Sex and schism in south London

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: July 11 2008 18:39 | Last updated: July 11 2008 18:39

At the Lambeth conference, which meets once a decade, bishops from the 38 provinces of the worldwide Anglican communion gather to think, pray and talk about sex. No binding votes are cast, but Lambeth has been a venue for airing Church preoccupations since it was first convoked in 1867. For decades, women, gays, abortion, polygamy and venereal disease have divided the attendees. At this year's conference, which starts on July 20, the bishops are expected to clash over the ordination of Gene Robinson, a non-celibate gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. In recent days, the Church of England, at its general synod, approved ordaining women bishops, souring relations with the Vatican. And the London press revealed that one C of E priest had celebrated an unofficial gay marriage ceremony for two others.

The only thing preventing a walkout by conservative bishops is that so few of them are attending the conference to start with. A thousand conservatives, mostly Africans, including 300 bishops, travelled to Jerusalem last month for an alternative meeting, the first Global Anglican Future Conference. Bishops from Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya plan to boycott Lambeth. Many are on the verge of a "breaking of communion" with the mainstream US Church over its policies on gays. Why, in general, is sex such a pressing issue for religion just now? Why, in particular, does homosexuality among US Episcopal priests threaten to tear up a world religion in a way that, say, the past decade's revelations of homosexuality among US Catholic priests did not?

According to the conservative Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, these fights are a "symptom". The biggest thing they are a symptom of is the newfound might of African Christianity. There were 9m Christians (of all denominations) in Africa in 1900 and 393m in 2005. Half the world's Anglicans are Africans. Their views differ. Christians in poor countries, the historian Philip Jenkins has shown, see the Bible as more authentic and authoritative than North Americans and Europeans do. They read it in a more literal way. This is not because African christians are less rational but because the Bible's world resembles theirs more. And the stakes are higher. In much of Africa, Christianity is a fighting faith: to evangelise is to recruit. There is no similar desperation on the western side of these controversies – the sexual rights for which reformers are fighting inside the Church are widely available in institutions outside of it.

The African view is considerably more in harmony with that of conservative Anglicans in England, Australia, Canada and, especially, the US. The entire diocese of San Joaquin, California, has defected to the more conservative Anglican province of the Southern Cone in Latin America. At least 33 US churches have placed themselves under the authority of the Church of Uganda. Dozens more have joined the Church of Nigeria. There are US "missionary" bishops of African churches.

John Bryson Chane, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, recently wrote: "Theologically, support for same-sex marriage is not a dramatic break with tradition, but a recognition that the church's understanding of marriage has changed dramatically over 2,000 years." Well, that depends on what Bishop Chane means by "the" Church. The English Church was in communion with Rome before Henry VIII changed his understanding of marriage. The result was schism. Apparently, what constitutes a "dramatic break" is in the eye of the beholder.

Other bishops view same-sex unions as a bigger break than Bishop Chane. At the 1998 conference they passed a resolution, by a vote of 526 to 70, "rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with scripture" and opposing "the legitimising or blessing of same-sex unions" and the ordination of people in such unions. It is the US disregard of this resolution that has led African bishops to cry bad faith.

As they debated women bishops and gay priests, Euro-American elites used to assume that time was on their side – first, because the logic of women's and sexual liberation was ineluctable and, second, because the opinions of the developing world were invariably "progressive". Wrong on both counts. There is resistance to feminism in many churches – indeed, the traditionalist ones draw more converts than the mainline ones. And those progressive views were political, not theological. A big Anglican role in the anti-apartheid movement disguised this divergence between Britain and North America on one hand and Africa on the other. Just as the US conservative coalition has come apart after the collapse of communism, the diverse Anglican churches are no longer held together by the struggle against white racism.

The consequences of this misreading are compounded by globalisation. When the Anglican Church began to change its views on human sexuality, African Christians were disorganised. Maybe the internet has not penetrated Africa the way it has the US and Europe, but it has penetrated enough for the leaderships of the various African Anglicanisms to discover they have roughly the same gripe with the metropole and can make common cause against it.

Whether English Anglicanism or African Anglicanism predominates, and what arrangements are made for reconciling the two, is the business of nobody but the Anglicans themselves. But only two resolutions to this situation appear possible: a split in the communion or an African preponderance within it. Either way, the long period of liberalisation in the Anglican communion is drawing to a close.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

Sex and schism in south London
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