Theo Hobson, with whose contributions to the Guardian I do not often agree, has a new column this morning entitled: Can Liberal Christians stop banging on about gayness? He’s afraid that liberal Anglicanism is becoming a one pony show, and that liberal Anglicanism is becoming identified as the gay party at prayer (though this is not the way he puts it), thus distracting from so many other things that liberalism should represent. Basically, Hobson thinks that this is just poor communication:
Dwelling on the issue is a bad form of Christian communication. The point of Christian communication, or “proclamation”, is to interest people in Christianity, to make it seem attractive, inviting, serious. Banging on about gayness puts people off.
That at least has the virtue of being clear, a bit like Chris Mooney’s claim that accommodationism is bad form for atheist scientists, or like the old saw that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
However, Hobson doesn’t seem to recognise why this particular agenda is so high on the list for liberal Anglicans. It’s in a sense a moral marker for liberal Christianity. Like racism for earlier Christian radicals, the cause of gay Christians has dominated liberal Christianity now for nearly three decades, if not a bit longer. Why? Because this is the one area about which conservative, evangelical Anglicans, or conservative, high church Anglicans, are not prepared to give a centimetre, let alone an inch.
It all came to a head at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the one that was so distressing for Richard Holloway that, ever since, he has found it increasingly difficult to think of himself as a Christian. As he says in Doubts and Loves (see “Where I Stand Now” – extracts from the book posted at graham-turner.com):
LAMBETH 1998 turned out to be the most traumatic experience of my life. The hot topic was the status of homosexuals in the Church. I went to Canterbury naïvely expecting that we would craft a classic Anglican compromise that would allow us to go on working together till some kind of creative consensus emerged in the future. In the event, the debate on the subject turned into an ugly rout, with the vast majority of bishops passing a resolution that condemned homosexuals as sinful.
The significance of this event cannot be downplayed. It has to be recalled that many liberal Anglicans felt that they were being condemned by the very segment of the church with which they had felt common purpose, because of their colourblindness, and concern for the poor. But it was just at that time that the very different Christianity of the developing world was beginning to become more assertive, thus revealing itself to be at once more “orthodox” than their white Anglo-Saxon brothers (some bishops refused to come to Lambeth, if women bishops from the few provinces which ordained women to the episcopate, were allowed to attend). Heir to centuries of conservative, evangelical or high church missions, the bishops of Africa, or of the Southern Cone of South America, came to Lambeth in 1998 ready to fight for “the faith once delivered to the saints,” and to chastise their wayward cousins of the white churches, both North and South: the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the latter having been more thoroughly integrated (racially) since the appointment of Desmond Tutu as Archbishop of Cape Town.
But here, I think, is the problem, and that’s why I call this “Hobson’s Choice.” Liberals do have another choice, but it is a much more dangerous and confrontational one, and few are willing to make it. So, for them, it is a one choice world. For the admission of gay Christians to full membership of the church, such that they can participate at every level, as well as celebrate their relationships through marriage in the church, is one of the least contentious of liberal religious claims. For liberal Anglicans sit very loose to most of the articles of the creeds and other founding documents (such as the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion). All one has to do is to read some of Don Cupitt’s or Jack Spong’s books to see how far liberal Anglicans have strayed from the ecumenical creeds, and other standards of Christian doctrine. Banging on about gayness, as Hobson puts it, I suspect, is about the only choice they have left, if they are not to be dismissed, without the option.
We can see the same process at work in other large conglomerate churches, like the Roman Catholic Church. There is every reason, as Joanna Manning puts it (h/t Veronica Abbass), to ask whether the pope is Catholic, because since John Paul II thinking outside the box has been almost entirely closed to Catholic theologians. To get a sense of how closed Roman Catholicism has become one need only read something like Monsignor Roderick Strange’s article on “The Virgin Birth is no Fairy Tale” in the London Times for 16 December 2011. Here are a couple characteristic extracts (the rest is behind a pay wall):
The young woman is going to have a baby. She is engaged, but her fiancé is not the father of the child. He is a kindly, gentle man and he loves her. He is dumbfounded by what has happened. Yet he has no wish to shame her. He plans to break off their engagement discreetly. Then one night, shortly before he does so, he has a dream. He dreams that this pregnancy is unique, not evidence of infidelity, but rather of God’s action. He reconsiders and takes her home as his wife.
