S14 E9: The One About Homosexuality And The Anglican Church

On the 13th February the General Synod met and discuss 'Living in Faith and Love' which is mentioned in today's episode (link below).  A decision still had not been made on and three more months has been requested.  

What stance should the Anglican Church take on homosexuality?

Dr. Susannah Cornwall from the University of Exeter Theology and Religion Faculty takes us through the history of the relationship between The Anglican Church and Homosexuality.  She highlights the nuances of this debate that are often missed when we reflect on this relationship.  While the Anglican Church were among the first to support the decriminalisation of homosexuality, it's more because they saw it as an illness rather a crime. Furthermore, as a global church, the impact that any change in Theology has to be considered against the variety of political and social contexts.  Furthermore, colonialism has often pushed a western agenda insensitively onto other groups without a true understanding of them.

We discuss the importance of the adjusted position on contraception by the Anglican Church and how this is pertinent to discussions about homosexuality, as well as what the debate has been and where the Anglican Church might go next.

Living in Faith and Love

https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2025-01/gs-2386-living-in-love-and-faith.pdf

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2020/13-november/news/uk/living-in-love-and-faith-a-quick-guide-through-the-book

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the R.E. Podcast, the first dedicated R.E. podcast for students and teachers.

SPEAKER_03 0:12

My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this is the RE Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think R.E. is boring, which it is, and I'll prove it to you. My guest today is going to help us understand the history of attitudes towards homosexuality in the Anglican Church and why the context of such a worldwide church provides challenges to having a global doctrine. We are recording after the resignation of Justin Welby, and so we will touch upon the wider context of the relationship between the church and sex and how, as educators, we can talk about such events. So, Susanna, welcome to the RE podcast. Thank you very much. Do you want to just introduce yourself a little bit and sort of talk about how you came to research the history of homosexuality in the Anglican Church?

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Yeah, sure. So I'm I'm an academic based at the University of Exeter in the UK. I'm professor of constructive theologies, which means I'm interested really in the history of the way that Christian theology has been understood and interpreted, but in particular to bring that into conversation with contemporary questions. So gender and sexuality are some of the areas that I'm particularly interested in, but also things like race and decolonization and the history of empire and so on. I did an undergraduate theology degree and did a module about, I think it was called Christian Moral Theory and Ethics, and for one of my elective essays, like we're going back 25 years, I chose to write about sexual ethics at that point. And yeah, for me, one of the things that had always interested me was the way that people were negotiating, remaining faithful to their faith traditions, in particular people who wanted to have a really high place for sacred texts, but who were also taking really seriously the experience of everyday people. So I was interested in, you know, what happened when there seemed to be a clash perhaps between biblical teachings on something like same-sex relationships and then the experiences of lesbian and gay people. So that's how I got interested, really.

SPEAKER_03 2:09

It's so fascinating. You're saying so many words. I know a lot of people are going to be going, Oh, yes, yes, yes, we love that. We love decolonization and we love, you know, sort of like gender theology and things like that. So that's really interesting. You know, I think there's always a sort of slight tension, as you say, between experience and doctrine and what parts of the sacred text are context and time and place, and what are meant to be sort of absolutes. And I think that's probably something we're going to get into today. So let's just start by defining our terms. So just clarify, because I've got this wrong before, the relationship between the Anglican Church and the Church of England and sort of where the Anglican Church came from, how it emerged.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Yeah. So the Church of England is an Anglican church, but there are lots of other Anglican churches around the world, and they're part of something called the Anglican Communion, which is like a global network of Anglican churches. In some places, the name Episcopalian gets used rather than Anglican, so in the Scottish Episcopal Church, for example, but that is still an Anglican church. So the Anglican Communion really is a network of churches across the world that share a particular relationship with things like liturgy, episcopal leadership or leadership by bishops, and a particular, I guess, distinctively Anglican way of organising themselves. So the Anglican Communion has existed since about the middle of the 19th century. At that point, most of the Anglican churches in countries that have now got their own Anglican churches, at that point they were really still outposts of the Church of England, kind of going back to the days of kind of missionary societies and that sort of thing. So the Church of England is an Anglican church. It's actually the only Anglican church which is the established church in its country, so it's the official church of the state. You know, we have the monarch at the moment, King Charles, who's the governor of the Church of England. And then you've got the Archbishop of Canterbury. So you mentioned Justin Welby, who's just resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury. So traditionally, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who's the kind of head of the Church of England, they are treated as a kind of focus of unity for all of the other Anglican churches worldwide. But actually, all of those individual Anglican churches have got their own leadership, their own governance. So they're kind of looking to Britain and looking to the Archbishop of Canterbury, but actually officially they're kind of self-governing. So the Archbishop of Canterbury doesn't actually have any authority in any other of the provinces of the Anglican Communion. You know, they've all got their own bishops and archbishops. Roughly about every ten years or so, there's a big kind of worldwide gathering of all or most of the bishops from the different Anglican churches around the world. That's called the Lambeth Conference. And they will try and come to agreements about certain things and make declarations on things that they agree about. But again, technically, none of those declarations is binding on the member churches. Each of the member churches is coming to their own decisions about, you know, in this case, sex and sexuality, but actually about lots of other things as well. So I hope that helps to sort of clear it up a bit.

