Little did I know that shortly after I wrote this post last month, two challenging events would face the Anglican communion: the election of a lesbian bishop in Los Angeles, and the impending ratification of an anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda which will see gay people facing the death penalty for their sexual orientation. To his credit, Gideon Byamugisha of the Ugandan Anglican church has spoken out against the law, though it is no more than we are entitled to expect.

However, Archbishop Rowan Williams has been deafeningly silent on the issue of the impending state-sponsored murder of a country's gay community, while robustly condemning our friends in Los Angeles for contravening the voluntary freeze on gay ordination. Is this what passes for moral leadership these days? Personally, I think this hypocrisy is deep enough to warrant Williams' resignation. Others will disagree. But what is certain is that we can all pile pressure on him to radically rethink his present moral priorities. You can join the Facebook group here, and below is the latest message from Susan Russell, the group's creator.

"Do you hear what I hear?" isn't just one of the Christmas carols echoing in the airwaves this week-before-Christmas. It is also the question I'm asking about the responses we've gotten from Lambeth Palace regarding the "disconnect" between the Archbishop of Canterbury's readiness to issue a formal statement on the election of a bishop suffragan in Los Angeles and his reticence to "go and do likewise" on the draconian anti-gay legislation pending in Uganda.

Like many of you, I received a "boilerplate" response in an email from Marie Papworth in the Lambeth Palace office. (text posted below) If you "heard what I heard" in that response, you heard words like "unacceptable" and "deep concern."

My question is: how deep does concern have to be before the Archbishop of Canterbury uses his moral authority to speak out on behalf of gay and lesbian Ugandans who cannot speak for themselves? How unacceptable does it have to get before he says so?

And to be clear: a comment in response to a question from a journalist does NOT an "official statement" make.

Do you hear what I hear? In the email from Lambeth Palace and in the deafening silence on this pressing human rights issue I hear that speaking out to protect gay and lesbian lives in Uganda is less important than speaking out to protect the Anglican Communion from a lesbian bishop.

If you hear what I hear, you hear that the leader of the Anglican Communion is more concerned about preserving institutional unity than he is protecting innocent Ugandans.

If you hear what I hear, then I invite you to do what I'm going to do:

Send another email.
Write another letter.
Post another blog.

[...]

Let us urge him to send a word of hope to LGBT Ugandans who "mourn in lonely exile" that the Emmanuel whose coming we prepare to celebrate in a few short days came not just for the Archbishop of Canterbury in his Lambeth Palace warm ... but for those who shiver in the cold of dehumanizing homophobia.

O come, O come, Emmanuel!

Labels: church, homosexuality, theology

We were lucky enough to have the afternoon off at the Cathedral and instead to hear Christchurch Cathedral Grammar School Girls leading our Evensong. Such visits are always valuable for a number of reasons: first, they give another choir the chance to sing in a different place; second, they bring with them members of a different congregation, and on this occasion, some of the families the girls are billeted with; third, they offer a test of our hospitality — and I'm pleased that many of our choir showed up and attended Evensong.

But most of all such visits are important because, by giving something literally out of the ordinary, they remind us that the acts of worship in which we participate from week to week are nowise performances, but rather offerings: liturgy, collective work to be sacrificed. And they remind us that the esoteric and high-brow music to which we so comfortably grow accustomed constantly runs the risk of atrophying: by its very transcendence drawing us out of community rather than into it.

This is the kind of lesson that can only be taught by the least amongst us, and is the essence of the inverted hierarchy of God's Kingdom. The lesson is also timely, as the New Zealand Hymnbook Trust launch their new volume of home-grown songs, Hope is Our Song, at Knox Church, Dunedin, this Sunday evening.

Labels: church, music, newzealand, theology

I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia, and to come back to you from Macedonia and have you send me on to Judea. Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to ordinary human standards, ready to say 'Yes, yes' and 'No, no' at the same time? As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been 'Yes and No.' For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not 'Yes and No'; but in him it is always 'Yes.' For in him every one of God's promises is a 'Yes.'

— 2 Corinthians 1.16-19

It is easier to say 'Yes' to people. But if you say 'Yes' to everyone, you end up contradicting yourself: saying 'Yes' to one thing logically means saying 'No' to something else.

