“Words strain.. crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.” T.S.Elliot
A somewhat unedifying dispute has broken out between conservative Anglicans in Nigeria and their ACNA fellow travellers in the States. The Anglican Church of North America is one of a number of break-away groupings, formed after a large conference in Jerusalem in 2008 for conservative Anglicans from all over the world. This conference was one of the latest in a long line of efforts to present conservatives as the heirs of orthodox historic Anglicanism. They are the ones who are biblically faithful and live in accordance with the true gospel of Jesus. Two documents are appealed to as expressing the mind of that Jerusalem conference. Adherence to them is also seen as marking out someone having membership of this true Anglicanism. The first is the document produced by the conference itself, the so-called Jerusalem Declaration. The second is part of a statement or report from the Lambeth Conference in 1998. Addressing the topic of sexuality, the segment is referred to as Lambeth 1:10.. This statement had quite a bit of material addressing the pastoral care of homosexuals but the sentence focused on by conservatives is the one which declared that ‘homosexuality was incompatible with Scripture’. Conservative bishops were able to read from this sentence a total vindication of their position. To this day, little by way of new thinking has taken place among conservative Anglicans and this was vividly attested to by the reactionary video put out recently by the organisation, the Church of England Evangelical Council. This was published in response to the nuanced document, Living in Love and Faith, which represented the range of viewpoints in the Anglican Church as a whole. It is clear that the issues of welcoming and engaging with the gay community is of no interest to many within the broad family of conservative Anglicans across the world.
The current dispute has been triggered by an open letter written by some members of ACNA in the States, addressed to their fellow Anglicans who are troubled by the way that gay Christians are treated in many conservative Anglican settings. It is not a radical document by any means, but it is stating things which would appear obvious to outsiders. Demanding that gay people attain abstinence and celibacy means that they have to meet standards not expected of straight people. Also, even when gay Christians achieve celibacy, they are still being treated as invisible. Congregations do nothing to affirm them in any way. The authors call for ‘compassionate and effective pastoral care’ for this group. What this means in practice is not spelt out, but clearly the letter has rattled cages right across ACNA and its allies around the world.
The conservative Anglican Church in Nigeria, under its Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, has been the first to see this open letter and ACNA’s response to it as the beginning of a capitulation to western decadence, and thus a betrayal of strict traditional Christian values. Homosexuality must continue to be treated as a virus or a yeast that ‘should be urgently and radically expunged lest it affect the whole dough.’ Further the Archbishop goes on, ‘the events ..(are) most unfortunate and dangerous to the cause of Mission…. The Church in USA which should lead the fight against this evil in ACNA; and if it fails, it would have disappointed God.’ In response to this furious letter, ACNA have answered, expressing the fact that absolutely nothing has changed in their approach to the issue of homosexuality and that they remain faithful to the foundation documents who hold together the GAFCON family across the world.
The blog is not intending to be a discussion about who is right between Archbishop Ndukuba, ACNA’s Archbishop Foley Beach and the writers of the ‘dear Gay Anglicans’ letter. Conservative Anglicans dwell within a universe of binary realities which Surviving Church does not share. Reality in the binary world is either true or false. It cannot occupy a place somewhere in the middle. As the quote from T.S.Elliot at the beginning indicated, the reality is that words are imperfect tools, they crack and decay with imprecision. If we want to understand what is really going on between conservative Anglicans in the States and Nigeria, we must go behind the words about homosexuality and ask questions in a quite different way.
What is going on when Christians struggle with one another and sometimes kill each other over the precise meaning and definition of words. To me, and many other liberally educated Christians, it is an enormous relief not to be tied to a single interpretation of a word. Even the advantage of having studied Greek and a little Hebrew, does not bring me any closer to a perfect understanding of Scripture. The ability to penetrate a word, by understanding its context and its history, may take me further away from any claim to understand it completely. The more we study words and ideas, the less we seem to make claims about having complete insight into their meaning. I prefer to live in a world of paradox and ambiguity where meaning and truth are only discovered after long painful questioning and scrutiny.
The spat that is going on in the conservative world of Anglicans is not, and never has been, one merely about truth. It is mainly about our old friend, institutional and personal power. The Bible and one way of reading it and interpreting it, has been weaponised to offer a victor, if successful, enormous rewards and access to power across the Anglican Church. Christians of all shades and opinions have been lured to seek power in Trump’s America. There has always been an extraordinary myth about the duty/call of Christians to rule over society having claimed power in God’s name. The idea of a Christian theocracy was first articulated by Rushdoony in the early 70s. Such ideas have little appeal in Britain, but it is an idea popular in the American evangelical world. A Christian leader in Africa, already subsidised by generous amounts of American cash, will have a good idea of the way that much power could fall into his lap if he backs the right person in the bitter culture wars being fought out among Christians in the States.