SPEAKER_03 5:18

It really does. And I think probably, and I don't know if I'm reading too much into it, that particular organisational structure creates problems because it means that it's very, very difficult to create shared doctrine and that people can kind of sway back and forward on different things, I would imagine. And so there's a sort of 400-year history then of the Anglican Church, but actually it's the bit from the 20th century onwards that we're kind of interested in in terms of this episode. So at the beginning of the 20th century, the bit that we're interested in is when the Anglican Church adjusted their position on contraception. So just talk to us about this change and why it's specifically pertinent to this conversation about homosexuality.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Yeah, of course. So, I mean, to start with the last bit, you know, one reason why it's relevant is that in churches which do accept that contraception can legitimately be used, which obviously not all churches do, but in churches which do accept that, one argument is churches in that situation have already recognised and already accepted that sexual intercourse, sexual activity is not just for the purpose of making babies. You know, if you accept that heterosexual couples can use contraception legitimately, that they're not going to be trying to have a child or being open to have a child every time they have sex, one argument says, well, you've already recognised that sex is about much more than that. You know, it's about unity, it's about bonding, it's about all sorts of things. And if you've already removed the assumption that sex always has to be about conceiving babies, you've removed part of the objection that somebody might have to same-sex sexual activity then. So lots of people, I imagine, will know the official position of the Roman Catholic Church is still that even married couples should not be using contraception because it frustrates or gets in the way of what's seen as one of the central purposes of sex, that is, to conceive children. But perhaps not everybody knows that till only about a hundred years ago that was the position of the Church of England as well. So I talked earlier about the Lambeth Conference, this worldwide gathering of lots of the bishops from Anglican churches worldwide. So after the 1908 Lambeth Conference, the bishops put out a statement and they said this, I'll read the quotation. They called on all Christian people to discountenance the use of all artificial means of restriction as demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare. So at this particular Lambeth Conference in 1908, there was a whole committee set up to think about this whole question of contraception and population restriction. And one of the real concerns they had at the time was they said if we look across the Western world, there's been a decline in birth rates, but they said that decline had been most marked among English-speaking peoples. And what they were saying was English-speaking peoples used to be super fertile and have lots of children, and that seems to be declining. So their worry was essentially that if English-speaking people diminished in number, they would be committing what they actually called race suicide. That's what they were talking about at the time. And they thought that by committing race suicide, English-speaking people, English-speaking Christians, would be failing to fulfil the destiny which God had ordained for them and to which they've been called. So what's going on, you know, at this point essentially, Britain is worried about losing its place as an imperial power. It's worried about its kind of shifting position on the world stage. And really, it wants to ensure that there are going to continue being plenty of white British children born who will be able to grow up to rule and govern its colonies, right? And you know, the bishops at the time, they were people of their time, and I think largely would have taken for granted British superiority over other nations. That was seen as part of Britain's call. So that's 1908. And then if we jump forward to 1920 at a slightly later Lambeth Conference, again the bishops say we are emphatic in our warning against the use of contraception and against the evils with which the extension of contraception threatens the race. So by 1920, obviously, we're just after the end of World War I. The population has been severely diminished in World War I. So if we think ourselves back into that context, I suppose you can see that it makes sense that Britain at the time is really keen to rebuild, really keen to ensure that enough new people are going to be born to kind of replace people killed in the war. We know that lots of women of that generation didn't marry, you know, either because perhaps they'd experienced what it was like to work outside the home and didn't want to get married, but actually for really pragmatic reasons, which was lots and lots of young men had been killed and there just weren't enough husbands to go round, you know. So you can see the powers that be, both within the church and more widely in society, they were really keen to encourage women who did marry to have children. They were thinking in really pragmatic, practical terms. So it wasn't actually until the next Lambeth Conference in 1930 that's when finally they kind of said, yes, we are going to say that we legitimise contraceptive use for married couples who want to limit their family size. And really, you know, again, that's following other shifts that happen after the end of World War I. You know, more women in the workforce. There have been acts of parliament in 1918 and 1928, I think, that made it possible for women to vote for the first time. So, you know, shifting attitudes to the place of women in society in particular, but I would say, you know, leading right up to World War II, there was still a sense that having children was something of a patriotic duty, so still a bit of suspicion about contraception floating around at that point.

