When will Gay Couples be able to take vows in the Church of England?
One of the most striking features of the GAFCON Jerusalem Statement and Declaration of June 2008 was the formation of a Primates Council which was urged to ‘authenticate and recognise confessing Anglican jurisdictions, clergy and congregations’. The radical nature of this step was reinforced by a corresponding negative – the rejection of the commonly held assumption that ‘Anglican identity is determined necessarily through the Archbishop of Canterbury’.
Events in England this week have underlined the wisdom of envisaging an alternative focus of leadership for the Anglican Communion. As regular readers of these articles will know, I believe that the current Archbishop of Canterbury is promoting an illusory unity which accommodates false teaching and endangers the whole Communion.
But there is another reason for calling into question the role of Canterbury and the Lambeth institutions which is not so much to do with Rowan Williams himself, but with the relentless erosion of orthodox faith in the Church of England by the deeply secularized culture of the liberal establishment.
A number of leading academics and clergy, including the Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt Revd David Stancliffe, wrote to the London Times this week arguing that it is ‘plainly discriminatory’ not to allow gay or lesbian partners to make vows to each other in church and this was obligingly reinforced in that newspaper’s leader comment yesterday in which it called on the government to ‘resolve the legal asymmetry’ which under the 2004 Civil Partnership Act prevents same sex couples from having a Civil Partnership ceremony in church premises.
The Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Revd Michael Scott Joynt, had opposed an attempt to allow such ceremonies in the course of a House of Lords debate on the Government’s Equality Bill on 25th January while at the same time resisting (successfully as it turned out) the Government’s attempt to severely narrow the freedom of churches not to employ practicing homosexuals. In their letter, the Bishop of Salisbury and his fellow signatories attacked the bishop’s position, arguing that it was inconsistent to seek ‘spiritual independence’ for the Church of England from anti-discrimination legislation while at the same time denying that right of independence to other Churches which want to solemnize homosexual partnerships.
This overlooked the fact that the Bishop’s argument against allowing gay couples to have church ceremonies was not based on arguments about freedom, but about the nature of marriage itself. The prohibition on church ceremonies in the 2004 legislation reflected the clear legal distinction drawn at the time between Civil Partnerships and marriage. Allowing any church to breach that boundary is not simply to bestow a freedom on a minority, it is also to give state sanction to a historic subversion of Christian marriage in which gender is incidental rather than essential.
Furthermore, the symmetry of freedoms that Bishop Stancliffe and his colleagues call on the Bishop of Winchester to respect is increasingly abstract. With depressing regularity Christians are finding themselves before the courts or employment tribunals as victims of a skewed culture which legislates for conscience and tends to flatten all moral and spiritual questions into issues of ‘rights’. If marriage is redefined in this way, then it is highly unlikely that traditional Christian churches will enjoy the freedom to preserve marriage according to their consciences for much longer.
If the Church of England continues its pragmatic adjustment to clams of discrimination, it will be continually on the back foot. An example from Holland illustrates: a gay Dutch Roman Catholic is seeking to force the Roman Catholic Church though the courts to admit him to Holy Communion by prosecuting a particular priest. In support of his case he claims that he is able to receive the sacrament at other Roman Catholic churches in Holland and that ‘There is no justification anywhere in the Bible’ for his exclusion.
Compare the situation in England - already practising homosexuals are commonly admitted to Holy Communion and the Lambeth Resolution 1.10 of 1998 which stated that homosexual relationships are ‘incompatible with Scripture’ is effectively useless, not least because bishops like David Stancliffe can teach the very opposite without any apparent protest or any prospect whatsoever of disciplinary action. So a similar legal action in England would seem to have a strong chance of being taken seriously and would then create a compelling precedent for imposing a legal right for admission to the sacrament of baptism and ‘gay marriage’.
That time may be nearer than many people think. The extent to which the Church of England has acclimatised itself to acceptance of openly gay clergy was revealed by General Synod’s recent vote in favour of the motion that the clergy pension scheme should ‘go beyond the requirements of the Civil Partnership Act 2004 and provide for pension benefits to be paid to the surviving civil partners of deceased clergy on the same basis as they are currently paid to surviving spouses.’ Although clergy entering a Civil partnership are supposed to be celibate, this condition is widely derided and is in any case unworkable.
The Synod vote clearly implies parity between marriage and Civil Partnerships. Colin Coward, one of the Church of England’s leading gay activists, was quick to see this, commenting ‘unless I am very mistaken, our church is learning and changing and this is a cause of real thanksgiving and celebration’.
There are courageous bishops like Michael Scott Joynt in the Church of England, but they are very much the exception than the rule. Tied to a fiercely liberal establishment by bonds of legality and history, the Church of England would need extraordinarily courageous and clear minded leadership to reverse the current trend, but that seems to be an increasingly remote prospect. Nonetheless, we can thank God that as the dissolution of the historic centre represented by Canterbury gathers pace, in his providence the basis for a new and vital focus of global Anglicanism has emerged in the faith confessed afresh in Jerusalem.
Charles Raven
24 February 2010