Uncivil partners
Fri Jan 31, 2020 · 1666 words · 9 min

It was in the weekly notice sheet that I learned about the latest wise pronouncements of the house of bishops on sexual matters - with a 'not again' facepalm reaction no doubt shared by many in this impeccably liberal parish.

This controversy is notable for being about almost nothing - a real return to the glory days of angels dancing on pinheads. It came of course from a pastoral statement [sic], concerning the extension of civil partnerships to heterosexual couples. What we got was a copy paste of the Church of England's tortuous compromise over the introduction of gay civil partnerships in 2005, the logic - such as it is - extended to straight couples. This means that such relationships ought to be chaste - sex must only take place in a marriage - although, it is quietly acknowledged, it is utterly implausible that this rule should actually be enforced on the laity.

Clergy and candidates for ordination, however, who enter into such a partnership, must justify their decision not to be married instead. The latter clause does not seem unreasonable - the main reason for straight couples to go for a civil partnership is to opt out of the religious baggage of marriage, after all, which would be a peculiar reason for a member of the clergy to do anything - even in the Church of England.

That said, there are defensible reasons for doing so, which have to do with the very fact of this enormous shitstorm. Every time the church opens its mouth about sex, the same argument plays out. Progressives point out that the statement is tone deaf; conservative bigots demand that the progressives declare where they stand on The Teaching Of The Church™️; the bishops go into crisis management mode and feebly toe-poke the issue into very slightly longer grass.

The bishops' efforts are decreasingly effective each turn around this widening gyre. There is a great effort in play to decide a new set of policies around sexual morality, but another compromise seems unlikely. If it is possible for the house of bishops to issue an utterly unnecessary pastoral statement that is unlikely to affect anyone at all, and that such a statement should tear off the scab so roughly and bring forth new humiliation as the recent advice has done, what chance for any real movement on the issue by the end of this year - that time frame being the long grass of the last upsets on this point in 2017?

It is the way of bishops to seek to preserve unity, but there must come a moment when we admit that the split has basically already happened. We may have reached the point of no return in the controversies over Gene Robinson and Jeffrey John in the first years of the century; or indeed a decade earlier, when a whole parallel hierarchy had to be developed so that reactionary vicars would not have to submit to any bishops who dirtied their hands by ordaining women. That may seem like an argument for episcopal caution; look at the numbers of women priests 25 years later, not 50-50 for sure, but a distinct improvement on 1,500 years of total exclusion.

But the net effect is to make future compromises less likely. Conservatives have strong evidence for the thin-end-of-the-wedge theory of theological compromise, and are thus more willing to hold the rest of us hostage with the threat of schism. (There is a secondary net effect, which is the faintly amusing spectacle of one bishop of Fulham after another defecting to Rome, and the attendant efforts of Lambeth Palace to find a sufficiently reactionary replacement down the back of a sofa.)

Once that threat is on the table, we are in a battle, not a collegiate discussion of the finer points of Romans 1. The willingness of progressives to be 'calmed down' over recent years, and the timidity of a church leadership that is quite aware, as has been said in this connection, that its sexual politics make it a laughing stock, merely ensure that one side is guaranteed victory. It is one thing to bring a knife to a gun fight; quite another to bring a cheap six-string and launch into Kumbaya. We will get nowhere until we put our 'prayers for unity' on hiatus and admit to ourselves - as is surely true - that there is a line beyond which we are not prepared to make concessions, and it is instead appropriate to respond to conservative blackmail, by calling their bluff. If the threats are realised, we must be prepared to say, with all the Christian goodwill we can muster, 'well go on then - fuck off.'

After all, this really does matter. Let's get real - this dispute is not about heterosexual civil partnership, but gay marriage. If the conservatives are right, we are on the threshold of a capitulation to the deracinated anthropology of secular modernity and its moral confusion. If we're right, on the other hand, then the church is guilty of a heinous crime against a tenth or so of its flock, dating back centuries, and really needs to get grovelling for forgiveness soon. (Yesterday, in fact.)

The progressive case rests perhaps too naively on the idea that the church must move with the times, to which point I merely mention that the times seem rather against us at the moment, and we would surely not change sides on that basis. The 'signs of the times' on the point of gay marriage, however, are telling in a very important way. Pre-modern societies, because of their agrarian character, had a relatively small urban population and a family-centred mode of production; this made it very difficult, in practice, for homosexual desire to become 'normal'. That in the end requires the separation of child-bearing from direct economic production, which became normal after capitalism became dominant.

Over the last two centuries, then, the nature of social life has changed, but human nature has not, with the consequence that some aspects of human nature are more obvious than they were previously. One of them is the sheer prevalence of homosexuality. Another, which has become clearer since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in many countries, is that same-sex desire is not pathological. When I say this is now obvious, I mean only that anyone who lives in a medium sized city or larger in a developed capitalist country will know several gay people and will thereby have learned that there is no discernible difference between their loves and those of our straight friends, besides the slightly more trying circumstances.

What the Church of England (and other churches with formal anti-gay positions) is out of touch with, then, is not so much the times as reality itself. If the Bible told us that the sky was red, we would not believe it; nor can any reasonable person believe, in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the people around them in the lives they actually live, that homosexual sex is immoral compared to heterosexual sex, all other things being equal. (Not all people are reasonable, of course - not even a majority of bishops, apparently.) If the new chauvinist reaction were to force gay men and women back into the closet, the church would now be in step with the times, but still out of touch with reality. It would be guilty of deliberate forgetting in order to avoid costly acts of kindness, which is a decent enough definition of sinful behaviour.

This goes for the brokers of the church's various tidy compromises even more than the outright bigots on its conservative wing. The brimstone-rich imprecations about Sodomites are vile, but at least testify to the truth that there is an essential decision to be made here that goes to the core of the Christian faith, as do equivalent discussions in other religions. We really are supposed to discern false from true love, at any rate; and if the anti-gay position is a monstrous error in doing so, it at least bothers to try. Our cautious leaders have convinced themselves that the job is done by the multiplication of working groups to look into the issue, and other interminable delaying tactics; and I have no reason to think that they do not really believe that.

I do have reason to believe, however, that nobody outside the church can credit the idea for a nanosecond. I'm new to all this religion business, and I still mix in mostly 'secular' circles. To such people, the pedantic 'pastoral' statements of this kind look like they have been cooked up not to get to the bottom of the issues they ostensibly address, but to steer the church past them with as little damage to itself as possible. It is from this perspective, which the more perspicacious members of the clergy share, that the church is made a laughing stock; it is its timidity in rejecting objectively and obviously false ideas about human sexuality, its endless deferrals to some future committee to come up with the perfect compromise. The church leadership's risk aversion may keep the existing unhappy coalition together, but it offers nothing to the next ten million Christians - again, unlike the purity politics of the reactionaries, which at least has a purpose, however malevolent.

I am not, in the end, made pessimistic by all this. It seems, again, clear - on the basis of the controversies of the last few years - that progressive Anglican clergy at least are sick of these compromises, and inclined at last to wonder what is it in it for them. That means we may get the split that is actually needed, has actually already taken place; and in fact we may end up more capable in such a situation of devotional solidarity with conservative believers than under the Anglican not-in-front-of-the-children-and-pray-for-unity regime. Time will tell; and not very much time, it seems today.


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