I’m reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s hefty new book, Lower than the Angels, A History of Sex and Christianity, at the moment. Diarmaid outlines with clarity the very complex story of the evolution of the Christian Church, its life, teaching, theology and variety together with the influence of other religions and cultures, clarifying as the goes the reality that there were a multiplicity of versions of Christianity. Many of us, me included, still live with the grossly over-simplified version recorded in the books of the New Testament. I still live with a widespread level of ignorance and unknowing, a simplistic awareness of and understanding of what Christianity was and is, its evolution and it’s continuous, complex evolving. I’ll dedicate a future blog to what will inevitably be fragments of Diarnaid’s playful wisdom.
Defusing the Sexuality Debate
But . . . in truth I’m not reading Lower than the Angels at the moment. It has been replaced temporarily by Defusing the Sexuallity Debate: The Anglican Evangelical Culture War by Mark Vasey-Saunders, a book that David Runcorn of Inclusive Evangelicals recommended to me a few weeks ago - thank you, David. Vasey-Saunders book is focused on the history of the Church of England over the last century and a quarter. I’m reasonably well acquainted with the history of the C of E and homosexuality in the post-war era, beginning with the publication of Derrick Sherwin-Bailey’s Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition in 1955 (not that I read it then!). It’s curious to read a history of events and personalities that I knew reasonably well (and since the 1990s, was directly involved with) from the ‘other side’, from an evangelical perspective: John Stott, the Fountain Trust, Keele, Nicky Gumbell, HTB, Steve Chalke, etc., etc.
Revisionists
I recognised that, like it or not, all of us, whatever part of the Christian tribal culture we identify with, progressives, inclusive evangelicals and conservative evangelicals, have been and are “revisionists”. That’s the label conservatives have been pinning on “progressives” in recent years as a signifier of their disgust, but both these books (and when I think about, almost any non-polemical piece of work) is a work of revision. It is revising history or theology or the foundations of Christianity and the Church according to contemporary wisdom, research, culture and discoveries; read the books to discover the truth of this statement. Conservative evangelicals, says Mark Vasey-Saunders, are as revisionist as everyone else. We all live in the same contemporary culture and our theologies and Christian histories and ideas about gender, sexuality and intimacies have developed within the same cultural sea. We have all evolved from fairly recent pre-modern ideas about sexuality. We are all affected by the development of ideas about sexuality that began to evolve from early in the twentieth century. Vasey –Saunders says “that ‘the tradition of the church’ in this area is an unchanging thing is fundamentally mistaken.”
The Modern Self
Vasey-Saunders suggests the conflicts over sexuality are not really about sexuality but about far deeper questions over responses to modernity. He presents the work of an evangelical scholar, Carl Trueman, as explored in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self as providing key insights. The conflict over sexuality is symptomatic of a far larger and deeper conflict within both church and society about how to respond to modernity. Trueman says: ‘expressive individualism is something that affects us all. It is the very essence of the culture of which we are all a part. We are all expressive individuals now’. We are all natives of modernity. Progressives and conservatives have far more in common than either are willing to admit.
Expressive Individualism
Philip Rieff, a sociologist, is introduced as a key influence on Trueman’s thinking:
“Throughout human history, societies have functioned as either what he terms first or second world societies, in which the ultimate authority or justification for morality, culture and all the institutions of society derive from a sacred order. In the first world (or pagan) societies this takes the form of a mythological framework for the world. In the second world (or Christendom) societies this takes the form of a religious faith. Modernity, however, is a third world society that does not look to a sacred order as the justification for its moral codes and institutions. Instead, this justification is found in each individual person living authentically. The individual must free themselves of all that represses them to be their true selves. Our inner lives have become the source of all authority, and there is no sense of an external objective truth that might rightly constrain us, our sense of identity is now plastic, or malleable, able to be reshaped as we choose. Any external authority or institution that prevents us from being our true selves is understood to be oppressive and to be dismantled.”
In tracing the history of individualism Trueman corrects Rieff, pointing out that the idea that the individual’s inner world is the key to understanding truth , far from being a modern anti-cultural influence, has its origins in Christianity. Expressive individualism is the heir of Paul, Augustine and Luther.
