Slavery – a crime against humanity
On 26 May 2024 the Observer published an article about the extent of the Church of England’s ties to slavery in the eighteenth century in the Codrington plantations, a sugar estate in Barbados where black and mixed-race African slaves were held captive in horrific conditions, branded with irons and traded. The United Society Partners in the Gospel had issued an apology last year recognising slavery in plantations from which it had benefitted financially as a crime against humanity.
In a recent post on the Psephizo website a well-known member of General Synod disagrees with the idea that slavery is a crime against humanity. They wonder why the Church of England is pursuing an agenda for racial justice which they think is controversially based on Critical Race Theory and its sibling Black Theology and why we are talking about reparations for slavery. The commitment to reparations, they say, is based on historical inaccuracies and a failure to recognise Britain’s role in eradicating this evil. They also wonder why we are continuing to engage with distracting, divisive, and damaging debates at Synod when there is only one thing we need to be focussing on. They don’t say what the one thing is but identify debates about LLF and LGBTQIA+ people as distracting, divisive and damaging, “enormously contentious” and “unresolvable since we are not going to change the doctrine of marriage”; and yet, they say, “some bishops are still pressing for an incompatible change of practice.”
Christian homophobia and transphobia as a crime against humanity
My experience as a gay man in the Church of England in the twentieth and twenty first centuries is as nothing compared with the historical abuse and murder of black slaves in the eighteenth century. Yet gay men have committed suicide in the recent, in some cases because they were horrifically abused within the Church of England and by the Church. In a future century, the Church of England’s failure to treat LGBTQIA+ people with equal humanity and respect may well be recognised as another crime by the Christian Church against humanity.
God’s disapproval of sin and my dissent
I have never believed in the God believed in by leaders of the Church of England Evangelical Council, the HTB hierarchy and the Anglican Global South majority – never.
I knew I was gay in 1957 when I was eleven years old. I was attracted to a boy in my class, knowing that the other boys were being attracted to girls. I knew that my family and the Church disapproved of such an attraction. I was also aware that God apparently disapproved of my desire for other boys. I decided that God had got it wrong. Intuitively I trusted my desires. I knew they were right and this ‘knowing’ laid the foundation for my dissenting, disbelieving mindset.
Five or so years later and certainly prior to my eighteenth birthday, the result of my rejection of what conservatives Christians name as orthodox, traditional, Biblical teaching in relation to homosexuality meant that I had carved out a freedom for myself to question everything else in the teaching of the Church that didn’t make sense. It was a huge relief when Honest to God was published because I already knew that I didn’t believe in the supposedly traditional orthodox God of the Church nor that the Bible stories of a virgin birth, angels, miracles, resurrection and miraculous appearances after death were accounts of things that actually happened.
Despite this, I had been confirmed and was deeply involved in the life of my local church and later in the life of the diocese. A decade and a half later I was accepted for training as an Anglican priest. No questions were asked about my sexuality or sexual activity. Theological college initiated in me an increasingly deep and personally important contemplative spiritual life. The foundations of my experiential, contemplative, activist faith were enhanced and deepened by my practical experience as a curate and parish priest in the 1980s.
It was the quality of life and the friendship of people in my parish church and diocesan networks that nourished and inspired me. My church social, theological and intellectual life was rich and energised. The Christian community and my network of friendships were more important than anything else. I learnt by experience that Christian life woven around the Gospel message of Jesus Christ was the way in which the lives of individuals, communities and human societies were being inspired and transformed.
Living “as if”
In my forties I decided to live “as if” everything was true, not believing that all the events and stories recounted in the Bible were literally true. I committed myself to live “as if” it was true because the practical life of the church was good and nourishing. There was great beauty and power in the metaphors, mythical stories and wisdom teachings, yes, but my conviction of the value of Christian faith and life was rooted in my personal experience and intuition.
The Changing Attitude Lambeth 1.10 era
Changing Attitude was founded in 1995. When the anti-gay global movement erupted at the Lambeth Conference in 1998 I knew that I would be judged and condemned for my disbelief by the conservative evangelical and Global South movements. I deliberately avoided associating with any organisation that conservatives deemed to be heretical, distancing myself from the two organisations in the Church of England that were my natural home: Sea of Faith (following Don Cupitt’s teachings) and the Progressive Christianity Network (PCN).
The energy I found in the Changing Attitude network and the alliance with Integrity in the USA provided all the inspiration, encouragement and nourishment I needed for a decade or so. But for the last fifteen years, following the Pilling Report, Shared Conversations and Living in Love and Faith, my faith, conviction and energy have steadily been eroded. Gradually I’ve lost inspiration and confidence. In late 2023 I began to wonder whether there were any like-minded networks around locally. I found that, unknown to me, a PCN group had been meeting in Devizes for over ten years. At the same time a group of five campaign friends met in a north London vicarage garden to explore whether we shared similar faith constructs and ideas about God. I have now been a member of PCN for eight months and thanks to bishop Peter Selby, I’ve recently become actively involved with Sea of Faith.
