Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  Was my wee boat finally heading for the rocks? It certainly seemed to be gathering speed in the current of my own recklessness; and a number of friends on the shore shouted warnings about the white water ahead. It would be the Lambeth Conference of 1998 that would send me over the edge, and it was just round the next bend.

  15

  LEAVING ALEXANDRIA

  In my fourteen years as a bishop I attended two Lambeth Conferences. I didn’t particularly enjoy the first one in 1988, but I actively hated the second in 1998. Held every ten years, they are better defined in negatives than in positives. They are not legislative assemblies or parliaments of the Anglican Communion, although the desire to give them that kind of authority is beginning to creep in. They are more like family reunions than anything else, and to understand them you have to know something about the history of the Anglican Communion, excluding Scotland, a special case to which I’ll return. Like the British Empire, the Communion grew by accident as clergy from England followed traders and colonists round the world and set up chaplaincies to minister to them. In the process they scattered their brand of religion around the globe much the way they spread the game of cricket. For a time these outposts considered themselves to be Church of England chaplaincies not independent ecclesiastical entities, but as the Empire evolved so did its religious counterpart. The closest secular parallel to the Anglican Communion is the British Commonwealth, the international club former colonies joined when they left the Empire. The result is a network of autonomous provinces held together more by affection and shared history than by doctrinal or cultural conformity. In spite of that, the Anglican Communion has shown a tenacious desire to keep itself together, something easier said than done with such a loose structure of national provinces all at different stages of social and theological evolution. Over the years several formal ‘instruments of unity’ were evolved to keep this scattered family in touch with each other, and the first one to appear was the Lambeth Conference. In 1867 the Archbishop of Canterbury invited Anglican bishops to join him for a conference at Lambeth Palace in London to celebrate their friendship and discuss their common interests, and the ten-yearly gathering was born. As is the way with these things, the conference has accrued influence and authority to itself over the years, but it is not a legislative body. Its reports may guide the policies of individual provinces, but they have no power to command them.

  The Conferences meet now at the University of Kent in Canterbury, not in London, though there is always a big London Day when the Church of England lays on a service in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in the morning and a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace in the afternoon. The rest of the time the 700 bishops go from their student rooms in the Canterbury campus to worship services, keynote lectures and discussion groups in which they debate the issues of the day, especially if they threaten the balancing act of the Communion’s integrity. The results of these debates are brought together in big set-piece plenary sessions where they are voted on. If they smell blood, the Press turn up to watch the spectacle. They came in their droves to Lambeth 1988 because the hot issue was the ordination of women and it was predicted it would tear the Communion apart. At that time there were few Anglican provinces where it had happened, but it was firmly on the agenda for discussion in many places, including the British Isles, and was already a done deal in North America. Opponents mustered their forces against the blasphemous advance of women, Conservative Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics operating a pincer strategy in opposition. Before looking at how the issue was handled at Lambeth 1988, I want to reflect on why it was such a tough topic to deal with, because it provides us with a classic example of the difficulties religions face when they are confronted with moral challenges that come from outside their own sacred enclosures.

  The problem for the Church in the twentieth century was that many of the pressures for human emancipation were coming from the secular rather than the religious sphere, and Christianity is always suspicious of moral imperatives it did not invent, seeing itself as the uniquely qualified conscience of humanity. It is hard for institutions that believe they are divinely inspired and guided to admit they are wrong about anything, especially in areas of moral evolution. This is why campaigners for reform within the Church have to go out of their way to prove that the new challenge is not only consistent with their old convictions but is actually mandated by them. The Church can never just do the right thing because it is the right thing to do; it has to find religious reasons for doing it. It can’t just abandon its rigid code, like the Good Samaritan, and go to the aid of the needy person on the side of the road; it has to find theological reasons for doing so. Code always has to justify compassion. Nevertheless, to be fair to it, the Church usually does try to find ways of adapting its code to the needs of compassion, though its serpentine logic may baffle the understanding of outsiders. I began to notice both the charm and the absurdity of this process when I was a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the body set up by the UK Parliament to license fertility clinics, invigilate upon their activities and keep an eye on new developments in the field.

  The first successful ‘test-tube baby’ had been born in 1978. The process had involved removing an egg from the mother’s ovaries and letting her partner’s sperm fertilise it in a fluid medium outside her body. The embryo that resulted was transferred to the mother’s uterus and established a successful pregnancy. This new reproductive technique was described as in vitro as opposed to in vivo fertilisation, because it involved cultivation of tissue in a glass container – in vitro – outside the body. The new reproductive technology presented many problems for religious groups, but I only want to look at one of the less profound issues it raised for the Catholic Church, because the way it got round the difficulty tells us a lot about religion.