Both of these books are helping me understand better what I was attempting to express in my previous blog with the dangerously expressive individualism of “MY” God and what MY God is like is, deeply influenced by my Western Christian Anglican mid-twentieth century birth, a God in which the qualities and values that are most vital to a healthy, creative, energised pattern of life must be exemplified. “God” must inspire the best, infuse life with the love, goodness, wisdom, insight and awareness that weaves creative energies and relationships through my life, our lives, life on earth and the life of the cosmos.
Living in Love and Faith – hah!
In his recent blog for Via Media, The “Failure of the Church”: Why Waiting is not Neutral, Charlie Bell says he is “bored with writing about LLF. After almost two years on from a key Synod motion we have moved effectively nowhere. what was already happening in many parishes has been effectively formalised. Endless variations on working groups (with precious little new output) and various half-promises have been made but in terms of actual change brought about for LGBTQIA+ people there has been effectively nothing and we are treated like fools, again, and again, and again.
The whole thing is a rotting ulcer at the heart of our church’s polity. Charlie asks rhetorical questions: Where is the courage? Where is our pastoral heart? How long, O Lord? Why is it that we are so expendable – so worthless – so detested? Adverts from inclusive churches speak of the need for ‘support’ for those who feel ‘disappointment, discomfort, or distress’ about the use of the Prayers of Love and Faith. Meanwhile, there is precisely nothing about the actual LGBTQIA people about whom this project was supposed to be. This time of treating LGBTQIA people like collateral chaff cannot continue. If the bishops do not have the courage to permit us to enter into same-sex marriages then it is time for them to admit that. They can keep their apologies until a single bishop is willing to name this injustice.
Charlie is right, of course. But I’ve been active in the campaigns and processes attempting to make progress towards the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in the Church of England since 1995 when Changing Attitude was founded nearly thirty years ago. Often I worked with various coalitions of groups, the latest manifestation being Together. But Together is not alone. There is now another campaign group, LGB Christians, a group that excludes trans and intersex people. Both groups could benefit from reading and absorbing the wisdom to be found in both of the books I’m at present reading. There is a regressive, reactionary momentum at work, born of frustration and a desperation to move the Church of England in as short a space of time as possible to the achievement of the Archbishops’ goal of a radical new inclusion, meaning for us, of course, the radical new and full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in ministry and relationships.
The battle cry today could be “Get the job done”. But instead of recognising that we are still in an intractable mess and developing a strategy appropriate to our level of desperation, people post forlorn comments on Facebook, echoing Charlie’s cry for swift action and change.
Trapped by the institution
It’s not going to happen at the moment. The bishops and Archbishops are trapped in a nether-world. It would seem they lack the spiritual and personal awareness, confidence and courage of faith necessary to achieve the vision and courage required to release the energies necessary for a radical new Christian inclusion. They lack the imaginative freedom to understand just what “God” does or doesn’t look like to the majority of people, inside and outside the Church today. They, and many of us, are addicted to the institution and its tribal instincts. Individually, each bishop and Archbishop is working through some of the dilemmas and emotional anxieties that are systemically part of today’s C of E culture. The Bishop of Oxford has been and still is working through a lot of personal stuff, processing his inner world views. The Archbishop of York has been steadily regressing back to a safe, incoherent mode, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is in a deeply conflicted state, knowing and not knowing, seeing and not seeing, too conscious of how he and the Church he leads have changed since he became Archbishop. No wonder he became so angry with me at the meeting in Lambeth Palace Library last November. Of course he did. I touched a very raw, very close to the surface raw nerve.
How the heck do we get to the end of LLF?
Something is required that is more than simply defusing the Sexuality Debate as proposed by Mark Vasey-Saunders. It isn’t solely an Anglican Evangelical Culture War that we are living with. We are all living consciously or unconsciously with the expressive individualism of the modern self described in his book. In my spiritual life, it became more and more obvious to me that I had to do the work myself, to work on myself. This became apparent soon after I was ordained in 1979. I wasn’t going to survive as a priest in the Church unless I changed, matured, developed and deepened my contemplative spiritual life, confronted my demons, grew up emotionally. Resolving the Church of England’s conflicts over sexuality and gender is still going to take a long time because we are not sufficiently investing in ourselves and developing the conceptual, prophetic, visionary, emotional, theological and spiritual resources necessary for our mutual cosmic salvation.