Living in Love and Faith
A stall in the market hall in Devizes sells second-hand books for £1. Browsing recently, I found two books on homosexuality that I’d never come across before and four books by Don Cupitt. I splashed out £3 for the gay books and the BBC Sea of Faith book - and very valuable it has proved to be.
I have (or had) lost the intuitive confidence of my eleven year old self. The last seven years of the LLF process have undermined my faith. The Church of England, once the root of my energy and inspiration, has become a hostile environment. The Archbishops have failed to pursue their potentially admirable vision of a radical new Christian inclusion, a vision that responds to my faith in Jesus’ image of life in all its fullness. Meetings with the LLF team and other progressive organisations in person at the Lambeth Palace Library and on zoom showed me that those involved are unable to confront contemporary disbelief in an objective, metaphysical, cosmos-transcending notion of God (to quote Don Cupitt), a disbelief that I suspect is the faith of the majority of members of the CofE. This belief is anathema to the central strategic activity of today’s Church magisterium, to Ian Paul and his CEEC and HTB colleagues. The HTB belief system and culture now controls not just Church of England Evangelical Council thinking but the theological mindset of General Synod.
The God We Never Knew and the God We Already Know
The God We Never Knew is a book written by Marcus Borg. Some of you (maybe many of you), will have read Marcus Borg, know this book, and value it for describing your kind of faith. The God We Already Know was written by Henry Morgan (my spiritual guide) and Roy Gregory. They believe that most people know most of what they need to know about God already but may lack the encouragement and confidence to trust their own instincts and intuition.
I knew at the age of 11 about the God I didn’t believe in. Over the following decades I have read hundreds of books exploring both the God I never knew and the God I already know. But the Church of England has stopped exploring this God and is reluctant to encourage people to trust themselves, their intuition and innate wisdom. It is rolling out programmes that trivialise our faith in the God we never knew and already know as radically unknowable mystery.
The God that underpins a Church of England theology of human sexuality
Since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, awareness of the God we never knew and the God we already know has steadily evolved. The Sea of Faith book is an invaluable guide to the developments in philosophy, theology, religion, spirituality, psychotherapy, science and human culture that have transformed our ideas about God. I look in vain for the signs that after seven decades of exploring human sexuality
The result is the continuation of a deeply embedded theology that thinks of God as an entity existing somewhere, divine and eternal, who communicates us with us by coming down from heaven and manifesting patriarchal and monarchical ways of thinking and organising Christian life. This God is reflected in seventy years of Church of England reports starting with the Moral Welfare Council’s The Problem of Homosexuality – An Interim Report (1954); a Report to the Board of the Working Party on Homosexuality (The Osborne Report) (1967) which the then Archbishop of Canterbury refused to allow to be published; Homosexual Relationships (The Gloucester Report 1979) which failed to receive Synodical endorsement; Report to the House of Bishops on Homosexuality 1987; Issues in Human Sexuality 1991; Some Issues in Human Sexuality 2003; Report of the House of Bishops Working Group on Human Sexuality (The Pilling Report) 2013; Shared Conversations 2014; Episcopal Teaching Document and Pastoral Advisory Group 2018; and finally, Living in Love and Faith, dominated by an archaic salvation history theology that ignores three centuries of development of Christian theological and philosophical wisdom
Not one of the reports prepared over the last seven decades acknowledges the transformation in spiritual and theological consciousness that has taken place in this period. As a result, we are enduring the quiet desperation of bishops and archbishops, conservative and progressive advocates, unconvinced that the latest iteration of the LLF process is going to achieve a successful outcome (however success is defined).
What to expect of General Synod in July
No breakthrough will be achieved by the House of Bishops, General Synod, the LLF team, the levers of the institution, whatever constitutes the hierarchy or magisterium (the Archbishops Council, for example) until people summon the courage to stop being blackmailed by those who think a separation of interests, otherwise known as schism, is the worst result. All those involved have to find the courage, honesty, wisdom and transparency to challenge the fantasy, mythical God image, to belief in which God the CofE has currently regressed and is addicted, the false God of tradition and orthodoxy.
Maybe I am a lone voice, speaking out against an idea of god that has steadily been reimagined and reconstructed over the past three centuries and never was, despite conservative claims, the objective, metaphysical “true God” of Hebrew faith, let alone of the early church or of Jesus.
Is the General Synod and the House of Bishops going to prolong this period of crime against the humanity of LGBTQIA+ people by passing (or failing to pass) the most timid next steps towards transforming the Church of England into a more comprehensive radical new Christian inclusion?
The July Synod looms. The House of Bishops and various groups continue to meet under LLF auspices. Deliberate leaks suggest the bishops and Archbishops are still conflicted, still afflicted with a critical spinal weakness, uncertain whether they have enough strength in unity to propose the modest changes that ought to have been approved a year ago. The proposals are nowhere near adequate, nowhere near creating radical new Christian inclusion for LGBTQIA+ people, still inhibited by a metaphysical archaic, homophobic, transphobic, sometimes misogynistic God.
After seventy years in which time our ideas about God have continued to evolve, the regressive, authoritarian, dogmatic, supposedly orthodox, traditional theology and teaching still dominates the conservative evangelical mindset of the Church of England Evangelical Council and the Global South majority of the Anglican Communion.