SPEAKER_03 11:23

I I have to say my head is I I just it's really hard to, I think, put ourselves in that context and understand just how embedded white superiority was. Yeah. And it was normalised, you know, it was it it wasn't even questioned as to whether it was good or bad. It was just accepted. So that's really interesting. So what is the next point I want to talk about is kind of probably the most surprising thing that maybe is going to come out of this conversation, which is that it was the Anglican Church that were part of the move to decriminalise homosexuality in the 1950s. So what were the specific conditions that led them to support this? Because it seems to be counter to everything that they've sort of said before about homosexuality.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

So, yeah, most people will know I think that it wasn't until the 1960s that same-sex activity between men was decriminalised in Britain. If we're talking about same-sex activity between women, that was actually never formally criminalised, which you know that might tell you a lot about who makes laws and you know their awareness about female sexuality and all sorts of things. But anyway, that's an aside. But you know, the change in law didn't come out of nowhere, right? So for quite a while before 1967, when the law changed, there had been discussions, conversations in society. And really, I'd say by the 1950s, there was already quite a lot of pressure to change the law, because there was a feeling that actually by that point the law was already out of step with public opinion. So I'd say there was quite a sympathetic view, among some people, at least in the 50s, towards gay men, particularly because of the risk of blackmail if they were found out. You know, at that point there was no way to have a kind of licit, legitimate public same-sex relationship. It's worth saying, I think, it's not that in the 1950s everybody was really pro-homosexuality, they weren't. Probably most people that you asked at that time would have said, well, yeah, obviously it's inferior to heterosexuality. But I think the point is mostly by the 50s, people didn't believe it should be a criminal matter anymore. So they didn't think that gay men should be criminalised. And as you've said, actually Christians, you know, including Anglican Church of England Christians, but also including Quakers and some others, they were really among the people who were campaigning for the law to be changed. Now, one of the sort of assumptions floating around at this point is being gay is a weakness, and Christians are supposed to be loving, compassionate people, and therefore they should have sympathy and compassion towards these unfortunate people who are attracted to people of the same sex. So, from a present-day standpoint, that probably feels quite uncomfortable. You know, it's not particularly language that lots of people would be happy to use today to think of homosexuality as a kind of illness or like a psychological weakness. But if we think about it in the context of its time, it's a really important step forward from the point when actually homosexuality was seen as just a perversion, like a deliberate and sick choice, as it might have been constructed a little bit earlier. So essentially, commentators in the 1950s were saying gay people can't help being gay, it's an affliction and we should feel sorry for them. So, about ten years before the law changed, so 1957, there was a report commissioned by the government called the Wolfenden Report, and this basically recommended that same-sex activity between consenting adults in private should be decriminalized. And the reason why that's interesting to us is that was really heavily influenced by a book that was written by an Anglican theologian called Derek Sherwin Bailey. The book was called Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition. So Derek Sherwin Bailey was one of the people saying homosexuality shouldn't be understood as a perversion, essentially. He led a group of church leaders in producing a document called The Problem of Homosexuality. And again, that doesn't sound great to modern ears to sort of start from the position that it's a problem, but basically they were saying, you know, yes, it is the role of the church and the role of the government to safeguard people from moral corruption, but what they said was, under the law as it stood at the time in the 1950s, gay men's own rights were being violated, and the church needed to speak out to protect them. So, you know, as we've said, not great by today's standards. You know, Derek Show in Bailey himself, he believed that probably homosexuality would die out because it would be recognised socially as kind of less fulfilling than heterosexuality, so he still seemed to think there was kind of an element of choice there. But clearly he was motivated by his Christianity, his sense of justice to help bring about a situation where homosexual men were no longer persecuted through criminalization.

SPEAKER_03 16:29

And I think it is really important to know that this was a stepping stone to something which is more parity and more equality, and although it wasn't the end result, it's a really important stepping stone. You know, you have to go through a spectrum of things becoming slightly different, and I think that's so important for a lot of the debates that are happening now to recognise the pattern of history that you don't get revolutions, you get evolutions. And so this is an evolution of thought that is an important part of it. And I I just I have to chuckle just in terms of like when the patriarchy suits women, that the patriarchy didn't understand that you know lesbians would exist, and so therefore lesbians were kind of freer to express their sexuality, and so the patriarchy sort of did us an unwitting favour. Yeah, sometimes there's advantages to flying under the radar. Yes. And I'm also imagining that this is part of a wider global introduction of human rights, and that this idea that people have the right to express their sexuality or love whoever they want to love, which I would imagine is the post-second world war thinking. Let's think about what happened next. So, over the last 30 years, what has the debate been?

