And this is Christianity’s saving grace where power is concerned. Literally. For the source of our shame, the source of the general pattern of sorrow power has created in Christian history, is not power itself, but confidence about power. Certainty about power. Optimism about power, of a kind that contradicts Jesus’s grimly kind lack of faith in our chances of managing righteousness. We are supposed to believe that human attempts at perfection will mean a nice slab on top, worms underneath; but it is possible, with a bit of squinting, to imagine that because we’re Christians, our projects might somehow share in God’s freedom from the HPtFtU. Then power, rather than being just another medium in which we’re sure to struggle and blunder as we try to articulate the vision of grace, might itself be sanctified. Christian power might be holy, and be exercised successfully for holy purposes, without irony, without humility, without doubt. As always seems to be the case, the vainglorious certainty that the HPtFtU can be excluded from some area of human experience only serves to invite it straight in around the back, to romp around fucking things up on the grand scale. When Christians try to exercise power as if it were God doing it, cruelty and suffering and tyranny follow swiftly. In short order, we get the steely-eyed monks of the Inquisition trying to drag the Moors and Jews of Spain into perfect orthodoxy, one fingernail at a time; we get the theocrats of Protestant New England hanging Quakers and dispensing scarlet letters; we get holy war, with weapons of ever-increasing sophistication. We get Guantánamo. We get Abu Ghraib. We get waterboarding. Yet all the while, something nags. To Christians, power rubs and chafes, even when it’s necessary. You may think that it’s the essence of religion to believe that some human agenda or other has divine backing, there being no other source of agendas except humanity, but our sky fairy is an uncooperative one. It manifests as a voice comparing the kingdom to twenty different impractical, unplannable, ungovernable things. In the heat of some dreadful surge of certainty, we may manage to drown the voice out for a while. But it always comes back in the end, reminding us that power is not in itself what we are supposed to be hoping for. It is not the medium in which the kingdom can be realised. Unfortunately, before ‘in the end’ arrives, there has often been time for us to fill the prisons and bless the armoured divisions.
Nor does the church need to have wielded direct civil authority to do harm to the flourishing of the lives within its reach. The power of perception is considerable too, the power to mould cultural judgements. Here is the fourth and last of the areas of persistent damage for which Christianity is to blame: our recurring tendency to give religious sanction to whatever is small-‘c’ conservative in a society, at the expense of everybody who falls outside the conservative definition of what’s good and natural. We are supposed to be the universal harbour for the guilty, an organisation in which no one claims to look at anyone else from the higher ground of virtue. We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it. But it is possible to see the church, instead, as virtue’s tribe, as a new version of the old self-satisfied Us, with the edge of the church standing as the edge of familiarity, the edge of the comfortable, and fusing in imagination with the anthropologically inevitable boundary between the clean and the dirty, the safe and the frightening. Then whatever is inside the tribal boundary begins to seem good because it is inside, and whatever is outside begins to seem wicked because it is outside.
This produces a moral map of the world where virtue is determined by labels rather than by actions: by what your label says you are, not by what you do. Given the universality of the HPtFtU, it follows that a lot of everyday spite and unpleasantness, and worse, is going to go on under the label of insiderish goodness, and may well be given cover, consciously or unconsciously, by other insiders who believe that they are defending the dignity of the Christian label. Or even that they are defending goodness itself – which is the same thing, according to the insider/outsider map. If your priority is to maintain the axiomatic wonderfulness of Christian marriage, then you may not want to listen very hard to news of wife-battering, marital rape and petty domestic tyranny. If your priority is to proclaim the axiomatic wonderfulness of the Christian family, then you may not want to pay much attention to stories of children abused. If your priority is to revere the axiomatic wonderfulness of the priesthood, then you may not want to give much credence to the whispers about Father Stephen and the altar boys. You won’t mean, by any of these acts of deliberate ignorance, to approve of the ills in question. You just deny that they can be happening; and since they do happen, people being people, your silence helps them to go on happening. Your preference for the bright-coloured map gives them permission to continue. And to the victims, seeing how the goodness and holiness of what hurts them is constantly affirmed, it can seem as if God Himself approves the harm. ‘The earth is heavy with His presence,’ says the psalm. Intolerably heavy, crushingly heavy, if you are taught that God is in the pinning weight you must not complain of.
