A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

We’ve thought, discussed, and prayed about it long enough. Now we have to make a decision. I am going to try to convince you that full acceptance and inclusion of homosexuals in the Anglican Church –not merely the blessing of same-sex marriage -- is clearly the right thing to do, despite the risk of schism.

Both “conservatives” and “liberals” must agree, I contend, that we have all overlooked the importance of one crucial fact about the Anglican tradition, which , when we take it into account, makes the right decision obvious. Once the muddle about Tradition is cleared up, the other two legs of the Anglican tripod, Scripture and Reason, will be seen to support that decision.

This should not surprise us. With famous exceptions, in most cases the right thing to do becomes, at some point, all too obvious. Almost always, the hard part is mustering the gumption to do it.

. The crucial fact to which I refer is that our discussions have not reflected the plain and undeniable truth about the Anglican tradition concerning homosexuals.

Almost all discussions I have read or heard concerning What To Do start with the proposition that persons actively homosexual are, in the Anglican tradition, thought to be in need of repentance and (if possible) reform, and are definitely excluded from any priestly office.

Wrong. All this time the real Anglican tradition has been that homosexuality –and I mean sexually active homosexuality, including all “yuck” factors --- has been not only tolerated but also tacitly accepted, subject only to the exercise of prudence and the maintenance of deniability. If you kept it secret from the outside world and from self-righteous heterosexuals within the Church, you could, if otherwise qualified, readily become a priest and ultimately a Bishop. Let’s talk specific examples. I am reliably informed that not too long ago, in our own Diocese of Edmonton, at least four of the twenty or so priests in the city of Edmonton were, or had at some point while ordained been, non-celibate homosexuals. Some time earlier still we even had a Bishop, now defunct, who had to resign when he was in danger of being “outed”. I mention that these situations occurred in the past not to protect reputations , but to emphasize that we’re talking tradition here, not counterexamples..

Show me an Anglican who says his or her diocese is different and I’ll show you a whited sepulchre. Or at best a person of surpassing credulity and simplicity.

I am also reliably informed that many Anglican seminaries are and have for many years been known to contain lots of homosexuals. For example, an “inside” joke is that the High Anglican seminary at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, is referred to as “Fond of Lace”. Graduates therefrom who for whatever reasons are anxious to rebut the presumption are, I am told, quick at the outset of any conversation with an insider casually to mention the wife and kids.

If those attracted to the Anglican priesthood include a large percentage of homosexuals, many of whom, one may say uncontroversially, enjoy dressing up, we might infer that, a fortiori, Catholic seminaries would include at least as many persons with homosexual orientation. And we would be right. The Catholic pundit and historian Gary Wills in a chapter entitled, “A Gay Priesthood” in his recent (2000) book , Papal Sin, (among other evidence) cites a study claiming that the percentage of homosexual seminarians was about 50 in the Fifties and had risen to more than 70 percent by 1980.

How long has the Anglican tradition of hypocrisy been going on? So long that nobody quite knows when it started.. That’s as good a working definition of “tradition” as any.

“Hypocrisy”, la Rochefoucauld famously said, “is the tribute vice pays to virtue”. What we Anglicans have is a double-barreled tradition of hypocrisy. Our homosexuals have hypocritically hidden their sexual orientation; and our hierarchy and leading lay people have averted their eyes and pretended not to know. Enough. Let us plainly ask ourselves: are we going to

1) root out homosexuals from our clergy; or

2) continue to accept and tolerate homosexuals while pretending they don’t exist or are celibate, and agree not to appoint any more openly homosexual Bishops or to permit our clergy to perform or acknowledge same sex marriages; or

3) permit homosexuals to admit both their sexual orientation and practices and recognize them as full and unrestricted members of our church?

Nobody is advocating #1. Tradition strongly suggests #2. But here I confidently appeal to a moral principle that nobody will deny, and that Jesus Christ took many opportunities to affirm: namely, that in the long run, hypocrisy is bad.

If we cull the hypocrisy from Anglican tradition we are left with what should be called the Real Tradition, as opposed to the hypocritical tradition: namely, a long history of the ordination of homosexual priests and the consecration of homosexual bishops. The Real Tradition is now entirely consistent with the law of Canada and other Western societies , which not only tolerates practising homosexuals but requires that they be treated precisely like other citizens. For example, in Canada the law now ensures that same-sex partners will be entitled to survivorship benefits.

The text that springs readily to mind in this context is John 16:12-13: “ I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak:and he will show you things to come.”

That text is a knock-down argument with respect to the direction we may gain from Scripture. It is common ground that Christ left no recorded comments about homosexuality; and the analogy of his openness to the despised and ritually impure has been convincingly pressed in support of the Real Tradition. Opponents are reduced to relying on two extraordinarily irrelevant passages from Leviticus, and three somewhat equivocal and perfunctory extracts from the letters of Paul (if you’ve read this far, you know what I’m talking about). Scriptural support for opponents of divorce and female ordination was several orders of magnitude stronger. But even if I am wrong as to who has the better of the argument about the correct exegesis of these passages --- and I am certainly no theologian, though as a barrister I make my living inventing and evaluating arguments ---we have it on the highest authority that the Spirit of truth trumps exegesis.