SPEAKER_01 17:44

So, thinking about the Church of England in particular, if we go back to 1990, that's what, 35 years now, isn't it? Terrifyingly. So the Church of England has been thinking a lot in that period, in particular about the question of same-sex marriage. So the situation right now, kind of beginning of 2025, is same-sex marriage is now legal in England. However, Church of England clergy, they are not allowed at the moment to hold same-sex marriages in their churches. They're also not allowed to officiate at them elsewhere, and they themselves, Church of England clergy, they are not allowed to be in same-sex marriages, and they can be disciplined if they do marry. So the Church of England, it's got this governing body, the General Synod, and the General Synod has approved some prayers of blessing which are going to be able to be used in church for same-sex couples who've had civil weddings. So the synod has already approved that, but the bishops haven't kind of officially given the go-ahead for them to be used quite yet. To understand a bit more about the context, so back in 1991, the Church of England published this very tiny pamphlet, really, this document called Issues in Human Sexuality. And one of the things that that said was that clergy, who at this time would all have been men, because women were not ordained till the middle of the 90s, so all men at this point, clergy, it said, need to be a focus for unity in their communities. And because of this, clergy are not at liberty to enter into sexually active same-sex relationships because it would be too controversial, right? Because in the early 90s, some people would have thought that was fine, but lots of people wouldn't. And that was in line with the kind of wider Church of England teaching, which still stands to this day, which is sexual activity should be reserved for marriage. The proper place for sexual activity is marriage. Gay couples cannot marry as of 1991, therefore gay couples shouldn't be having sex. And we need to keep in mind that in 1991, same-sex marriage wasn't really on the horizon yet. Although it happened not too many years later, that all happened quite quickly. In 1991, people weren't really thinking about that as a possibility. We also need to keep in mind that 1991 is less than ten years into the emergence of HIV and AIDS, and there's something of a social backlash at that time against gay men in particular, and about what was sometimes kind of called the gay lifestyle. So public opinion on same-sex marriage shifted quickly. Same-sex marriage has now been possible in England for more than ten years, but the Church of England is exempt from that law, so it's not possible legally for them to celebrate same-sex marriages. So, this guidance from 1991 called Issues in Human Sexuality that hasn't been superseded in the Church of England by anything more recent. They are working on it at the moment, but it hasn't been superseded. So, what that has meant is that from 1991 up until now, people who were accepted to train as clergy in the Church of England, they've had to affirm that they agree to live in accordance with issues in human sexuality. There's a bit of a postcode lottery on that. It seems to depend a bit on which diocese you're in, who your bishop is, about whether you'll even be asked the question, whether you'll be asked to say that you agree to it or just that you've read it, etc. But anyway, that's the situation. Now the Church of England does though allow its clergy to be in same-sex civil partnerships. And the reason for that seems to be that in law there's no assumption that a civil partnership will be sexually active, but there is that assumption made about marriage. So Church of England clergy are allowed to be in civil partnerships, but they've had to promise to remain celibate. So that's been kind of the way the conversation has been going over the last 30 years, really.

SPEAKER_03 21:48

And is there any distinction now between same sex male relationships and same sex female? Has that been brought into the narrative, or is all of these discussions and debates just about two men?

SPEAKER_01 21:59

No, so this is not. The same for everybody.

unknown 22:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

So it's the same case for women or for men, you know, for female or for male clergy in in same-sex relationships. Yeah, same situation.

SPEAKER_03 22:09

And so now we're kind of quite far away from one the AIDS decade, but also that narrative I think has changed that this was not anything to do with gay lifestyles and everything to do with lack of sexual health support for gay men. Yeah. And actually AIDS is an everybody problem. What's the kind of justification for not allowing same-sex marriage?

SPEAKER_01 22:35

So that is going to differ depending on who you are. Okay. So for some people, the argument is simply going to be historically, both within the Church of England, but also much more widely, if you look at all sorts of human societies and cultures, marriage is something which has been between a man and a woman. So actually, if you now say that marriage can be between two men or two women, you're kind of out of step with history. That's one argument. You know, we could call that the historical case. There are some people who make what we might want to call an ontological case, and basically what they're saying is marriage simply is something which exists between a man and a woman, and we can't change the definition of that. Some people will want to think about marriage in sacramental terms, you know, if we're thinking about it theologically, and they will say there is something about marriage between a man and a woman which carries this particular means of mediating grace to the spouses, and that actually you can't just change the definition of it and say, well, that can now include relationships between two men or two women as well. You're going to find people making both of those types of cases within the Church of England as well as you know elsewhere and in other churches.

SPEAKER_03 23:52

So it's almost a tautology, isn't it? It's almost a definition of marriage is a union between a man and a woman.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

It's really interesting. There's been some very interesting, I suppose, analyses of exactly what that language means, you know. So if we go back what, twelve years or so, to shortly before same-sex marriage was legalised in England, the Church of England was having lots of conversations at that time, and they were really worried about it. They were really worried saying, you know, if same-sex marriage is legalized, then that will be a real loss to society, you know, because they wanted to say something about marriage symbolises something about the relationship that God has with humans and with the world, and you know, it will be lost essentially if marriage is no longer just a male-female thing. Now, there are all sorts of people who've kind of pushed back at that, again from within the church as well as beyond, and they've kind of said, look at all the ways that marriage across history has meant different things. So, you know, you talk about it always being between a man and a woman in various different cultures, but you know, let's look at societies in which you know there have been child marriages. You know, we still have societies today which practice child marriage, but it's much rarer than it used to be. Look at all of the cultures, you know, including cultures within the Bible where it was taken for granted that marriages would be polygamous, you know, where one man would have multiple wives and maybe concubines, slaves who he was having sex with, and all sorts of things. You know, and even going back just, I don't know, 150 years or so, you know, it used to be the case that if a man was married to a woman who then died, he then wasn't allowed to marry her sister, because in law she was treated as his sister as well, and you can't marry your sister. So, you know, that's been a fairly recent change. It used to be the case that you know Christians would have taken for granted that if somebody was divorced and their first spouse was still alive, then they couldn't remarry. And some Christians would still hold that that's the case, but others, you know, no longer believe that. So there's all sorts of examples we could point to where Christians and others they have recognised that the definition of marriage changes and that marriage hasn't meant exactly the same thing in every society and culture. So, yes, same-sex marriage is a change, but the question is, is it a change too far away from what marriage has meant?