— George Connor, retiring Bishop of Dunedin, 28 November 2009 (paraphrased)

crisis: c.1425, from Gk. krisis "turning point in a disease" (used as such by Hippocrates and Galen), lit. "judgment," from krinein "to separate, decide, judge."

— Online Etymology Dictionary

Labels: church, newzealand, theology

Proclaiming the Gospel may have much to do with the struggle to make explicit what is at stake in particular human decisions or policies, individual and collective, and in this sense bring in the event of judgement, the revaluation of identities. [...] I am wholly in sympathy with [Lindbeck's] challenges to the "liberal" assumption that this [discernment] is to be achieved by adjusting theology to current fashion, and what I have already said accords in important respects with his call for discernment on the basis of criteria drawn from the specifically Christian narrative ("an intratextually derived eschatology").

But I want, in contrast, to argue that such discernment is not easily intelligible when divorced from the language of transformative judgement, enacted in particular events, that is the central theme of so many of our foundational texts. In short, I don't think that Christian and theological discernment can ever be wholly "contemplative" and "noninterventionist"; I believe it is more importantly exercised in the discernment of what contemporary conflicts are actually about and in the effort both to clarify this and to decide where the Christian should find his or her identity. The Christian is involved in seeking conversion — the bringing to judgement of contemporary struggles, and the appropriation of some new dimension of the transforming summons of Christ in his or her own life.

— Rowan Williams, "The Judgement of the World" in On Christian Theology (my bold)

The Anglican Communion is in one hell of a pickle. And in spite of his brilliant words (you can read the whole essay online), it is happening on Archbishop Rowan Williams' watch. Of course, the polarization of "liberal" and "evangelical" in Anglican churches was a process that occured over a period of decades, ably, if polemically, documented by Michael Hampson in his book Last Rites: The End of the Church of England. Williams cannot be held personally accountable for the fact that we are in our current situation. But both his sympathisers and critics believe he may well be responsible for perpetuating it by appeasing those that, according to the theology he expressed in the passage above, Christians should not be at all hesitant to pass judgement on.

In the light of all this, I suggest that the voices most often identified as "liberal" and "evangelical" have no claim to these names; and Williams knows it, because he, too, places "liberal" in inverted commas, uneasy with its connotations in ordinary language. In the contemporary church the word "liberal" has come to signify the maxim "be nice to everyone", while continuing with the most base of hypocrisies. The Church's theology, scripture, liturgy, religious belief, ethical reasoning, has been reduced by the "liberal" to this catastrophic, bastardised misreading of the gospel. By the same token, "evangelical" has sadly come to denote another bastardised misreading of the same gospel, this time based on a wantonly inadequate reading of the Bible undertaken to justify bigotry. Hampson writes of this situation:

The real tragedy [...] is the complete failure of integrity on the part of the liberals. On the single-question test of orthodoxy — "What is your attitude towards homosexuality?" — their silence and ambivalence show more sympathy for the dangerous cult of contemporary fundamentalism than concern for the truth or for the good of the world and its people. The truth, and the dignity of homosexual people everywhere, have been sacrificed "for the sake of unity" to the cult of fundamentalism. The latest sacrifice at the time of writing is the Anglican Communion, now officially a worldwide anti-homosexual organisation. It has carried out the first two expulsions in its history — the United States and Canada — for refusing to discriminate sufficiently against homosexuals [...] This is not a price worth paying "for the sake of unity": it is a betrayal of the very heart of the gospel.

My anger at this situation, which is never far from boiling over, was further heated by a conversation with someone from the Dunedin Diocesan Office at Selwyn's High Tea a few weeks ago. I had explained why I thought the "evangelical" position on homosexuality was morally bankrupt. The response of my interlocutor was: "But don't you think they believe it?" I was dumbfounded at the sheer spinelessness of this attitude — as if the legitimacy of bigotry should be assessed only by how sincerely it is held. But sadly, it is a spinelessness that has been led from the front. The evangelical wing of the Church must be held responsible for their (successful) attempts to blackmail the entire institution over the appointment of Jeffrey John. But Williams should be held responsible for giving in to these attempts by forcing him to step down. What Williams clearly believes in his own theology is that, in that situation, the gospel called for a moment of judgement. In his own words, "The Christian is involved in seeking conversion — the bringing to judgement of contemporary struggles, and the appropriation of some new dimension of the transforming summons of Christ in his or her own life." Where was that faithful act of judgement in the Jeffrey John saga?

