The toxic culture of prejudice and abuse affected by public school pathology and an addiction to substitutionary atonement theology advocated by conservative evangelicals is not going to be overcome until the Church of England Synod and in particular the House of Bishops and the Archbishops’ Council are shaken into a radically changed attitude in their understanding, teaching, practice, liturgy, doctrine and corporate life leading to a dramatic change in C of E culture and teaching.
At the moment I am very aware of how books have changed me and my relationship with myself, my sexuality, the Church of England, Christianity, and God, half-way though Diarmaid MacCulloch’s recently published Lower than the Angels; A History of Sex and Christianity. It was the phrase “the divine relationship, an audacious transformation” that unlocked the door to an idea I’ve been struggling to develop for several weeks.
After the General Synod debate following completion of the Living in Love and Faith process I began to realise that I am being seen, that we progressives seeking justice and equality are seen, as agents contaminating the Church. I subsequently began to see that we are actually the active ingredients necessary to cleanse the Church from those advocating misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and racism, fuelling the systemic prejudice and abuse that contaminates the Christian Church.
Davis Mac-Iyalla, now the Executive Director of the Interfaith Diversity Network of West Africa (IDNOWA), spoke against the passage of the Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, 2021 on Thursday 17th February 2022 at the third public hearing of the Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee on the bill. The bill, effectively an anti-LGBTQIA+ bill, will if passed in its current state, criminalise Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Agender people and any person or group supporting them, including family members, bishops, priests and pastors.
As I read an article in the Guardian yesterday about Kehinde Andrews, the UK’s first Black studies professor, I wondered what effect it would have, in the context of the Living in Love and Faith process, if I replaced all the references to black with LGBTIQ+. Here is a very abbreviated version of the article. What effect does this have on you?
Homophobia is woven through Christianity’s culture, teaching and practice, unnoticed. When the Living in Love and Faith process was announced I warned that it was simply a further delaying tactic but people wanted to believe in the process and the commitment made by the Archbishops to radical inclusion. Now I warn that when it is brought to Synod in 2022 nothing radical will be proposed. Instead there will be a further period in which the implications of the current process will be re-processed and digested. The purpose of the campaign that the re-created Changing Attitude England group is conducting is to engage creatively with the bishops in the hope that by the time they bring proposals to Synod in 2022 they will understand that if they do not address equal marriage in church and equality for clergy and lay ministers, we will be really angry, and they will know why.