SPEAKER_03 26:17

And also the idea that marriage existed throughout the you know, that there there's no marriage between Adam and Eve, there's no ceremony, there's no legal binding of those two people, and so actually marriage is an invention of human society. So I it's interesting, there doesn't seem to be evidence for that, there doesn't seem to be logical support for that. But I'm presuming that there is a theological argument, which is that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong, therefore gay marriage has to be wrong.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Yeah, there are particular passages that people will often go to, so both within the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and then within the New Testament. Sometimes they get called by lesbian and gay people clubber texts because they're texts that have kind of been used to clobber people. I mean, there's not that many of them, which is interesting. And I think for me as a theologian, one of the things that I'm interested in are the ways that different biblical scholars and different interpreters have kind of tried to deal with those passages, you know. So thinking about people who do accept the legitimacy of same-sex relationships, if those people are within Christian traditions and Christian churches, they've got to make a decision about what they do with texts like that. You know, so some people have come to the conclusion and and they've said, well, those texts they can't really mean what they seem to mean. They must have been talking about something different. Whereas other people have said, well, no, they do mean exactly what they seem to mean. However, you know, they're texts coming out of very different cultures from ours. We now understand things about you know the possibilities for faithful and egalitarian same-sex relationships in a way that perhaps wasn't understood in those societies and cultures. You know, so there are people that have made the argument that texts which seem to be outlawing homosexuality, they're actually outlawing things like exploitative sexual relationships or sexual slavery, or you know, sometimes even that they're not about sex at all, they're about not showing appropriate hospitality to strangers and all of that sort of thing. But as you said right back at the beginning, I think a big imperative for lots of people has been to say if you are within a faith tradition, how do you take sacred texts seriously, but also take seriously the experience of people as they experience their own revelations of God. You know, and thinking about it in Anglican terms, one of the things that's sometimes seen as, I suppose, a characteristic of Anglican theology is to say that actually there are a variety of different sources of knowledge or revelation about God, and Bible or scripture is one of them, tradition is another, but you know, also our own reason is another and our experience is one. So actually, all of those things are kind of being interpreted in light of each other.

SPEAKER_03 29:10

It's really fascinating. Let's think about where the debate is gonna go next. Because you're kind of saying that actually over the last 30 years or so there's been a sort of almost a bit of a stagnation that they've got to a certain point and they kind of haven't progressed much more. What are the discussions being had about the sort of next steps?

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Yeah, so for the Church of England, since 2018, the Church of England has been having particular discussions about sex, sexuality, gender, marriage, which led to the publication of a big book called Living in Love and Faith, which came out in 2021, I think, and also kind of videos and study resources to go along with it. And that was the result of years of work by lots and lots of people, lots of conversations with LGBT people, people who identify as same-sex attracted but don't think Christians should legitimately be in same-sex relationships, all sorts of people. So in 2023, that was when the General Synod, the Church of England's governing body, thought about should they be making changes to their existing canons and existing polity on marriage. So that was the point where the Church of England could have said, going forward, we do want to make it possible for same-sex marriage to take place in our churches. They didn't do that, they did agree some slightly smaller things, as you said earlier. It's kind of been about small incremental steps. So for the moment, same-sex marriage still isn't possible. What they have said at the moment is that they do want to make it possible within the near future, we don't know quite how near, they do want to make it possible for standalone services of blessing to be used for same-sex couples. But because at the moment that's not something that all churches want, or that all Church of England clergy want to be able to do, they're not going to allow churches who do want to do that to be able to do it until there's a bit more, they're calling it pastoral reassurance, a bit more structure in place to reassure churches who don't want to do that, that they won't be forced to do it, that they won't get into trouble for not doing it. And there's also this whole question, which there is a lot of disagreement about, basically about whether if the Church of England does move forward with recognising and celebrating same-sex marriage, whether that will constitute a change to its doctrine of marriage. Some people argue that it would, some people argue that it wouldn't, and even those people who say that it would, they don't necessarily consider that a big problem. But the point is that there's various sort of safeguards and things that they want to put in place. So next month in February, that's when the General Synod is due to meet next, and that's where they're going to be discussing this whole question about pastoral assurances for clergy and for congregations who feel that actually, in all conscience, they're not going to be able to offer these prayers of love and faith as they're being called. So we'll know a bit more after February, but no more at the moment.