Well, Dunedin has recently faced its own moment of judgement and the result is not particularly encouraging. Dunedin priest Juan Kinnear has given an interview this week quietly lamenting the rise of a "conservative" to the Otago & Southland bishopric. Kinnear's ordination took place a few years ago against the backdrop of similarly ugly scenes to those witnessed during the Jeffrey John saga. The word "conservative" introduces a new dimension to this debate. That any Christian could identify with the term "conservative" is a fact that I find risible. What does the gospel have to say about "conserving" anything? It is a message of generosity, openness, but also judgement. Conservatism, by contrast, is about keeping what you've got, sticking to your thoroughly parochial certainties, and condemning change on the basis of its sheer novelty. It assumes its own penchant for condemnation to be a legitimate expression of the gospel imperative to pass judgement.

Earlier in the same essay, Williams writes:

The Church may be committed to interpreting the world in terms of its own foundational narratives; but the very act of interpreting affects the narratives as well as the world, for good and ill, and it is not restricted to what we usually think of as the theological mainstream. Something happens to the Exodus story as it is absorbed into the black slave culture of America. Something still more unsettling happens to Abraham and Isaac when they have passed through Kierkegaards's hands — or the hands of the agnostic Wilfred Owen, writing in the First World War of how the old man refused to hear the angel "and slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one". [...] Owen's savage transformation of Abraham's sacrifice points up what we might miss in Genesis: the final drawing back from slaughter is an act of obedience as great as or greater than the first decision to sacrifice Isaac. It also points up the impotence of the narrative in a world that has lost the means to forgo its pride. Not sacrificing Isaac is a necessary humiliation; the righteous old men of Europe in 1914 are strangers to such a possibility. This is indeed a discovery of scripture and world, and of the gulf between them; and it is now — or should be — part of what the Church reads in Genesis 22.

Scripture, the gospel itself, is changed by our collective cultural experiences of gay liberation. It is not an experience the gospel-writers could have known; so it is not good enough to fall back on old certainties with the pathetic pseudo-liberal justification, "But it's what they believe". Liberals must fight relentlessly for views from all perspectives to be voiced and heard; but this is not the same as making an apology for relativism. Rather, liberals must then fight equally relentlessly for the values a truly progressive and liberal theology stands for, and directly challenge those whose beliefs betray the gospel. If it cannot do this, it seriously begs the question if these so-called "liberals" stand for anything at all. The kind of "liberal" Hampson describes, the kind of "liberal" I conversed with at High Tea, is really an old-fashioned conservative in some fashionable clothes, more interested in the structural integrity of an antiquated institution than in discerning a truly Christian response. So I give the last word to Williams, in the hope that he might start to enact his own theology.

In judging the world, by its confrontation of the world with its own dramatic script, the Church also judges itself: in attempting to show the world a critical truth, it shows itself to itself as Church also.

Labels: christianity, church, dunedin, homosexuality, newzealand, theology

"How did it come to this?" the man asks. I suggest you ask Jeffrey John, mate. Rarely has there been such a complete capitulation to the comfortable expediency of a nondescript own-brand (how ironic it's called St Michael) as the moment by which Stephen Cottrell obtained his appointment.

Labels: church, politics, theology

Former priest of our parish seems to have killed himself this week, which is slightly strange news. I never knew the man, but by all accounts he did an excellent job. It makes you wonder what kind of place church must have been for him, and highlights, sadly, how those with the most giving and generous personalities can often struggle to value themselves, even, or especially, in an ecclesiastical environment.

Tags: nicholasclapp, priest, death.

Labels: church

I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia, and to come back to you from Macedonia and have you send me on to Judea. Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to ordinary human standards, ready to say 'Yes, yes' and 'No, no' at the same time? As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been 'Yes and No.' For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not Yes and No'; but in him it is always 'Yes.' For in him every one of God's promises is a 'Yes.'

— 2 Corinthians 1.16-19

Labels: church, relationships, religion

Yesterday was one of the rare occasions when I checked the Telegraph website — an event that usually happens when I want to reassure myself that I am not conservative and/or that not every news site carries the same recycled Associated Press/Reuters stories. So anyway, while I was there, I stumbled across this opinion piece by Charles Moore (a former editor of the paper), entitled "Flying the flag is only the first step to victory". Moore's article is problematic, in my view, first for its blend of half-truth and prejudice, but chiefly for its completely facile and functionalist view of Christian symbols.

