Face to faith: "Liberal Anglicans should not sacrifice their beliefs in

Face to faith: "Liberal Anglicans should not sacrifice their beliefs in
order to hold on to church unity at all costs"

Marilyn McCord Adams
Saturday March 25, 2006

Guardian

Liberal tolerance is easy even for liberals to misunderstand. Liberal
societies do and should respect the right of citizens to hold whatever
beliefs they like and to organise groups around them, so long as they do
nothing to jeopardise the life, liberty, health or property of outsiders.
Typically, however, liberal tolerance does not extend any entitlement to set
public or institutional policy. In the US for example, the Ku Klux Klan is
still a legal organisation, whose members meet to reinforce one another's
racist beliefs. But the government's respect for their conscience does not
grant them any right that schools be segregated.

In recent Church of England controversies over women priests and bishops,
the notion of conscientious objection looms large. Conservatives insist that
they could not, in conscience, stay in the C of E, if it makes them accept
the offices of women priests and bishops, or even of male bishops who ordain
women. Knowing that liberals have a soft spot for tolerance, conservatives
demand respect for their conscientious convictions in the form of
institutional accommodation. Knowing that liberals have a penchant for
inclusivity, conservatives confront advocates of women bishops with a forced
choice: either stop pressing your convictions, or split the church.

Even liberal bishops are congratulating themselves after February's general
synod, on their steering "a via media between clarity and charity". They
boast that the endorsed scheme for transferred episcopal arrangements will
forward the process of ordaining women bishops, while changing ecclesial
polity to guarantee parishes in dioceses with female bishops or male bishops
who have participated in the ordination of women the option of working
instead with male bishops whose hands are clean. Inclusivity has been
secured, albeit by a move that will compromise the symbolic authority of
liberal and women (but not of conservative male) bishops.

Certainly, conservatives have been "wise as serpents" in setting up the
dilemma. But in trying for the "innocence of doves", liberal leaders have
betrayed their own cause. Liberal beliefs - that conservative positions on
gender and sexuality evidence the grip of oppressive taboos - are also
conscientious. Sacrificing such beliefs in order to hang on to already
impaired communion with those who will remain only if you do what they tell
you sends the message that dividing the church is more sinful than misogyny
and homophobia, and more important than first-class ecclesial citizenship
for women and for homosexual Christians. Conservatives thereby win a double
victory: not only do they co-opt the church's institutional structures; they
confirm the widespread suspicion that liberals do not have enough backbone
to be conscientious at all.

There is no health in this, because "going along to get along" is not the
gospel. The synoptics virtually guarantee: because the reign of God stands
in judgment over any and every human social system, its coming by successive
approximations is sure to violate our socially constructed identities
repeatedly. Our part is to discern for all we're worth and to live up to the
light that is in us. Because we are fallible, we are not entitled to make
undermining other people's lifestyles our ends or chosen means, but we have
to accept that it may be a known but unintended side-effect of putting our
conscientious convictions into effect. Refusing to do so shows no charity to
the oppressed whose cause we feel called to sponsor. Nor can we consistently
believe that it shows charity to those who are dug in against us, because
our considered opinion is that they are imprisoned by illogic and taboos.

Finally, liberals must not make an idol of unity. In institutions, as in
biology, differentiation and division may be in service of richer and more
mature integration. John's Jesus prays for unity, but the Jesus-movement
precipitated a schism within Judaism. It was not his first choice, but it is
how the gospel spread.

. The Rev Marilyn McCord Adams is Regius professor of divinity and canon of
Christ Church, Oxford

Guardian Unlimited C Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1739234,00.html