Thought for the day

Today’s will be the shortest blog post I have made to date – it is a simple thought that popped into my head last night:

The actions of conservative Christians to exclude them has no effect whatsoever on limiting LGBT people from fulfilling God’s purpose: it simply affects where this activity may take place. The Holy Spirit is not constrained by other people’s opinions.

The waning power of Anglican Mainstream

The House of Bishops announced a review of the Bishops’ Guidelines on Civil Partnerships yesterday, which prompted Anglican Mainstream to reissue a letter sent to the House of Bishops in 2005, a few months after the UK’s Civil Partnership Act become law: ‘Civil Partnerships a parody of marriage: Bishops must take action’.

In the preamble to the letter itself, Anglican Mainstream claimed:

that same-sex sexual relationships are contrary to Christian discipleship for both clergy and lay people

And, in the letter itself, that:

it would be inadvisable for Christians to enter [Civil Partnerships] if only to avoid causing scandal

Scandal, what scandal? Anglican Mainstream might perhaps be extremely disappointed with the conspicuous lack of scandal caused by Civil Partnerships in the past six years, but it has not stopped them reissuing the statement. My partner and I were amongst the first to take advantage of the Civil Partnership Act and there has not been one hint of scandal in any sphere of our lives, neither in our families, at work, amongst our friends, or within our church community: everybody is perfectly happy and calm about the whole thing – and we belong to a staunchly Evangelical church.

Whatever Anglican Mainstream claims about Civil Partnerships being a ‘parody of marriage’, I am sure our own personal experience is reflected very widely, so I don’t believe this viewpoint is how most people either within or outside the church see things. Most people probably recognise that the rights given us following a declaration of lifelong commitment to each other are no less a reasonable entitlement than those given to a straight couple who marry in a registry office. I’m sure if Anglican Mainstream were around in 1837, they would have been purple with indignation about the Civil Marriage Act and called it a ‘parody of marriage’. But we hardly bat an eyelid nowadays at the thought of people getting married in a Registry Office. There is no scandal, and indeed most people who actually know someone in a Civil Partnership judge us not by the fact that we are in a Civil Partnership, or indeed the fact that we are a gay couple, or what we might or might not do in bed, but by what we do in the rest of our lives. If we are Christians, do our lives reflect the sort of life a Christian is encouraged to lead? Gay Christians are no different from any other Christians in this respect: in my experience, even the most outspoken Christian opponents of homosexuality will, when they know you personally, quickly start to judge you by who you are and what you do rather than by your sexuality. And if their entire mindset on the gay issue is not changed, then at least it is not you who is now the problem, but all the other gays: the issue quickly becomes an abstract one for them about other gay people, not about you, but as far as the real human relationships of their experience are concerned, reality kicks in perfectly pleasantly and rather quickly, and it’s business as usual, not to mention lunch or dinner. I have personally been told by one of the biggest names in Evangelical circles: ‘Some of my best friends are gay. I play tennis with one of them at the weekend.’ This from somebody who quite literally ‘writes the book’ on the homosexuality issue. But, somehow, it seems to be easy for some people never to make the connection between the gay people you know and love and the gay people you don’t know who are part of a worldwide ‘homosexual agenda’ to ‘undermine Christian marriage’ and threaten the church.

To those of us who remember the seventies and eighties, doesn’t this seem all too familiar? Isn’t it a little like the banter from Rigsby to Philip in ‘Rising Damp’ – which, to our more contemporary ear, sounds very much like prejudice – if not outright racism?

This week, President Obama gave a speech on the occasion of Gay Pride Month in the USA. He said the following:

What gives me hope is the deeper shift we’re seeing that’s a transformation, not just in our laws, but in the hearts and minds of people. The progress, led not by Washington, but by ordinary citizens. It’s propelled not by politics, but by love, and friendship, and a sense of mutual regard and mutual respect. It’s playing out in New York, it’s playing out in courtrooms, it’s playing out in the ballot box. […]

It happens when a father realizes that he doesn’t just love his daughter, but he loves her partner. It happens when a soldier tells his unit that he’s gay, and they say, ‘Well, we knew that, but you’re a good soldier.’ It happens when a video sparks a movement to let every single young person out there know that they’re not alone. It happens when people look past their differences to understand our common humanity. And that’s not just the story of the gay rights movement, it is the story of America.

