The Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles has elected an openly-gay woman in a committed relationship as one of two new assistant or ‘suffragan’ bishops. Before the newly elected bishops can be consecrated, the choice will have to be approved by other Episcopal dioceses around the country. The signs are that this will happen; last summer US Episcopal bishops voted to end a three year moratorium on appointing gay bishops.
This is going to set off another tempest in the teacup of American Episcopal politics and will greatly complicate relations between the American Episcopal church and more conservative Anglican churches in countries like Nigeria. It will likely finalize the split between the majority of American Episcopalians and the dioceses and parishes who have voted to secede from the national church in recent years.
But I don’t want to blog about theology or gay rights here. I want to make a point about American culture.
Most of my fellow Episcopalians hated George W. Bush and his foreign policy. More than anything else, they despised his unilateralism, his hotheadedness and his seeming contempt for global institutions like the United Nations.
Fair enough, but liberal Episcopalians turn out to be just as unilateral, just as hotheaded and just as unwilling to seek compromise to preserve the unity of global institutions as Bush. As more and more American Episcopalians became convinced that lesbian and gay church people are loved by God and that homosexuality is a way of being human rather than a depraved moral choice, they concluded that they had a moral duty to give equal treatment to gays. Once that moral duty was clear, it was immoral to delay.
The Anglican Communion is a group of national churches linked to the Archbishop of Canterbury. These churches are found around the world — mostly where the Union Jack once flew over British imperial outposts, but also where missionaries established local churches. While there are, officially, 26 million Anglicans in the United Kingdom, few of them are seen frequently in church. The 45 million Anglicans in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania are generally more active in church life — and much, much more conservative on many social issues than the older, wealthier and generally whiter Anglican churches in places like the US. (There are about 2 million Episcopalians in the United States today.) As it happens, the member states of the British Commonwealth — a community composed mostly of Britain and its former colonies — are generally more opposed to homosexuality than much of the rest of the world, and many of the ex-colonies still retain anti-homosexuality laws from the imperial period when Britain, more religious and more conservative than it is now, imposed such laws on the Empire.
African cultures often take extremely dim views of homosexuality, with draconian laws against homosexual acts on the books in many places. A bill now being considered before the Ugandan Parliament would impose life imprisonment for most homosexual acts with the death penalty in certain cases. Members of the public who failed to report knowledge of homosexual behavior could face three years in prison if the bill passes. In Nigeria, where a handful of organizers are fighting strong and sometimes violent resistance, a bill now under consideration would impose criminal penalties on same sex couples living together and otherwise put additional restraints on public advocacy of homosexuality and gay rights.
Further complicating this picture is the religious competition between Anglicans (and other western faiths like the Roman Catholic church) against Islam on the one hand and Pentecostalism on the other. Religious tensions in much of sub-Saharan Africa are very high; tens of thousands of people in Nigeria have been killed in violence between predominantly Christian and Muslims factions and tribes. Much of this tension is linked to the dramatic growth of African Christianity in the last fifty years; globalization is also changing the continent as economic development and urbanization lead to mass migrations of different tribal and religious groups into growing cities. For Anglicans in these countries, growing tolerance of homosexuality in the western churches isn’t just a theological issue; it directly affects the way they and their churches are perceived by sometimes hostile and even murderous neighbors.
Now the theology of homosexuality is a very complicated affair. For Christians, the problems are not so much the commandments in the Old Testament that call for the death penalty for homosexuals (and witches) as it is the epistles of St. Paul, especially his master-epistle to the Romans, a document that stands very much at the heart of Christian reflection down through the centuries. In that letter, Paul seems to write of homosexuality either as a depraved moral choice or as a punishment from God against idolaters. In this he is clearly expressing the Jewish reaction against the tolerant sexual mores of the Greco-Roman world — and one should not forget that in a time of slavery, aristocratic decadence and the dependence of weak clients on strong patrons, homosexuality in the age of Nero could sometimes be an ugly thing (like the exploitative forms of heterosexuality which Paul also attacked).
Different people read these texts in different ways today. I myself think that ultimately the common reflection of the world’s Christians will reach something like a consensus that there is a difference between innate and involuntary homosexual orientation and the behavior Paul had in mind. How the world’s churches will develop moral norms to fit this vision of homosexuality is something I cannot answer, and I suspect that different denominations will have their own approaches and that regional variations will remain in the way the world’s Christians come to terms with this question. However, that’s a layman’s opinion, not a fatwa; for now this is something every Christian needs to decide in the light of his or her own conscience, conscientious study of scripture, and careful attention to the leaders, doctrines and authorities of his or her chosen form of faith. In questions like this one ought to be careful and cautious about one’s own position, always remembering that one could be wrong. At the same time one must extend the greatest possible charity towards those of different views. Sometimes God may be more interested in whether those of us on the different sides of questions like this behave appropriately, responsibly and charitably than in whether we get it ‘right’.
Meanwhile, I think we Episcopalians and Anglicans are all partly in the wrong. Both the liberal North Americans and the conservative Africans seem to be reading the cultural consensus of their society into Christian doctrine rather than judging their society’s standards by something higher and different. I’d have a lot more confidence in the theological bona fides of the African bishops if I heard more pastoral concern for homosexuals, combined with protests against draconian laws that reflect public prejudice more than divine standards.
But as a North American Episcopalian, I’d like to see my own church leaders and laypeople look a little harder in the mirror. What they will see there looks more like George W. Bush than, I think, many of them understand.
First, there’s the unilateralism. In a fellowship like the Anglican Communion, consecrating a bishop isn’t a decision that just affects one national church. When Episcopalians in New Hampshire and Los Angeles elect gay bishops, this matters in Lagos and Nairobi. Sometimes belonging to a global institution involves costs; you can’t always do everything you would like, or make changes as fast as you would like. George W. Bush wasn’t willing to wait and build a consensus at the UN for the war in Iraq; American Episcopalians aren’t willing to wait for other countries to reach the same conclusions they have reached on gay bishops. The world can’t be expected always to move at America’s pace.
It’s an American thing. When we are convinced that we are right, we think it’s immoral to slow down and wait for others. We know what’s right and it’s our duty to do it. Now.
At the same time, Americans tend to think that legitimacy goes from the grassroots up, not from the top down. Power belongs to the people, and the farther from the people power gets, the more likely it is to be corrupted. We tend to be more suspicious of the federal government than of state governments — and we are more suspicious of the UN than of the feds. It’s the same way in the church. We trust the local congregation more than the diocese, the diocese more than the national church, and the national church more than the Archbishop of Canterbury and the global communion he nominally heads.
On the right, the combination of those two traits — unilateralism and a preference for local authority and legitimacy over global institutions — shaped the Bush foreign policy. On the left, they are shaping the Episcopal Church’s relations with its Anglican brethren.
We’ll see where it all leads; this is one of those horrible disputes where everyone involved is sincerely convinced that they are doing the right thing. That’s usually when people behave worst and do the most damage.
Meanwhile the poor old American Episcopal church is going to continue to lose members and close parishes.