  One of the challenges IVF presented for Catholic moral theology was how to retrieve sperm ethically. There was physical discomfort involved in harvesting the egg from the woman, but there was no moral problem attached to the process: as far as religion was concerned, it was a surgical procedure with little moral resonance. However, the usual way of harvesting sperm was morally problematic because it involved masturbation, a sin according to Catholic moral theology. How was the Church to balance the good of helping a married couple have children against the evil of the masturbatory act without which it could not be achieved? The Catholic moral tradition often appears to be inflexible, but it does its best to accommodate change within its own parameters. That is what it did here. It suggested two solutions to the dilemma, two ways of capturing sperm without sinning. One was for the husband and wife to have sexual intercourse and for the semen to be retrieved from the woman afterwards by a process of aspiration. The other was the use of the canonical contraceptive, a pre-perforated, non-spermicidal condom worn by the husband during intercourse and placed immediately after withdrawal in a container and express-delivered to the clinic, where it was stored until the insemination procedure was carried out.100 When I read about this attempt on the part of Catholic theologians to be helpful, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. I was moved by the fact that within its own worldview the Church was trying to be helpful. On the other hand, it seemed to be yet another example of the tendency, particularly strong in religious systems, to assert the primacy of abstract principle over urgent human need.

  Farcical as this example of Catholic casuistry may appear to be, I quickly realised that we were doing something similar in the Anglican Church in our debate about the ordination of women. We could not bring ourselves to say that the Church’s opposition to the emancipation of women was stupid as well as wrong and should be abandoned forthwith. We had to find religious reasons for doing the right thing. We could not say that our scriptures were wrong on this subject as on much else – which was hardly surprising, given their cultural lineage in late Stone Age society – so let us put them aside and agree that there is no justification for refusing women ordination and just get on with i
t. What we did was to twist ourselves in knots to find justifications within scripture for doing what scripture had previously been understood to forbid. And we found them, just as Catholic theologians found a sinless way to retrieve sperm. The exegetical equivalent of the pre-perforated, non-spermicidal condom was ‘the canon within the canon’ or the Bible within the Bible: in other words, bits of the Holy Book that were held to be more profound and important than other bits. A text latched onto from Paul, the main opponent where the liberation of women was concerned, seemed to do the trick:

  as many of ye as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.101

  This text referred to one of the Church’s earliest struggles with another gang of importunate outsiders, in this case Gentiles seeking entrance to a community that had hitherto understood itself to be a sect within Judaism. The passage from Galatians became our canonical condom, but it did not persuade everyone in the Church. Conservative evangelicals refused to use it. Galatians had nothing to do with the status of women; it was about the baptism of Gentiles, something Paul was quite clear about. On the status of women, Paul was equally clear: Man is the boss.

  Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

  For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church . . . Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.102

  For Anglo-Catholic opponents of women, who were on the other tine of the pincer, the Bible was not the problem. Anglo-Catholics didn’t rate the Bible that highly. They claimed, correctly, that the Church was in existence hundreds of years before the New Testament, which was the Church’s creation and over which it had interpretative authority. So Paul wasn’t a problem. You could get round Paul. The Pope was the problem, and no one could get round the Pope except the Pope himself. It was not an inerrant text we had to contend with, they claimed, it was an inerrant institution.

  The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, exercising the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, he defines . . . a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, through the divine assistance promised to him in St. Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer wished His church to be endowed . . . and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.103

  That, as the insurance salesman said to Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, is a doozy. It might appear odd that a sect within a Church that came into existence to resist claims of Papal infallibility was now denying that same Church the right to order its own life without permission of that same infallibility. It is strange. Anglicanism has often been a coalition of the unwilling, but this took its incoherence to a new low. But there was enough in the back-story of the Catholic revival in Anglicanism to have alerted us. During the height of the ritualistic controversies in the nineteenth century, one journalist had noted that many Anglo-Catholics were ‘endowed less with a great power of will than with an enormous power of won’t.’ As well as the romance of monasticism and the dedication of slum priests, in the DNA of Anglo-Catholicism there was nostalgia for the strong leader who would navigate the flux of history and pilot the Church infallibly through its storms. This kind of nostalgia is not unique to religion. It is at the root of all totalitarian systems: religious, political, intellectual. And it is easy to find sympathy for the craving. It is the longing for permanence and stability in the chaos and tumult of history; the need for something that abides, something to cling to among the wreckage of time. Unfortunately, there are no magical deliverers who can deliver us from ourselves and our muddles. No infallible Bible. No infallible Church. No infallible anything. And there never has been. Nevertheless, I find it hard to deny others the consolation of believing they have found one that works for them. Anglicanism had never claimed that kind of infallibility for itself. It knew it was a muddle; a muddled Church for muddled people. And since there were lots of muddled people around, it had an honourable vocation. Fortunately, when the ordination of women was squabbled over at Lambeth in 1988, the Archbishop of Canterbury who presided over it was an intuitive Anglican who understood the theology of muddle and helped us muddle through.