I’m British and perhaps not as aware as I would otherwise be of the complex nuances of American politics, but I have to say, when I read this it brought a lump to my throat. Because Obama here reflects the experience of countless thousands who, upon the (perhaps initially unwelcome) realisation that a friend or a loved-one is gay, either are unfazed or begin to think deeply about the issue for the first time, and change their minds. This is the experience of at least one Senator in New York last week when the Gay Marriage bill was passed into law, and this experience is the same for Republican or Democrat alike, as most people who have come out to their parents will testify. The Religious Right will try to persuade you that the judgement of one personally affected by the issue is clouded by love and that the change of heart changes nothing, certainly not the ‘truth’. From their perspective, this is love misplaced (or misunderstood), for a truly loving parent reprimands a child out of love for the child, and so should a truly loving Christian reprimand a ‘homosexual’. But for many people, having a gay friend, a gay son or daughter, or a gay loved-one makes them reflect on whether the ‘truths’ that they have hitherto accepted are really truths at all. As soon as you start dealing with real people, the once apparently simple ‘Biblical’ message becomes less simple (see, for instance, this article in today’s Huffington Post) and it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile what you thought the bible was saying about homosexuality with the reality of the gay people you know: what they are, who they are, how good or honest they are, how happy and well-adjusted they are. Surprisingly to some, gay people are not just interested in ‘genital acts’, as Anglican Mainstream so charmingly puts it. Many actually have a much more useful role to offer society. Some even have a useful role to offer the church.

When they lose their ignorance, people change their minds. As one New York Senator, Roy McDonald, so colourfully put it: “You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing. You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that […] Well, f*** it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

And the interesting thing about this process is that it is, by-and-large, one way: most people when they become better acquainted with the issue through personal experience, become more understanding, and less accepting of the old ‘truths’. But not the other way around: people rarely go back to a position of homophobia. This is why Anglican Mainstream and other Christian Right organisations are so keen to wheel out the ‘Ex-gays’: people who have changed their mind about their homosexual leanings and have rejected them, returning to a – sometimes short-lived – life as a heterosexual. But the experience of so few does not, as some would want you to believe, mean that all gays may be ‘cured’ of homosexuality. Far from it. Most cannot ‘pray away the gay’ any more than they could pray away other unwanted attributes, as is actually subtly acknowledged on websites for organisations like NARTH who offer therapy for people who have ‘unwanted’ same-sex attractions. The important – and much overlooked – word here is ‘unwanted’. Anglican Mainstream and other similar organisations would prefer you to think that all gay people can ‘pray away’ their same-sex attractions, however this is simply not the case. For most of us, the same-sex attraction is not ‘unwanted’, it is simply part of us. We have come to accept – and even love – ourselves as we are and don’t want to give our whole lives over to fighting it. We are what we are and we’re much too busy just living our lives to let this be the big issue it apparently is for others. Homosexuality isn’t necessarily a big issue for gay people: it’s a big issue for a minority group of Christians who simply can’t figure out how to deal with it but have convinced themselves that they should.

Neither is there any great issue about Civil Partnerships within society at large in the UK: and perhaps this is what must upset Anglican Mainstream the most, as if somehow having lost the mainstream opinion so completely, they must constantly redouble their efforts to win it back. But, even within the church, their support is truly limited, and falling all the time as the world moves on and the young – who, generally, simply don’t have an issue with it – grow older. In the preamble to the above letter, Anglican Mainstream, along with the Church of England Evangelical Council and Reform, claim to represent people in over 1000 churches. But if my experience is anything to go by, coming from a church that Anglican Mainstream probably counts amongst this number, they, and the church leadership, are massively out of touch with the vast majority of people who actually come to the church, for one simple reason: they never ask. Discussion is actively discouraged and acceptance of the ‘traditional’ position is simply assumed. I don’t suppose my church is much different from many of the others Anglican Mainstream claim to represent, but I am very certain that they do not represent us at all. Most people in my church have probably never heard of Anglican Mainstream. Never once have I heard them mentioned in ten years of attendance.

It would be folly to say that we don’t need to worry about organisations like Anglican Mainstream, because their power lies in the power of their deception, and if they can persuade people that they are powerful, then they effectively are. But they are not nearly as powerful as they think they are, and their influence is certainly on the wane. It is no wonder they concentrate on the support of countries like Nigeria, where homophobia is an accepted norm and it is easy to persuade people of the ‘truth’ of the biblical message; where people like Archbishop Nicholas Okoh consider homosexuality the defining issue on whether Nigeria should remain in or leave the UN now that the UN has set as one of its ambitions an end to discrimination against LGBT people. Given the appalling discrimination many gay people face in Africa, is this the sort of Christianity to which we want to align ourselves, or are LGBT people in today’s context the ‘least of these’ whom we failed to protect: ‘What you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me’ (Matthew 25:44-46)? Most of us are justly horrified at the way LGBT people are treated by ‘Christians’, but to Anglican Mainstream, the support – real or assumed – of the vast numbers of Anglicans in Africa is seen as a necessary means to an end, however distasteful the means.