SPEAKER_03 32:11

And actually, this will come out in February, so it'll be quite sort of interesting to see the sort of developments there. Is there any other precedent in sort of Anglican history whereby churches are being forced to do something they don't want to do? Because I'm just thinking, could it be an option but it doesn't have to be an imperative so that churches can choose, could they have some kind of teaching which is that you are free to on a case-by-case basis, but you don't have to? Because I can't think of any other time where the church has forced Anglican ministers to do something they don't want to do.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

We've kind of got that situation, there's a couple of examples, you know, even within the Church of England at the moment, right? So one of them is that the Church of England now has female bishops.

SPEAKER_02 32:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:55

But actually, because not everyone within the Church of England believes that it's ontologically possible for a woman to be a bishop, or in some cases they feel that the Bible indicates that you know women shouldn't hold high positions of religious authority like that, there are structures in place which say if this church cannot accept the ministry of a female bishop, but the bishop in their diocese or their local area is a woman, we will make sure that they've got an alternative male bishop to look after them. So that already exists. You know, it's the case also that, for example, while the Church of England will officially remarry people who've been divorced, an individual priest can opt out of doing that if they don't feel that in conscience they can do that. The Church of England allows trans people to marry, but again, individual clergy can opt out of doing that if they feel that it goes against their conscience. So, you know, some people are proposing pretty much exactly what you've said, really, you know, to kind of say, could there be a system where some Church of England churches will offer these prayers and some won't? And then further down the line, could there be a situation where some will marry same-sex couples and some won't? So I think it's quite a pragmatic and quite a neat solution in some ways. I guess there's concern from some people to say if you've got people taking such different positions, in what way are they meaningfully part of the same church, part of the same denomination? And I think there's also worry from people that if you think about kind of society more broadly, it just might be a bit confusing. You know, you might not be aware whether your particular local church does marry same-sex couples or doesn't. And perhaps that's going to lead to confusion for people. So for various different reasons, there still seems to be a sense at the moment that there will be some sort of resolution whereby people will all be doing the same thing. But I I don't know if that's realistic, and you know, we may well end up with something much closer to what you're describing.

SPEAKER_03 34:59

Yeah. And I think it feels like a stepping stone that will allow conversations to happen. So if you're a same-sex couple and you go to your local Anglican church and there's someone who don't, then it actually you can have that conversation, and I think conversations are helpful. Yeah. And I think it kind of just tests that water to see if actually what is predicted to happen, that society is going to fall apart and you lose something. Or let's just see if that's the case. I don't think it is going to. But we'll see, we'll see, we'll see. So we've got the general synod this month, 2025 February. One thing that you mentioned right at the beginning is that the Anglican Church is a worldwide church. And so you've got Anglican churches in very, very different contexts, in very different cultures. And if we've learned anything through colonization, is that it's sometimes very awkward to push British values, British ideals, British culture onto another culture, kind of in a way that is helpful for both sides. Is there then a particular problem created by that sort of context of a worldwide church for the purposes of homosexuality?

SPEAKER_01 36:12

Yeah, it's really relevant to the conversation. So when he was Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who's just resigned, he I think was really keenly aware of this. And he was really aware that actually lots of Anglican churches all over the world were looking to him and to the Church of England for guidance, even if it was kind of unofficial guidance. And something he spoke about several times in various interviews over the years, was his visits to countries with other Anglican churches, including in particular in those African countries which tend to have much more conservative views on sexuality than in Northern Europe or North America, for example. And Justin Welby talked in particular about talking to Christians in those countries, places like South Sudan, for example, who said to him, We are really worried about persecution. You know, Christianity is one of the most persecuted religions in the world. There are plenty of countries where it is not safe to be a Christian. Justin Welby said, Christians in those countries had said to him that they were worried about persecution, in particular if there was a perception from other people around them that Christians had lax moral standards, that they were kind of too worldly, not moral enough. So Justin Welby's fear was, I think, that if the Church of England did move to accept same-sex marriage, then there would be Anglicans in countries like maybe South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, who wouldn't feel able to remain part of the Anglican Communion with the Church of England because of a fear that they would be tainted by association, right? And Justin Welby, I think, felt a sense of duty to defend the goods and the safety of Christians in countries where they might face persecution, including from those with more conservative views on sex. And there are plenty of conservatives within the Church of England who want to say actually, if the Church of England accepts same-sex marriage, that is going to put it out of step with Anglican churches in some of the other provinces. And that could lead to the breakdown of the Anglican Communion. Now, there are people who point out, well, actually, there are already other churches within the Anglican Communion which do celebrate same-sex marriages. So, you know, the Episcopal Church in the United States would be one example. You know, even the Scottish Episcopal Church, even within Britain, there is another Anglican church that does already recognise same-sex marriage. There's a particular interview with Justin Welby from about seven years ago, I think, and he basically is asked what his position on same-sex marriage is. And what he said was that he felt he was struggling because he was trying to be faithful to the tradition, he was also trying to be faithful to what he understood the Bible to be saying, he was trying to be faithful to understand what God was saying in the 21st century and to kind of have an answer that would please everybody. And basically he said, I haven't got a good answer, and I'm not really doing that as well as I would like to. I think what's important about that though is that it kind of sums up how reactions and responses to social shifts and changing social attitudes about things like sexuality, they're happening inside the church, not just outside it. You know, people sometimes think of the church or you know, indeed other religious traditions as always being very conservative about sexuality and wider society as always being very liberal, and it's not always the case.