  Religions take a long time to negotiate change, and Robert Runcie bought the Anglican Communion enough time to come to terms with the ordination of women by wielding two theoretical devices: reception and contextuality. They were based on historical observation: it takes a while for new ideas and new social arrangements to be received by people; and cultures vary in their absorption of the new according to their social context. A change that was a no-brainer in Manhattan might be anathema in Mombasa. Let us therefore accept these differences in cultural time-zones and not expect Manhattan to set its clock by Mombasa, or vice versa. Meanwhile, let us appoint a commission to explore the difficulties the ordination of women will undoubtedly cause for the Communion as a whole and how we might best manage them. There was grumbling, but there was also relief when we followed this approach. No province was pressured either to stop or start ordaining women. The Press had predicted the break-up of the Communion and they alone were disappointed when it did not happen. Runcie, a keen cricketer, had glided the problem into the long grass. Over the next decade more and more Anglican provinces, including those in the British Isles, started ordaining women. Conservative Evangelicals learned to live with the change, but Anglo-Papalists never did. Most of them have now transferred to a secure unit within the Roman Catholic Church, where they know the Pope will protect them from the advances of women for the foreseeable future.

  Runcie was a complex and attractive figure. Though temperamentally his opposite, I grew to love and admire him. He was an instinctive Anglican of the old English type that distrusted enthusiasm and ideology. A devout pragmatist, he believed that institutions were best kept together by adaptative changes subtle enough to prevent panic among the forces of reaction but serious enough to achieve real momentum. Though a brave man and a decorated soldier in World War II, in his retirement, visited by the regrets that come to all reflective men as they approach the end, he wondered if he should not have been bolder in his approach. His critics had often accused him of nailing his colours to the fence. In spite of my impatience for change, I thought his approach was wise. And it worked. The Anglican Communion did not hit the rocks over women. It was his successor who pulled off that navigational feat ten years later on the even more contentious issue of homosexuality.4

  As with women’s ordination, there was a wild variety of opinion on the subject. This time, however, the opposition’s tone was uglier. And no canonical condom was available, no get-out-of-gaol text to help us fudge the debate. Paul had not told us in his Letter to the Galatians that in Christ there was neither gay nor straight. What references there were in the Bible to homosexuality were all hostile. Stick to the Bible and you were stuck with hatred of gays. Fundamentalists from the Bible Belt understood the logic: God hates fags. What I hadn’t expected at Lambeth 1998 was to hear so many men in purple cassocks mouthing the same sentiments with the same ugly avidity.

  I turned up not expecting the Communion to support gay rights, but I did expect a reprise of the Runcie strategy and I was firmly under the impression that the new Archbishop, George Carey, intended to steer us in that direction. There would, I assumed, be passionate debate, equally passionate disagreement, and ugly things would doubtless be said; a commission would then be appointed to consider the impact on the Communion of our disagreements – to report back before the Second Coming – and the problem would roll into the high grass for a generation. Meanwhile, provinces would deal with it in ways appropriate to their own context, as they had with women’s ordination, and we would muddle through again. I turned up at the campus in Canterbury with little enthusiasm, but with n
o idea that it would be as grim as it turned out to be. My own reception was not encouraging. As a patron of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, I had invited the bishops to a reception in Canterbury to meet some gay Christians. I did not expect all 749 bishops to attend, but I thought we would get a representative sample. I was wrong. To be fair to him, George Carey was one of the few opponents of change to turn up. I was moved when a young man told him that it had taken more courage for him to come out to the gay community as a Christian than it had to come out as a gay man to his family and friends. The gay community’s perception of Christianity was unsurprisingly negative, given the ugly things Christians said loudly about them. He hoped the conference would help to soften that perception.

  In the event, the conference made it far worse, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, probably more out of naivety than collusion, allowed the African bishops to force an unconstitutional debate on a subject that had already been prudently dealt with by an official sub-group of the conference. He presided over the rout with smiling incomprehension as the damage was done. Bishop after bishop, mainly but not exclusively from Africa, got up to denounce the wickedness and animality of lovers of their own sex. There were some valiant African opponents of the coup, including the Archbishops of South and Central Africa, but it pursued its ugly course to the end. A resolution was passed by a large majority, denouncing homosexuality as a practice incompatible with scripture and refusing to legitimise the blessing of same-sex unions or the ordination of homosexuals. But it was the tone of the debate that did the real damage. One American bishop, a man with a big heart and a small body, told me that he had been physically menaced by the bishops around him whenever he had raised his hand to vote against their increasingly intemperate resolutions. Immediately after the rout, on a grassy knoll outside the conference hall, a Nigerian bishop attempted to cast out the demons of homosexuality from Richard Kirker, the Director of the Gay and Lesbian Christian Movement, who had bravely challenged him about what had happened. A demon was released that afternoon, but it did not come out of the brave young man being apostrophised by the African prelate. A South African woman present at the conference as a consultant, a university professor, told me that what we had just witnessed was not just about African attitudes to homosexuality; it was an imperious assertion of male control over sex. One aspect of this had always been the control of women by men, but the other had been the ancient prohibition of sodomy because of the way it undermined the idea of male dominance in the sexual act. Andrea Dworkin had addressed the problem years before.