Unity Breaking Out

When I suggested to S.D. last week that Archbishop Justin should trumpet as a great step forward the fact that the Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference were refraining from knifing each other in the way they would have done during the Church's formative conflicts over Christology or iconoclasm - look how far we've come in 1600 years! That's progress for you - I was joking, but this does indeed seem to be the lesson of the Conference. On Sunday the RC parish priest, Fr Jeffrey, told me warmly in the vestry that the compromise statement on how the Anglican Communion was to manage same-sex relationships was 'a move in the right direction', a declaration which made me blink a bit. Which direction was that? Surely not the one he's not officially supposed to approve of? But then, stricte dictu, he shouldn't really be genuflecting in front of our aumbry whenever he passes it!

Some of ++Justin's statements make one gasp with their ineptness ...

... BUT his brief summary of The State We're In was, I thought, rather deft. The African Churches oppose homosexuality, he said, because they will be shredded if they don't: for them, it's an existential question. Meanwhile, the Western Churches, by and large, strain to take a liberal position for exactly the same reason: they face scorn, rejection and irrelevance if they don't. You could even argue (though I don't think ++Justin did) that, in a context where African states are harrassing and persecuting LGBT+ advocacy groups and people physically attack neighbours who come out as members of sexual minorities, to insist that, yes, gays are disgusting and horrible but really we shouldn't be stoning them to death is perhaps as far as the Churches can realistically go. You can hope people might be heroes, but I fear you can't demand it.

When African bishops argue that their Churches are growing 'because they are Scriptural' this is, of course, a fantasy. Their Churches are growing because Africa is being polarised between Islam and that which isn't Islam - i.e., different brands of Christianity in different places - and in this crossfire the old animist religions are vanishing. Religions almost never grow for reasons unconnected with politics and community relations. But recognising that is perhaps a step too far, just for the moment.