Among my books is one entitled American Culture Warriors in Africa. It is an account of the way that the anti-LGBT protagonists are exporting their struggles to Africa. There, with plentiful cash and human resources, these ‘warriors’ are seducing whole churches and denominations to the anti-LGBT cause. Individuals such as the Sekulows (father and son) and Scott Lively spread anti-gay poison throughout Africa, contributing to the strong legal inhibitions about gays that are current in Uganda and elsewhere. With the background of all this well documented ideological interference in Africa by right wing Americans, we are right to query when an Anglican prelate makes statements which have a strongly political flavour. Can this be understood as a bid for influence and power? Is there some behind the scenes manipulation going on which would align the Church in Nigeria with some even more extreme Anglican factions in the States? There are certainly many who would love to see denominational Christianity destroyed so local congregations could operate without accountability. Battles for influence and control, using scriptural arguments about homosexuality as a kind of excuse for aggressive belligerence, are unedifying. The email correspondence flying back and forth between Africa and the States reflects the same battle that is being fought from many pulpits. All are trying to impress hearts and minds, falsely I believe, that the gay issue is a defining Christian principle. Most, if not all, of these efforts seem to be an attempt by Christians to obtain for themselves power and influence over others. Whether these bitter culture wars will settle down in time for Lambeth 2022 remains to be seen. Perhaps it would help if a new dose of honesty entered the discussions. Power, we would claim, is at the root of many of these fractious debates. The idea that Christians are always fighting valiantly for truth seems to be a delusion. If that dishonesty is not challenged, the whole Anglican structure could shatter into pieces. The dishonesty of trying to pretend that the current stance of ACNA and GAFCON should somehow be normative for all Anglicans everywhere is palpable. Do we really expect, as ACNA (and the members of fundamentalist groups in Britain) does, that words uttered at any period of history can remain unaltered free from interpretation and new understandings? The Church of Nigeria’s position and ACNA are both wrong. Words, insights and ideas are necessarily and constantly in a state of flux and change. If they stay the same, they become brittle and crack and ‘will not stay in place’. Ideas and experiences are always moving. ‘To be perfect is to change often’.
See https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/church-of-nigeria-criticises-acna/ for sight of documents mentioned in the post.
Words and clarity. Two things concern me here.
As I understand it the word homosexual was only invented in the nineteenth century. This should be born in mind when looking at earlier literature.
Secondly, I always find a statement like ‘homosexuality is incompatible with Scripture’ unsatisfactory, because it is not clear whether the speaker means a disposition, feeling etc. or an act.
I was brought up to deeply distrust Roman Catholics. When I moved to Manchester I found myself living next door to a very friendly, and deeply devout, Catholic family. When I’d been living there a couple of months or so, we got together one night over a bottle of red wine. As the evening went on and we cracked a second bottle, we began to discuss frankly our differing views of the faith. And I found, much to my surprise, that often when we use different words we meant the same thing; and sometimes, when we used the same words we meant something different. I still view that evening in 1992 (or possibly early 1993) as one of the great turning points in my religious experience.
It helped that Terry had a sense of humour. ‘The trouble with you Protestants,’ he said, ‘is that you’ve thrown the Mother out with the bathwater.’
I had a similar experience. I was surprised to discover, fortunately in my teens, that Catholics didn’t seem to have two heads!
The story goes that a Catholic family (shock horror) moved in next door to a Protestant family, and their three year olds had a playdate – a paddling pool on a hot day. Afterwards the Catholic girl confided about the Protestant boy – ‘Mum and Dad, I never really understood when you said about the differences between Catholics and Protestants, but I think I do understand now.’.
The same but different. We have a close relationship with a Muslim woman who boarded with us during student days for her PhD. She remarked that we were very similar in our moral outlook and views as opposed to many she met in our country. She was happy to come to Church; we were happy to help with her halal meat. Once while talking on the news she said if Salman Rushdie was on the pavement and she had a gun she would feel obliged to shoot him.
Opposite, really. It sounds a bit as though you’re suggesting that fellow feelings are totally misleading. I was suggesting that the bogey man may not be a monster after all.
Oh, not at all EA. What I was showing was that we can be absolutely together in many things and yet completely different in others.
Ok. Fair enough.
In the case of our lovely friend I realised how much education and background plays in what we see and how we adapt ourselves to the world. Let me pass on some early conversations:-
“So America isn’t part of Europe?” (I jokingly offered to present her with a globe at her graduation.)
Remarking on the Holocaust when it came up on TV – “What’s that?”
On telling what it was and what the Germans had done during the war – “Were they Christians?” and about the Nazis under Hitler, “Was he a Christian?”
As Chris Hardwick has said, “We are not in an information age anymore. We are in the information management age.”
Where people argue over words that mean different things to each other, there is no reason. Where dualism is left behind, paradox can allow in compassion and forgiveness.