The woman’s experience has been far more remarkable. One day, she has had a sudden, startling, overwhelming sense of divine presence and an invitation to motherhood: the child she will bear will be the Son of the Most High. She is alarmed, utterly bewildered. She is still a virgin. How could she become a mother? She learns that she will conceive, not by sexual intercourse, but through the power of the Holy Spirit. She believes and bows to the divine will: “Let it be to me according to Your word.”
When I was just a schoolboy I used to say, rather wittily, I thought, at the time, that, if the virgin birth mattered, then nothing really mattered (that is, so far as faith is concerned). My point was simply this. If god expects us to believe in something so out of the ordinary, then it is hard to think what could convince us that anything we are told about such a god is true. You might wonder how, starting from this point, I ended up a priest. It was easy. Christianity didn’t seem to require such belief. These were myths which could be intepreted theologically.
Of course, it was hard to say where the myths came to an end, and things became real, but that was the virtue of liberalism: the goal posts could be kept in motion. As Dennett says pointedly, if you play tennis without a net, every shot counts. And that, I think, is why liberals bang on about gayness. This is a relatively safe goalpost to move, and if it can’t be moved, then there aren’t many other ones that can be budged either. This is something that Holloway recognised at Lambeth 1998. He also recognised that liberalism is harder to sell as religion. As he says, in the extracts from his book Doubts and Loves linked above:
THEOLOGIES of anxiety [conservative, evangelical] have considerable strengths. The main one is the coherence of the system they proclaim. Once we accept the premises on which the message is based, the logic is powerful and persuasive. It can be learnt easily and taught effectively. It is, essentially, a product, a package that can be explained to the sales force.
But it doesn’t satisfy the needs for justice and fulness of life. Jesus is supposed to have said:
The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. [John 10.10]
This is already a warning against those who come pretending to speak the truth, and yet purveying a different message to the one preached by Jesus. But where abundant life is defined strictly in terms of a narrow band of orthodox beliefs — as so often happens – the life of faith becomes calcified by institutional barriers and anxious concerns about faithfulness. Abundant life is always the loser. InDoubts and LovesHolloway suggests an alternative, but the alternative will not convince those who hold that certain well-defined beliefs are central to faith, as most Christians do.
Theo Hobson does not seem to be aware of the limited choices that liberals have in the contemporary church. There is a steady trend towards reading the limits of faith more and more narrowly, without any wiggle room between the orthodox formularies and their interpretation. The Roman Catholic Church is not the only ecclesial body to be undergoing this process of conservative retrenchment. In this case, I suspect, liberal Anglicans are playing a cagey game. By concentrating on a point that can be disputed in biblical terms (see, for example, the Roman Catholic, Gareth Moore, A Question of Truth: Christianity and Homosexuality, Continuum, 2003), liberals can distract attention from offences against orthodoxy which test the limits of faith much more invidiously.
Interpreting resurrection, virginal conception, or incarnation in ways that depart from the orthodox understanding of such things, has a tendency to be much more threatening to the institutionalists in the church. I suspect that bishops in the African church are quite aware that liberalism about homosexuality cashes itself in in terms of liberalism with respect to the fundamental doctrines of the faith. Their opposition to the acceptance and recognition of homosexual relationships is largely cultural, but their concern for orthodoxy, given the historic background of the African church in conservative Christian movements, weighs much more heavily on their minds. Liberals, like Rowan Williams, who has tried to keep the Anglican Communion from tearing itself apart over the issue of gayness, are, I suspect, fully aware that the problem really lies at a much deeper level than this. It really is Hobson’s choice. Liberals either bang on about gayness or they shut up. Or, of course, like Rowan Williams, they obfuscate. Liberal Anglicans (and many other Christians) have painted themselves into a corner, and it is hard, in this case, to preserve their integrity. Theo Hobson seems to think that it’s time to stop banging on about gayness, but he seems unaware of the extent to which this is a Hobson’s choice. And with a growing atheist constituency, the tendency of a growing conservatism in religion is to drive people away from faith altogether. We should celebrate that, but we should also recognise how tenuous in makes the hold of liberal believers on to their faith.
