile imaginings where magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. Lilla’s view of Christianity will not be popular among those who take their faith seriously at either end of the spectrum – Con-Evo and Ang-Cath. St Paul, he says, is the founding father of one of the most consequential and, some would contend, most pernicious religious cult the world has known. The reviewer says “Paul made possible the transformation of the Gospels’ beautiful moral ideal into an anti-intellectual ideology that was enshrined permanently in the Christian scriptures and has since passed into our secular societies. That ideology has attracted a certain sort of mind ever since – one with a death wish.”
The Church is living into a death wish at the moment, knowing and not wanting to know the truth about abusive individuals like Peter Ball and John Smyth; knowing and not wanting to know the truth about the authority of the Bible; knowing and not wanting to know what we really believe about God. I wonder how many incumbents and curates and assistant priests have talked to or with their congregations about the contents of the Makin Review, the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the season of Advent when the Church and the world pour time, money and energy into celebrating mythical stories woven around the birth of Jesus, a birth that was almost certainly not in Bethlehem. Maybe such facts don’t matter; it’s the deeper truth that counts – and I would agree. But the Christian Church is now in a very precarious situation and at the moment prefers NOT to know the truth.