Moore is responding to Gordon Brown's instruction that all government buildings fly the Union flag. Attentive readers will recall that Robert Putnam spoke about the logic of the American obsession with their flag a couple of weeks ago in Manchester. Even more attentive readers will also recall that Putnam argued that Americans' "flag worship" was a means of creating a solidifying "civic nationalism" out of the dangerous shards of an "ethnic nationalism", which could not deal with the pressures of immigration. To this extent, then, I sympathise with Brown and Moore in arguing for such a unifying realm of public symbolism in Britain. But after this, Moore really starts going off on one:

[...] millions whose first language is not English now live in this country. A significant minority of them cannot even speak English.

Many of these people are Muslims, and some seem to hate the country they inhabit. Their most prominent leaders, including the Muslim Council of Britain, which claims to be their main umbrella organisation, equivocate about the requirements of being British. You cannot, for example, get them to say that it is wrong to kidnap or kill British soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.

What exactly is Moore saying here? That to qualify as "British", you have to agree with an authorised (ie, Telegraph-led) version of what "Britishness" is? And as for getting "them" to say that killing British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are surely a large number of "white" left-wingers (ie, not "them") who would say the same thing. Are they therefore also not British? The logic in Moore's argument is, quite simply, missing. But, wait! It gets worse:

So it is natural to ask oneself more sharply what it is to be British, and to realise that the idea has been slipping away. There is nothing like threat to make people think harder about who they are. Renewed interest in the Union flag is a symptom of this. A piece of cloth composed of variations of the most famous Christian symbol re-acquires meaning.

Whither the Union flag? What "meaning" does it reacquire? Moore does not ask or answer this question, completely undermining any credibility that arguing for its deployment could have. What's worse (and perhaps symptomatic of this aversion to "meaning"), Moore goes on:

She [Linda Colley, in her book on British nationalism] does not argue that this [public ownership of nationalism symbolism] was automatically a good thing - the Britishness she describes was often aggressive, violent, greedy and opportunistic - but, politically, it worked.

Great. So as long as politics "works" — even if it is "aggressive, violent, greedy and opportunistic" — it's OK. Sorry, what was his problem with suicide bombing again? I'll be charitable for a moment, though. Moore does make one salient point:

Values don't hover above the British Isles like this summer's rainclouds. They arise out of the choices made about who runs things and how they are run. You find them in a Church, or an army, or a police force, or a profession, or a legislature, or a school, or a family. In other words, you find them in institutions. And it is free institutions that modern politicians are so bad at understanding.

Here, Moore is right. Governments are bad at understanding what William Temple called "intermediate institutions" — those organisations which operate within civil society to mediate between the state and private enterprise. I'm not so sure that governments need to "understand" them, though — if people are doing and acting as they should — with their communities in mind — these institutions should thrive withal. Governments "understanding" usually leads to governments "interfering".

If only Moore had thought a little bit more about his latter point, he could have made a convincing argument. But as it stands, his article happily refers to "Christian symbols" without any inquiry into their proper context — that is, Church communities, wider communities, "the Christian narrative", and scripture more generally. Taking "the cross" in such a facile way to demonstrate "British" superiority over against those nasty "Muslims" is cringeworthy and reminiscent of the Crusades, when much the same thing happened. It encourages people in their conviction that to be "Christian" you just have to be British and wave the flag around, and does not present them with anything of monotheism's inherent risk.

It is only through being in-community that Christian symbols — which stand as symbols of naked violence when held up by crude, narrow-minded nationalists — become softened and enmeshed in the fuzzy relationships and challenges of actually living with others of different opinions and backgrounds. Thus they acquire true, practised meaning. Such a simplistic appraisal of "Britishness" is only possible for Moore because he does not understand, and does not wish to know, that religion can only ever happen in community, and it is the same alienation from community which drives both Muslims to suicide bombing and Christians to reading the Daily Telegraph.

Perhaps, though, this is as much as we should expect from an ex-editor of a paper whose darling is Margaret "no such thing as society" Thatcher. I sense the acrid stench of conservative hypocrisy.

Tags: christianity, islam, charlesmoore, muslim, moore, charles, telegraph, community, dailytelegraph, church.

