The Church of England's latest report gives traditionalists the excuse they need to effectively break away. Will anyone notice?
A couple of months ago I was at a meeting at Church House, the administrative headquarters of the Church of England, and a vicar from south London made a brief impassioned speech about gay marriage. He wanted it implemented now. His church, and his friends, had been blessing gay couples for 20 years, he said, and they were sick of doing it in such a hole-in-the-corner way. What they wanted was an official and unambiguous commitment to marrying gay people in church. Today's report from the committee chaired by Sir Joseph Pilling won't give him that – it took 200 pages to say very little at all – but it does mean that gay marriage is coming to the Church of England, and also, I think, that the conservative evangelicals will split off, as they have been longing to do.
The report itself does nothing more than formalise three things that everyone who cares already knows: that there is nothing to stop determined vicars from blessing gay partnerships – the earliest English liturgy for this was published in 1993, I believe – that conservative evangelicals would rather leave the church of England than accept this, and that the question can no longer be ignored in the hope that it will go away.
The conservative evangelical objections are set out at length in a dissenting statement by the suffragan bishop of Birkenhead, Keith Sinclair. They are a subtle nonsense. The core ones are that the Bible is not ambiguous in its treatment of gay sex: it is always and everywhere condemned; that the Church of England is falling below biblical standards in failing to repeat this condemnation; that the scientific evidence for homosexuality as a natural condition can be disregarded because all sorts of sinful desires are part of our natures; and finally that the change in the official line represents a betrayal of all those gay men who have rejected their own desires in favour of marriage or celibacy.
None of these are amenable to argument. You can't imagine the evidence or the reasoning that would compel him to change his mind. And it's clear that there is a loose network of conservative evangelical churches that have been looking for an occasion to break away from the Church of England, which they regard as doomed and corrupt. This report will give them the chance they have been looking for.
The rest of the church will not miss them. For the past 20 years they have exercised a veto on policy about women and gay people, bolstered by vast over-representation in the General Synod. Their views, though, are clearly out of step with those of a majority of Anglicans, even among regular churchgoers, as polls show. And the rest of the church is now sick of them. Nor is it clear what the practical effect of their departure would be. Most already withhold funds from the central authorities, and so far as they can also ignore anything they are told to do. If a church in Battersea announces that it is now subject to the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Uganda rather than that of Canterbury it's hard to know who will care.
What has changed is the gradual foregrounding of arguments from personal misery. One of the most prominent campaigners against a change in the rules for sexuality, the Rev Peter Ould, is a man who describes himself as "post-gay" and is married to a woman. In a blogpost responding to the report he talks about "People like myself, who despite not being heterosexual have fashioned their lives to surrender to God's will for human sexual functioning as outlined in Scripture".
He continues: "By suggesting that sexual relationships between two people of the same-sex can be affirmed, Pilling says to me and many others that we didn't need to make the sacrifices and difficult choices that we did. It is to all intents and purposes a slap in our face."
But this kind of argument from personality rather than principle concedes far too much. If he is happily married, the slap has missed his face. If he's not, why should his story be persuasive? The argument that doing the right thing would be a betrayal of all those Christians who did the wrong thing in the past was one that led the Roman Catholic church into its catastrophic restatement of the ban on contraception. The Church of England can be very silly sometimes, but surely not quite as silly as that.
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