The short version of Theo Hobson’s article could be “By accepting about the gays, the liberal Anglicans are making the Church a sissy women’s thing.” I’m surprised he didn’t include anything paeans to rough-and-tumble sports or whatever garbage traditional masculinity is supposed to be.
Truly one of the more misogynistic articles I’ve read in a while.
There are few issues that are laid out as unequivocally as homosexuality is in the bible. It seems fairly obvious to me that to change its mind on such an issue a Christian church has to raise serious doubts about its doctrine. Do they have any other choice besides “banging on” about it?
Of course liberal churches are quite adept at the mental contortions required to make ancient scripture work with modern ethics. Homosexual acceptance will end up being another awkward thing to consider along with all the other major advances in secular morality, from abolishing slavery to the ever more equal role women play in society. This will certainly not be a final blow, but I think it will be a major one.
John K.
There I would have to disagree with you — and that is why liberal Christians actually have an argument about this — for the Bible knows nothing about homosexuality. All it knows is homosexual acts (something that becomes quite clear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church), and these are seen to be depraved because not heterosexual, a deliberate perversion of natural sexuality.
And in this the Bible is of course wrong, and the liberals are right, which is why this is such a powerful counter to conservative moralism. The “Yuck” response of the conservative is simply a misreading of homosexuality, and, of course, of bisexuality. The whole point here is that the Bible is as hopelessly out of date here as it is on creation.
The reason that conservatives are so antagonistic to any change in sexual ethics is that they are stuck with the idea of essential being, as though this could be known without any empirical examination (as Bernard Williams would say, the soul is adjectivally related to the body, not another noun twinned with it). If liberal Christians were to point this out bluntly, it simply undermines Christianity as a whole, so it is a major blow, but liberals would want to go farther here, and suggest that there are (a la Bultmann, for example) existential readings of faith which, while tied to specific biblical teachings, are not in any sense what might be called literal interpretations of the kerygmatic passages, and where other things are, in a sense, open to free interpretation, or at least interpretation bound by what we know (scientifically, empirically) about reality. This is what gave liberal Christianity so much confidence mid-twentieth century, although it seems to be a bit less confident now, because people have responded in two ways: conservative retrenchment, on the one hand, and liberal abandonment (of faith) on the other. The church shrinks to the right, and that is why the new atheism is new, because it deliberately addresses the question of shrinkage, and encourages it.
Yes, Daniel, Hobson, with whom I seldom agree, has really outdone himself this time!
” The “Yuck” response of the conservative is simply a misreading of homosexuality,”
Eric, I don’t think it’s that complicated. Evolution has given us two distinct kinds of sexual passion, separately evolved. There’s the familiar one that the poets and pornographers specialize in and is as old as sex itself and then there is the other passion that evolved in most social animals. It’s the need to stop sex that doesn’t involve oneself. After all, if you can prevent your rivals from having offspring then you prevent your offspring from having rivals. As selfish genes go, this is one of the most powerful.
We also evolved a fear of strangers. Homosexuals get a double whammy of hate because they are strange and it involves sex.
I don’t quite follow the argument in the first paragraph of your response. Does drawing a distinction between homosexual acts and homosexual people really change anything? I can imagine conservatives arguing about distinguishing murderous acts from murderers to give free reign in that category as well. Leviticus seemed pretty clear that man on man sex was an abomination, the proviso that it is only when done by heterosexuals would be a strikingly glaring omission. Also, this also begs the question of why the omniscient author of all morality was outdone by his creations in a few thousand years. Shouldn’t he have an understanding of homosexuals already? Also, if this was just an early misinformed law of men, when can we safely take biblical laws as the word of god and not the proclamations of ancient ignorance?
Do not spend too much time defending liberal Christianity from me; this may indeed just be more of the tortured logic I am familiar with. When I think I see a weak argument I find myself compulsively pouncing on it, even when it is brought up in passing by someone not necessarily invested in defending it.