Labels: church, politics

Regular readers of this site will know that anti-racism is one of my hobby horses. I have previously expressed my frustration at being unable to tell some people in North Manchester General what I thought of their poisionous opinions, and remarked upon the contradictions of racist behaviour. I have also been flamed for encouraging people to leave constructive criticism on the racist blog posts of others.

So it was with trepidation today that I went on our choir meal — we were depleted in number, which was perhaps key to what ensued. Our priest (with whom I have a very good relationship) was away at another church, and a few of the other regulars were off sick. There is one particular person — not in my choir, I hasten to add, but always invited to the meals by association — who predictably, consistently, ends up sounding off about some tabloid matter, whether it be young people not respecting their elders, people having no sense of good behaviour on the roads, or, more usually, how Britain will soon become a minority white country. What is worst about this particular person is the volume and assurance with which he expounds his idiotic views — he clearly holds a conviction that his opinions are intellectual, empirically sound, and logically grounded, something he always attempts to demonstrate by the misuse of convoluted sentence structures and quasi-hifalutin vocabulary. All this has combined, over the five years I've known him, to give the impression of someone assured in their completely imagined authority.

When he started up today (due to the abovementioned reasons I was sat rather closer to him than usual, alas) I could feel the adrenalin start pumping; memories of that day in North Manchester General came flooding back, and I was filled immediately with pure rage. Having briefly attempted passive-aggressive gestures to demonstrate our antagonism, something snapped and I began (almost) shouting rebuttals at him, peppered, or rather riddled, with expletives whose offensiveness I deemed miniscule compared to the politely phrased indecency I had just witnessed. The content of my rebuttals was poor, but I had made a forceful gesture of opposition, which encouraged most of the other people at the table to rally around me, making more substantive contributions. To my delight, the two people he usually uses as "sympathetic" sounding boards — (they will tacitly agree with anything he says to them, because of an originary desire not to disagree with anyone, this then no doubt being interpreted by the offendant as real assent) — pointedly did not take his side, but rather spent the rest of the meal being particularly smiley with me. As a result, he did not speak again for thirty minutes, or perhaps almost an hour; something completely unheard of. It is possible that he hadn't realised how little respect he commands amongst the assembled company, in which case today will have been a genuine shock. And I'm sure he'll put it all down to me being young and not respecting my elders.

So was today a good or a bad day? It was certainly unusual. Most people at church have never heard me swear in five years (this is the first time I've really lost it at anyone, a record I'm proud of given my severe anger management issues, although I have regularly lost it with the photocopier), so I guess they will have been quite entertained by hearing me construct a minute-long sentence along the lines of "That's complete and utter fucking bollocks. I've never heard such a load of bullshit in fucking years. I'm not going to shitting sit here all afternoon to hear you spout more and more of this bollocks." Etc etc. I'm glad I said something this time, even if it was dramatic and probably not very constructive. At least he's in no doubt about where I and a number of other people stand now. But I know that it won't change his mind; if anything, he will only feel more justified in the ridiculous views he already holds. And I think this is problematic for our church.

If I'd had more time to fester and come up with good lines, I'd have said something intelligent like, "I don't understand how you can call yourself a Christian and then come here, a public place with fellow Christians, and talk like this. Jesus is supposed to have embodied the most radical social ethic there is, and here you are aligning yourself with the conservatives and bigots." And I forgot to say — this is someone who views himself as incredibly pious, always beating himself around the breast the loudest during the penitential bits of the mass. How can people live these absurd contradictions? His views are a problem for another reason: our parish and congregation is increasingly formed of African immigrants. How would they feel if they heard someone in the church talking like this, when the church may well be one of few places in the area where they feel welcomed? This is not just a matter of principle — it has the potential to do real damage. I really sympathise with liberals who dismiss Christianity because we have idiots like my friend amongst our number. Oh, and let's not forget former Archbishop George Carey's words on immigration last week.

I gradually calmed down but felt a bit bad for souring the atmosphere for everyone — even though most people I think enjoyed seeing someone stand up to the guy. Nevertheless, I consoled myself by going to the bar and downing a pint of John Smiths, before gazing vacantly at his wife's Bacardi Breezer bottles, observing that the labels had been ripped off, and hoping that all that stuff about sexual frustration was exactly right.

Tags: racism, church, manchester, love, immigration, meal, migration, george, georgecarey, archbishop, carey.

Labels: church, politics, racism