And as for attitudes towards those seen as being on the dirty outside of the tribe, especially if their difference is frightening in some way, especially if their difference has to do with sexuality: oh my. It is of course an illusion to imagine that the dykes and the queers and the trannies are all safely locked out there in the outer darkness rather than being in here with us, in fact being us, but that’s what the corrupting little map of virtue suggests, and quite a lot of those who are conducting my own church’s stumbling rearguard action against gay rights seem to feel that they are defending a fortress of traditional behaviour against hordes of drag queens on crack. The record of the church here is, frankly, rubbish. We are supposed, always, to be trying to love what we don’t like or understand or want to touch; we are supposed to be taking as little notice of boundaries to love as we believe God does. We are supposed to be looking at each other in guilty brotherhood and sisterhood. We are not supposed to be assigning guilt according to who does what with whom. Categories of clean and dirty belong in the law-religions, not in Christianity. Where consenting adults are concerned, we ought to be as uninterested in lists of forbidden sexual acts as we are in lists of forbidden foods. ‘Objectively disordered’, my arse. The disorder is in our hearts. Sexual sins matter, all right – where selves touch so closely, what more fertile field could there be for the HPtFtU? – but any of us can commit them, and we usually do, taking hold of each other coldly, carelessly, mockingly, exploitatively, angrily, as if the other or our own self were a convenient object rather than flesh requiring our recognition and our tenderness. Sexual guilt, like every other kind, is distributed across the entire human race. As we’ve seen, the founding story of Christianity is astonishingly unbothered about it. Jesus didn’t think it was worth picking it out in particular to talk about it. Yet Christians seem to be intensely and continuously bothered. In other areas of life, dealing with other kinds of difference and other hierarchies of status and privilege, like those of race or class or caste, we have managed at times over the last century to live up to the emancipatory promise of our faith. The Civil Rights movement in the United States being a proud case in point, where Christian theology and the Christian critique of power helped a dispossessed people to demand freedom.* When it comes to the oppression of women and sexual minorities, not so much. Far from giving any kind of emancipatory lead, the church has struggled along behind, always late, always reluctant, accepting with palpable difficulty and discomfort liberations that became normal outside the church a generation earlier. My own church digs in its feet about women being bishops, about gay men being bishops, about same-sex marriage and adoption by gay couples. It constantly contrives to signal that it rates the unhappiness of the traditionally-minded higher in the scale of priorities than any injustice or violence or hatred suffered by those whom tradition excludes. It gives the impression that it would be preferable if homosexuality ceased to exist, or failing that, if homosexuals would all remain silent and invisible and (naturally) celibate all their lives, tidily
locked away in self-hating self-denial. Meanwhile, it maintains warm, chatty relationships with sister churches around the world which (Uganda) advocate the death penalty for gay sex, or (Nigeria) hold that there is no such thing as sexual orientation, just individuals giving in to sodomitical wickedness. It’s no wonder people conclude that Christianity is intrinsically homophobic and misogynistic.
* According to Christopher Hitchens, the Reverend Martin Luther King cannot be counted to the credit of the religion. ‘In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian.’ He was too good, you see. The non-violence, the humility – utterly incompatible with Christianity’s proven wickedness. While we consider the rigorous logic of this position, let’s all sing that great Civil Rights anthem ‘Eyes on the Prize’. Put my hand on the gospel plough [Luke 9.62], won’t take nothing for my journey now [Mark 6.8] . . . The only thing we did was wrong, was staying in the wilderness too long [Matthew 4.1–8], keep your eyes on the prize [1 Corinthians 9.24–5] and hold on [1 Thessalonians 5.21] . . . No, nothing Christian there.
However, there is a misapprehension here. The everyday moral consensus of the western European and North American world has shifted sharply on the subjects of sexuality and gender roles over the last fifty years. It’s been a swift, epochal social change. And because the church has been slow to participate in it, and was committed before it (with only a very few exceptions) to the pre-feminist and pre-Stonewall understanding of what was right ’n’ proper, many people now assume that the church must be bigoted on principle. They presume that the bigoted world of the past was bigoted because the church then had the power to enforce its bigoted principle, and is no longer bigoted because the church has lost the power to impose it. Surely the Christian scriptures must contain somewhere the announcement that the Westboro Baptist Church puts on its delightful placards, God Hates Fags. Obviously, they think, mainstream churchy types are a bit more circumspect about expressing it than the Westboro nutcases, seeing that it doesn’t go down very well these days, but just look at the news, just look at the way the churches writhe and cringe when they’re asked to follow the equality laws. It’s the same thing. The Bible teaches hate. They try to hide it now, but it’s too late; that old tyrannical pleasure-prohibiting stuff has lost its grip on us. We’re off to dance the night away at the roller-disco, daddy-o, wearing hotpants and smooching whom we please, and you can’t stop us, you sad old religious nobodies. We’re free! Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we’re free at last. (Whoops, wrong liberation struggle.)