SPEAKER_03 39:50

And also it's different in different countries, you know, that actually there's going to be countries where the church is much more liberal about sexuality than the state and society as large. So when the Anglican Church kind of said that blessings of gay relationships was okay, did that have any knock-on effect to some of those other Anglican churches and other places?

SPEAKER_01 40:12

So, yeah, there have been pronouncements by bishops in some of those places kind of saying, look, here is evidence that the Church of England is kind of falling away, it's kind of backsliding, and so on. But I mean I think you mentioned decolonisation earlier, and it it is really relevant to this conversation, really, because if we look at where Anglicans are now around the world, more than half of all Anglicans in the world are in Africa. You know, you might have thought historically that, well, the real centre of gravity for Anglicanism would be Britain, you know, would be England in particular, but it's not the case anymore. Where we do find Anglican churches worldwide are mostly in countries that were part of the British Empire under colonialism. And you know, just like schools and universities and galleries and museums, you know, churches have been thinking a lot about this question of decolonisation. And I think one of the things going on for Justin Welby was he was really aware that in a post-colonial context there was something problematic, like quite distasteful perhaps, about a church leader in Britain saying to church leaders in places like Kenya or Uganda or South Sudan, your views on sexuality are backward, you need to have a position which is closer to the position of people in the West. You know, Justin Welby himself sort of hinted that he thought of that as a new kind of imperialism. Because if you take seriously the fact that all of those Anglican churches worldwide are self-governing, you know, there will be tensions when actually they come to different conclusions on things like sexuality, you know, and feel quite out of step perhaps with some societies in the West. Of course, it's complicated because there are also lots of scholars and historians who say that one possible argument for where you can trace those attitudes to sexuality back to is to the arrival of European missionaries to those countries in you know late 19th, early 20th century. So there are some theologians and historians who've said actually, what happens if we go back and try and sort of uncover the history of same-sex relationships and same-sex love in those countries before European missionaries arrived? You know, you've got somebody like Peter Akinola, so he was a former Archbishop of the Church of Nigeria, and he said homosexuality is not African, it's a European thing, we don't want it in Africa, we don't recognise it in Africa. That's one picture, but there are plenty of scholars who've said that doesn't really do justice to the complex history of Nigeria or or Africa more widely. So the the colonial legacy is definitely complex.

SPEAKER_03 42:55

Yeah. So there's part of it which is that we've imposed this religion, and and actually we've got to be sensitive to that imperialistic idea of these are our values, we're gonna put them on you. And you just kind of have to bend and sway to whatever progress we're making, whatever it might be. It's really fascinating. I think probably something I've not really considered before, that I feel quite challenged, I think, to be culturally sensitive and not to be sort of almost egotistical because actually that's a very colonial concept is that what we think is better than what you think, and that sort of white supremacy kind of comes in, it's really interesting. While I think you know we don't want to try to deconstruct or simplify the kind of current sex abuse story that's happening within the Church of England, I think what would be helpful for us because it's sort of a dimension, and I think you know, if we're talking about attitude towards sex within the Anglican Church, this is kind of pertinent. But I think what would be helpful to ask is what questions do we As our re-teachers need to consider when narrating the situation.

SPEAKER_01 44:04

Yeah. I mean, I think without being an apologetic about it, I think one of the things to keep in mind, as everybody will know, is that the current discussions have been part of some soul searching that have been going on among all sorts of institutions over the last couple of decades, right? So we know there have been lots and lots of revelation about sex abuse in churches, in other faith communities. As we've kind of said already, the reason why Justin Welby has resigned now is because of this issue concerning a cover-up of sex abuse by a Christian leader. But it's part of this wider discussion that's happening, and lots of people will know that a few years back there was a major inquiry called the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse, or ICSA for short, and that was looking at churches and faith communities, but it was also looking at schools and youth organizations, residential homes, all sorts of institutions, which had all harboured sex abuse in various ways. So, you know, on the one hand, sex abuse is not unique to faith communities, you know, we need to be really wary of any suggestion that religion inevitably leads to sex abuse, but we also I think need to think really hard about some characteristics of religious communities that might make them in some ways particularly attractive to people who are already disposed to abuse and to kind of perpetuating toxic relationships. So, you know, one example would be in communities where there are very differential systems of hierarchy, you know, does that make it harder to speak out against leaders? Does that make it harder to be a whistleblower? You know, if you are being abused or you suspect somebody else is being abused, are there things about the actual structures and systems that kind of make it harder to get that dealt with well? Or we might think about gender dynamics that are operative in some types of faith communities. So I'm thinking back to some research that was done in the early 90s in Norway, and this was interviewing women who'd experienced rape and also other forms of domestic abuse by their Christian husbands. And this piece of research was interviewing the husbands about, you know, why they'd done what they'd done. And some of them were explicitly saying, you know, God has put me in a position of authority over my wife. We can point to some types of teaching that might be distorted in that sort of direction. So it's not that those things are unique to religious communities, but it's to say, are there particular things happening within some religious communities that perhaps make that type of abuse more possible? And if so, what can religious communities be doing to make it less possible? And to name that, and to name some of the ways that perhaps particular dynamics and particular theologies might have fed into that.

