Archbishop must take a moral stance ... ...

Published on Saturday 17 June 2006 01:39

SPARE a thought this weekend, if you will, for the Most Rev Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. On Thursday at St Paul's, amid all the splendour of a British state occasion at its grandest, he gave the sermon at a service of thanksgiving for the Queen's 80th birthday and spoke, as usual, thoughtfully about constitutional monarchy as a way of giving a human face to power.

Yet next week, as the US Episcopalian Church begins its triennial meeting in Ohio, the archbishop risks becoming the last occupant of his post to preside over a more or less united worldwide Anglican Communion. Essentially, his Church is tearing itself apart over the 2003 decision of the US Epicopalians to elect the Anglican Communion's first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, of New Hampshire. Nor is there any shortage of critics willing to suggest that Dr Williams has brought this crisis upon himself, by being "too liberal" and failing to side decisively with those who say that active homosexuality is sinful and incompatible with priesthood.

Once upon a time, for an archbishop of Canterbury, every day must have resembled Thursday's day of thanksgiving at St Paul's; he stood at the centre of the ritual life of the nation and expressed moral verities and ideals with which everyone could agree. But today, religious leaders increasingly find themselves caught up, often against their will, in a weird national psychodrama of future-shock and reaction, mediated through the popular press; a story in which all the social and sexual changes of the past 40 years are to be regretted and religious leaders are routinely berated for failing to save us from ourselves by sticking unswervingly to the old rules.

Last month, for example, the Church of Scotland staged its own small but fierce public row over its decision to refer back to local level the debate about whether ministers should be disciplined for carrying out services of blessing for gay civil partnerships, with many denunciations of "weakness" and "sin" in the letters pages of major newspapers.

And this week, Bashir Maan, a devout Muslim and one of Scotland's leading public figures, resigned as president of the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations on the grounds that his fierce denunciations of homosexual behaviour were not compatible with the SCVO's code of equality. "Driven Out By The Gay Mafia" shrieked one front page in response.

Our whole civilisation, it seems, is now caught in tension between a tribal past in which homosexuality had to be anathematised as a deliberate evil which would reduce the birth rate and break down social structures and a more enlightened present in which we recognise that homosexuality should be valued and socially recognised as much as any other loving and life- enhancing human trait.

Once people have attended gay civil partnership ceremonies and seen the joy they can bring, they tend to realise - as many practising parish clergy do - that there can be no going back from this simple advance in human decency and compassion. But after so many millennia of rigorous conditioning into the idea that homosexuality is wicked and shameful, resistance is inevitable and it looks increasingly as if Dr Williams's career as archbishop may be one of the early casualties of the struggle.

One thing we can do, though, as we move through the white-water rapids of this particular social change, is to try to avoid confusion and sharpen up the language of the debate. Often, when asked why they so object to the equal treatment of gays, moral traditionalists begin to talk the language of social pragmatism, rather than morality.

They talk, for example, about the breakdown of the family and how this is bad for society; speaking in support of Mr Maan, last week, a spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland said that he had been victimised for speaking "self-evident truths ... about the breakdown of the family and of the values that have underpinned our society for generations".

Yet in these areas, at least, it is surely possible to offer reassurance to traditionalists frightened by change. For so long as gay people were excluded from the family circle, denied the right to form stable partnerships recognised by law, or forced into fundamentally perjured marriages with members of the opposite sex whom they could not love, they did indeed present a threat to happy family life.

Now, however, the new generation of openly gay people has an opportunity to switch energy from concealment and self-hatred to full-hearted social involvement and engagement - and many are seizing that chance with both hands.

By the same token, if "the values that have underpinned our society for generations" have been found guilty - and they have - of rampant bias against women and gays, plus widespread collusion in the abuse of children, then church leaders must surely feel obliged to challenge and reconsider them, and to measure traditional codes of sexual morality against the highest ideals of the faith they embrace.

As for those sections of the media that seek to turn up the heat under this debate by appealing to old prejudices and by exhorting religious leaders to indulge in reactionary posturing simply because it suits their agenda - well, it cannot be said too loudly, or too often, that those who claim to be defending "morality" in writing such headlines are indulging in an almost Orwellian perversion of language. For there is no "morality", nor has there ever been, in peddling hatred of or discrimination against other human beings simply on the basis of their God-given nature.

On that point at least, I hope Dr Williams will stand firm - even if the Anglican communion is brought down around him, in the end, by those with less compassion, less insight and less love.