But there is no such principle. Christian homophobia and misogyny do not proceed from an instruction in our Big Black How-To Book of Hate. (And in any case the Bible is a library, not a manual.) They are a consequence of the church’s immersion in the prejudices, assumptions and habits of the world before the change, formed by that world as much as forming it. More broadly, they are a consequence of the way Christianity always exists in a culture, and grows to fill whatever human niche it finds itself in. At its essential heart, it is very simple and radical, and it does not actually require most of the heterogeneous material that gets gathered up along with the gathering of the people into each local crazy-paved caddis-larva assemblage. But the difference between the bits that are core and the bits that are periphery is not always very apparent from where a particular person, or a particular society, is standing. A lot of stuff gets hoovered up,* including, in each society, an instinctual semi-conscious sense of what constitutes the unchanging part of human experience. The part that doesn’t ebb and flow with fashion and the weather. The part that is bedrock. I talked earlier about the church giving supernatural sanction to small-‘c’ conservatism, and that’s what this is. Not large-‘C’ Conservatism, with a philosophy and a programme; not a rule, not a principle, not a judgement for all times and seasons. Just a preference for what seems old, settled, permanent, with respect to (relative to) one particular time and place. Tradition varies. The conservatism of an elderly French peasant is different from the conservatism of a twenty-five-year-old Californian lawyer, which is different again from the conservatism of a Nigerian market-stall matriarch who thinks her daughter-in-law is a hussy on the make. The common link is a kind of poetics of order; an expectation that the ultimate (but invisible) solidity of God can be found in, is reflected in, whatever in daily life seems most solid. Which means, the way the world worked when I first learned the world. Which means, the old ways, whatever they were. This plays a much larger role in Christian hostility to changes in sexual behaviour than does any positive adherence to, for instance, the sexual code in the Book of Leviticus. (We don’t obey the twiddly behavioural bits of ancient Jewish law at all, in fact, grace having replaced them.) My own church contains actual homophobes here and there, of course, but it is dragging its feet primarily because it was so deeply acculturated to the world before the change. It had bound itself to the habits and outlook of that world, and those in the church who are the right age now remember the order of things in the 1950s as the old stuff, the sanctified stuff, the solid stuff, from which it is frightening and dangerous to move on. Naturally this isn’t just a phenomenon that affects perceptions of sexuality, or that applies to that one generation of church members. Similar patterns of time-lag explain why the Church of England also preserves, as if in aspic, pockets of 1980s-style anti-racism, and a number of 1970s-style beardy lefties. Cough the Archbishop of Canterbury cough.
* Philosophy and cosmology, for example, as well as food rituals, dress codes, laws of inheritance and views on the appropriate level of interest rates. This is how the medieval Latin church finds itself temporarily committed to the metaphysics of Aristotle and the bibbity-bobbity clockwork solar system of Ptolemy.
Obviously this is not much substantial comfort, if you’re being gay-bashed outside a pub, and the church is wringing its hands and going oo-er-I-feel-your-pain to the people kicking your head in. But it has implications for the future. It strongly suggests that the church will get there in the end. Slow and late and pathetically reluctant, it will eventually allow the central commandment we have got, to love our neighbours as we love ourselves, to overrule the poetry of custom; and the church will reconfigure, at snail-like speed, for a new social reality. By then, however, social reality is sure to have changed again. There is no ‘in the end’ for human societies. So the implication is not that the church has to make its way through a finite menu of accommodations to social justice, after which it will have sorted itself out and become an institution in good order, which enlightened people can be glad to have around. There will always be more change needed. There always has been more change needed. The process is never-ending. For ever and ever, in any possible future, the church will always be adjusting imperfectly to new times, and then un-adjusting again later, also imperfectly, with occasional lucky breaks where grace, crackling onwards through history, helps us to a sudden generosity. The church will always be clumsy and time-lagged and complicit in the corruptions of its times. The slowness of the church will sometimes exhibit a kind of wisdom, protecting what is beautiful and vulnerable in our inheritance, insulating us from inane enthusiasm for change as such, guarding us against the illusion that we can renew ourselves at will; but there will always be costs exacted for it too, in human needs recognised too sluggishly, in injustices scandalously tolerated. There will never come a year zero after which we are pure. We’re the league of the guilty, after all, not the league of the shortly-to-become-good. We are a work in progress. We will always be a work in progress. We will always fail, and it will always matter.
And the same applies to our other intimate disasters: to all the patterns of harm that spread from our abuse of our story, from our falls from grace into punishment, from our temptation to believe we can be God’s holy regents on the earth. On they roll. On they will roll, no doubt, in new forms for as long as there are Christians, people being what we are, the HPtFtU being what it is. If we waited for the church to clean up, if we waite
d for the church to be nothing but good, to do nothing but good, we would wait for ever.
So we don’t wait. We don’t, in fact, believe the church is precious because it is good or does good or because it may do good in future. We care about its behaviour, but we don’t believe that its muddled and sometimes awful record is the only truth about it. We believe that the church is precious because it embodies something that the HPtFtU in general and our sins of complicity in particular cannot destroy. Something which already exists now, despite our every failure, and which consequently always has existed for Christians, right through all the dark centuries when slavery and tyranny governed the world, and the church too, and the modern idea of rights was not yet even imaginable. When the abbot was a thug who got the abbey from the thug his brother who was king, when the bishop did send the bootboys round, when famine raged and the clergy stayed fat, this other thing stayed true. Was already true. Didn’t have to be waited for.
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