Gay communion

A funny thing is happening within the Anglican communion. It is threatening to tear itself apart over a handful of people who live in monogamous, stable, long-term, loving relationships and are sufficiently religiously observant to want the church to bless them.

Ideal couples, then, for a church desperately seeking support, you might think. But they are, of course, gay and therefore, in the words of one Anglican archbishop, an abomination.

While the rest of the world considers weightier matters of life and death, the church has converted an issue most of the western world now regards as a private and personal matter into an obsession. Not for the first time, the church’s moral censure leaves it in danger of seeming irrelevant — even bigoted — to outsiders of the sort it hopes to attract to its emptying pews.

Many religions have an issue with gays. Cardinal Francis Arinze, seen by some as likely to become possibly the first black pope, was booed at Georgetown University in Washington last month for suggesting that homosexuality, along with other sexual sins such as adultery and divorce, mocked the family. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who turned a blind eye to a paedophile priest for years, intervened to prevent a bishop conducting a private blessing for the director of Cafod, the international development agency, and his long-term partner.

But it is the Anglican church which is most obsessed with what gays get up to in the privacy of their bedrooms. Since biblical references to homosexuality are scattered and, as far as the New Testament is concerned, solely to be found in the writings of St Paul, one might think it scarcely of all-consuming importance. If Jesus Christ mentioned the subject, none of the gospel writers bothered to note it.

The row is, however, as much about power and authority as sex. During the past 20 years the Anglican communion has attempted to cobble together a painfully achieved compromise to hold its various wings together. The current position is that while gay communicants can be in a relationship, ordained clergy may not — an illogical recipe, on the face of it, for hypocrisy, deceit and double standards.

In this moral fuzziness, homosexuality has been seized by a group of evangelicals as an easily explicable issue to enthuse and infuriate supporters alarmed by liberal trends within the church. It is becoming, in the words of one commentator, the anti-semitism of evangelicalism.

Despite being the most vibrant section of the Church of England, some evangelicals fear the church is drifting away from them. They have not succeeded in energising England for Christ and some take refuge in a Manichaean struggle for the soul of the church instead.

Their fears were amplified by last year’s appointment of Rowan Williams, known for his liberalism towards gays, to succeed the evangelical George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury. Since Williams is an orthodox and subtle theologian, and an attractive figure to the outside world, his evangelical opponents have struggled to undermine him.

Like most theologians, Williams believes that the Bible has to be interpreted. A text written over hundreds of years for hugely different societies cannot be taken entirely at face value, though for some evangelical fundamentalists, biblical literalism can take surprising forms: the English Churchman — a Calvinist, Paisleyite publication — this week carries a justification of slavery, describing it as ”a form of social security for which many starving people today would be grateful”.

The evangelicals have some grounds for fearing they are on a slippery slope. The weekend before last, at a service in Concord, New Hampshire, parishioners of the local diocese of the Episcopalian church — the North American branch of the Anglican communion — elected an openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson.

That followed an authorised blessing service the weekend before for a gay couple in Vancouver. It preceded an outbreak of anguish here over the appointment of a gay rights campaigner, Canon Jeffrey John, to the suffragan bishopric of Reading. Several bishops called for John to stand aside and the church’s Evangelical Council, insisting it was not ”homophobic”, said the bishop’s consecration should not proceed.

Even more alarmingly for church leaders, Peter Akinola — archbishop of Nigeria and head of the largest single church in the Anglican communion — has denounced Bishop Robinson’s appointment as an abomination.

This is the cost of the Anglican communion seeking to maintain an increasingly spurious unity among 70-million communicant members from vastly differing cultures, lifestyles and attitudes.

The church has for generations accommodated differing worship styles and churchmanship. Diversity has always been seen as a strength and safeguard against dogmatism. This is now under threat: a problem compounded by the fact that the third world church has the numbers — 17,5-million in Nigeria alone, a quarter of the entire communion — while the west has the money.

By and large, Church of England bishops have been conspicuous by their reticence in leading the debate or backing their archbishop. They are crossing their fingers that the row can be contained. The fact that the story has caused barely a ripple in the outside world should be a source of consolation.