SPEAKER_03 47:09

Yeah, I think that's really, really helpful. And I think, you know, for us as RV teachers, it's really important that we make that point that this is not a Christian problem, this is not a religion problem, this is a human problem, and that there is abuse that's happened in many different organizations, whether it's the media, etc. But that there's like a sort of fertile ground in terms of protecting a greater organisation, which I think probably fed into some of the cover-up, is that they were trying to protect the church.

SPEAKER_01 47:41

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And you know, you could be really cynical and say it's all about reputational management. And I think you know, that's part of it. Yeah. But when we dig down into the reasons why people go for things like reputational management, yes, people are sometimes just looking after themselves, but sometimes people will say something like, you know, this institution is doing good things as well as bad ones, right? And actually, you know, churches are feeding hungry people and they are, you know, they're doing all this really practical stuff. And if people are just looking at sex abuse, you know, they're not they're not looking at the whole picture. And I think sometimes it comes about because of people's, I think, misguided good intentions, you know. So thinking about the particular thing that's in the news at the moment, and this is about the make-in review into John Smythe, who was this Christian leader who abused young men, kind of carried out these really brutal beatings, and it's this case which Justin Welby is now accused of having known about for you know longer than he might have done and not done all he could to ensure that it was more widely known. If you go back to letters that were being sent back in the early 80s, you know, between the people who knew about that when it was happening, one of the justifications that lots of them give for kind of keeping it quiet at the time, yes, it was to do with the reputation of their organisation, but also they were concerned about the need to kind of protect the identities of the young men who'd been abused, you know, some of whom felt that that must have happened because they'd done something wrong. You know, they wanted to ensure that actually those young men would be able to move forward and live their lives without necessarily always being tainted by association with this man. So I think one of the really problematic things in all of this is that people are often they're motivated by really good intentions, but that actually there are still lots of problems that come along with that kind of secrecy and lack of transparency.

SPEAKER_03 49:43

And also I think we've got to make the point that it's possible to do both, it's possible to protect an institution and at the same time make sure that people that need bringing to justice are brought to justice. Yeah, you know, it's not an either-aw thing that there is solutions to problems like this and there is precedent of these kind of solutions happening. In that, you know, we brought down people within the media, but the media hasn't been thrown away with the bath water kind of thing. So I think it is possible. So just as we close then, the question I asked all my guests is if you could wake up tomorrow and one thing was different, what would you want it to be?

SPEAKER_01 50:17

So I've got this theory that actually lots of the discourse about sexuality in the church, you know, the Church of England, but also much more widely, it's motivated by fear. It's motivated by fear of loss of authority and control. It's motivated by fear of what happens when women and gay people and trans people kind of speak into their own power. It's motivated by fear about actually what happens when perhaps church leaders have to acknowledge their own sexual desires, including same-sex desires that maybe they haven't been able to speak about or acknowledge before. So I think if I could wave that magic wand, what I would want would be to see what talk about love and sex and relationships might look like if it was done in a non-defensive way. So, in other words, what would it look like in a world where it wasn't motivated by fear and loss of authority, particularly among powerful men? You know, if discourses of sex weren't always combative, if they weren't bound up in ideas about lack and scarcity and all of that sort of thing, and if people didn't have to be anxious about experiencing same-sex desire, what might we be able to do in terms of the worlds that we could build? I suspect we'd see a lot less misogyny and homophobia and transphobia, I suspect we'd see less violence against women and girls, less incel culture and sex abuse, you know, less of male attempts to control women's bodies and sexualities, and I think less anxiety about sex in general. So I think that's what I would like to see.

SPEAKER_02 51:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 51:58

A world where these discourses were not motivated by anxiety or kind of reinforcing the power of people who take for granted that they should be in control of the conversation. Do you know what?

SPEAKER_03 52:10

I've had this thought so many times over the last few years that there's a verse in the Bible that says perfect love drives out fear, and so much of the rhetoric, so much of the narrative is based on fear. And so what we have is that fear drives out love. And if we had this idea that perfect love drives out fear, if we created doctrines, policies that celebrated perfect love without fear, I think you're right, is I think that's just a brilliant way to end. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me. My name is Louisa Jane Smith, and this has been the R.E. Podcast. The podcast for those of you who think R.E. is boring, but it's not. It's messy, it's nuanced, and it gives us the opportunity to engage with difficult but important debates. But thank you so much for listening to us all the life out of you.