Thus Scripture.

How, then, may we ascertain what, if anything the Spirit of truth has to say to us today?
Taking care, I hope, to avoid the risk of circularity, I submit that the Real Tradition provides a guide, or at least a rebuttable presumption. The truth about the prevalence and acceptance of homosexuality in the Church should have been obvious to Anglicans for hundreds of years. Is it not significant that only now are we able to admit it? Perhaps that is because only now, when most of the civil disabilities of minorities have been removed, are (most of us) able to bear the truth: that the category “homosexual” is as spiritually irrelevant as the categories, “slave”, “woman”, “Jew” (and Greek, for that matter), which have all come to be seen to be legally irrelevant.

“Most of us”: there’s the problem, indeed, for the worldwide “Anglican communion”.

Unfortunately, most African Anglicans --- with praiseworthy exceptions, of course, starting with Bishop Desmond Tutu — appear to have been affected by the fact that they live in societies that in some respects cannot yet bear to hear the truth about homosexuals, and may not be able to bear it for a long time. Famously, and fatuously, Bishop Akinola of Nigeria, who appears to be the heaviest hitter among the African bishops, has gone so far as to claim that homosexuality doesn’t exist in Nigeria, “even among animals”, and has apparently approved repressive laws preventing those non-existent homosexuals from even attempting to alter Nigerian law so as to achieve more toleration. Yes, yes, of course in other contexts I’m obliged to admit that there are truths evident to most people in the Third World that we in the West cannot yet hear. But tu quoque –“You’re another!”--- though the standard House-of-Commons riposte, is not an admissible argument in this context (any more than the equally common, but equally irrelevant ad hominem argument: would it matter if the writer —or the reader –is “straight” or “gay” or “bi”?). We in Canada, if we do what is right, will be merely trying to remove the beam from our own eyes by owning up to our Real Tradition. We are not attempting to legislate for Africa, or other Third-World dioceses (besides, Bishop Akinola all by himself generates enough eyewash to remove even fair-sized motes without any help from us ).

“What we got here”, to quote a phrase from the 1967 classic American film, Cool Hand Luke, “is a failure to communicate”.

So let’s again try to avoid hypocrisy. Such is our communications problem that -- let’s admit it: in reality, we already are out of communion with the African churches. That has been so since at least 1998, when a number of the African bishops embarrassed themselves and their Church by their conduct at the Lambeth Conference. According to Bishop Richard Holloway, that conduct included purported “exorcisms” of identified homosexuals! Of course, a number of other Bishops embarrassed themselves at least as much by not only failing to condemn these excesses, but also failing to support their victims. Such people continue to be an embarrassment. Here in Canada , for example, we recently heard Bishop Terry Buckle of the Yukon, in a keynote address to the conference of the Diocese of Edmonton, claim and advocate ---untroubled by or (more likely) utterly unaware of the great mass of evidence to the contrary --- that homosexuals can be “cured”.

What , we must ask, will be lost if we become “officially” out of Communion with some or all of the African churches ? Well, true, we won’t be able to say there are 86 million (or however many) Anglicans. The number will be cut at least in half. Searching scripture (and tactfully ignoring the “church-building” enthusiasms of the evangelical wing of our Tradition!) , I cannot see that the number of “bums in the pews” has ever been considered a spiritual desideratum. In any case, that way of thinking is spiritually dangerous. Other than the halving of our numbers, I can see no long-term problem, as long as we retain sufficient humility to be really open to dialogue. Let’s not forget how recently we have come to these understandings: I, and many of my readers, antedate the feminist movement, let alone “gay rights”. English law did not remove civil disabilities from non-Anglicans till well into the 19th century, and was still treating women as chattels until just before beginning of the 20th. Well, I’m not that old. The point being that truth in these matters is far from self-evident. These ideas, aided by the social solvent of capitalism, took Western society half a millenium to accept –and that only recently and imperfectly . It is unreasonable to expect that they could possibly be welcomed in very different, mainly traditional societies, in a few scant decades. Still, there comes a point when, to protect the integrity of a group, intolerant people ( as opposed to people with whom we disagree, however strongly) should no longer be tolerated, and must be ignored unless and until they see the error of their ways. The Anglican church has reached that point.

The alternative sought to be imposed by the most recent “deadline” announced by a group of reactionary Bishops – a moratorium of some sort whereby homosexuals seeking ordination or preferment would again be strongly tempted, and perhaps, as in the past, encouraged, to cover up their sexual orientation. –would plunge us back into an intolerably dishonest situation. In that case, my ears are anticipatorily ringing with the epithet that our Saviour, for all his meekness, didn’t hesitate to apply to whoever deserved it, however righteous they might otherwise be: “You hypocrites!”

-Bradley J. Willis,
c/o #132 Heritage Court, 150 Chippewa Rd.
Sherwood Park, AB, T8A-6A2
ph.780-417-9222; fax 780-449-1222
email: jwillis@strathconalawgroup.com