In the end I think we are in total agreement. The advancing secular values erode the authority of the old doctrines and thus the religion either by liberal abandonment or conservative retrenchment, as you say.
For the record, the same polarisation is going on in Australia, and has led to an estrangement between the hard-line anti-gay Sydney diocese and the more liberal rural and country dioceses. There were rumours of a schism around a few years ago, but the cracks seem to have been papered over for the time being.
But I agree that anti-gay hatred has become a ‘badge’ belief among hardcore theists of all kinds, for much the same reasons that Creationism is a badge belief among American fundamentalists. It’s manifestly irrational, so it’s not held by anyone other than theists; and it usually doesn’t involve any particular personal inconvenience. It’s an easy way to demonstrate the power of one’s faith without any real danger of personal sacrifice.
Pingback: Hobson’s Choice « Choice in Dying « Secularity
John K. From a secular point of view it makes no difference, but from the point of view of biblical interpretation it is clearly of the first importance. Act and essence are different in this case in an important sense in which it is not in the case of murderers and murderous acts. From the standpoint of biblical interpretation, the idea that homosexuality is a deliberately perverse act, vs. the the idea that it is the natural state of a person (whether or not he or she chooses to act in accordance with that nature) is important, since the Bible, having no knowledge of homosexuality as such, cannot condemn it. All the Bible can be taken to condemn is the act. Thus the magisterium (of the RCC) would argue, therefore, that they do not condemn the state of being homosexual, but only the act of men (female homosexuality is not mentioned in the Bible) — but here’s the important part — who are acting perversely in engaging in same-sex acts. But the Bible, knowing nothing of homosexuality, cannot be assumed to condemn homosexual acts, but only acts that are between presumably heterosexual men. Also, same-sex acts had a peculiar meaning in Israelite society at the time the Bible was written. Male rape could be sued in that society to shame another man. That is why the Hebrew word used in the condemnation of same-sex acts is roughly equivalent to “the lyings of a woman”. That is what is condemned. As I say, the Bible did not know homosexuality as such and could thus not condemn it. Same goes for Paul. Jesus never mentions it and may have been gay (if he existed).
The point of explaining liberal Christianity is to show the tenuous relationship that liberal Christianity has with the foundations of faith. That is why liberals emphasise such things as gay liberation, because it’s easier to address than their questions about more central aspects of faith.
I remember many years ago seeing a television discussion between Don Cupitt and Janet Radcliffe Richards (a philisopher) on a programme called “Platform 2″. Ut must have been shortly after the release ofhis book “The Sea Of Faith”, and he was explaining his version of Chrsitianity. After he had finished, Janet Radcliffe Richards, who was an atheistsimply pointed out that there was very little of what she had heard that she could disagree with, and told Cupitt that he was just an atheist in a dog collar. He vociferously denied it, and got quite upset by the remark. I was a Christian at the time, just about – an evangelical with serious doubts and it made me think that I would rather abandon my evangeliclaism altogether than try to find a liberal compromise. I think once you have started picking at that ball of wool, it just all unravels.
Eric,
The thinking used is really amazing to me. I appreciate your explanations, I find this sort of thing fascinating.
It seems like you could justify just about anything you want with the kind of thinking you describe, and I suppose many Christians do just that. You could turn a lot of what Jesus said right on its head with something like: “Jesus did not like rich people and encouraged helping the poor, but that is just because he did not know the merits of free-market capitalism.”
The places I found the bible at odds with modern society were a big factor in my becoming an atheist. I suppose I mostly have trouble getting into the mindset of those who would go for such reaching rationalizations over the simpler method of just dismissing it.
I don’t know if anyone has addressed this question, but I’m interested in the source of the anti-gay bias in the bible.
After all, at about the same time Leviticus was being written, the Greek civilization — arguably far-more advanced than the Palestinian one — had no problem whatsoever with homosexuality.
Why the difference? Seems an odd distinction to make. For one civilization, it’s perfectly normal. For another, an abomination.
Totally wierd.