He sees nothing funny, though, in the “homophobic” attitudes that threaten to split his church. The long-simmering debate over homosexuality and the clergy erupted into open battle last week when the American Episcopal Church, part of the global Anglican family, confirmed an openly gay priest, the Rev. Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire, the first such appointment in church history. Liberals welcomed the news as a victory for Christian tolerance over prejudice. Many saw it as a blow for modernity that, they hope, will be emulated elsewhere. But orthodox leaders responded very differently. To them, Robinson’s elevation was an affront to Biblical teachings–and a challenge to their own standing within the church, whose membership worldwide exceeds 75 million. With passions escalating and little hope of compromise, there’s now open talk of schism. “The strains may be just too great,” says David Jenkins, a retired Church of England bishop and theologian. “In some ways, the honest position would be to split.”
The row has resonance far beyond the church’s traditional heartlands. Once upon a time, Anglicanism was largely an affair for the English and their Episcopal cousins in America. Over its 450-year history the church could often count on assured ties with the establishment–the queen remains temporal head of the Church of England–and healthy financial support. Today’s church looks very different, however. In much of the northern world, pews are emptying fast. Churchgoing among Anglicans in the United Kingdom has fallen 7.5 percent over the past 10 years. By some reckonings, the Church of England still ranks as the largest in Anglicanism, but for many, observance stretches little beyond Christ-mas Day worship. Only the conservative-minded evangelicals–enemies of the gay cause–have managed to lift their numbers.
Instead, it’s Britain’s former colonies, especially in Africa, that now supply most of the church’s strength. Like other African churches, Roman Catholic and Protestant, the Anglicans have seen congregations swell. In hard times, communities have welcomed the positive message preached by the evangelicals who increasingly dominate local churches. “It’s often said that the typical Anglican is now black, female and under 30,” says Gregory Cameron of the Anglican Communion in London, an umbrella group for the church’s 38 Anglican churches worldwide. Nigeria is a case in point. Over the past 30 years the church has seen its membership there climb sevenfold to about 20 million, nearly 10 times the figure for the United States.
That’s no help to the liberal churchmen of North America and the United Kingdom. The African leadership has stuck close to the conventional Bible-based teachings bequeathed by European missionaries and their former colonial masters. For most of them, the answer to the question of homosexuality within the church is simple. It’s a resounding no, says the Right Rev. William Waqo of the Anglican Church of Kenya. “It’s a question of saying, ‘This is what I believe, and this is what I hold to’,” he adds, explaining his own opposition to Robinson’s appointment. An abhorrence of same-sex relationships runs deep in much of Africa, reinforced by local culture and mirrored in traditional religions. Says the Right Rev. Peter Akinola, archbishop of Nigeria: “Even in the world of animals–dogs, cows and lions–we don’t hear of such things.”
With numbers come confidence and influence. Why should they adapt their teachings, African church leaders ask, to match the failing ideas of the mother church in England or the Episcopalians in America? “They are saying, ‘We don’t want to follow your ways when they don’t work’,” says Peter Brierley of Christian Research, a London-based organization that tracks developments in the church. Already they have flexed their muscles. With allies among the newly powerful evangelicals of the north, the traditionalists are in a position to sway decision making beyond their home territory. Earlier this summer an English priest–gay but celibate–was persuaded to decline his nomination as bishop of Reading. Behind the decision by Canon Jeffrey John was the outrage voiced in Africa and the church leadership’s fear of provoking a split.
The latest controversy is pushing the church toward the very showdown it’s long sought to avoid. Both in England and the United States, church officials have struggled to keep the peace by fudging messy compromises: gay priests in England, for instance, could be gay so long as they abstained from sex. Even in the upper ranks homosexuality has been tacitly condoned. The Right Rev. Thomas Shaw of Massachusetts calls it a climate of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” adding: “Gene Robinson won’t be the first bishop who is gay and in a relationship, just the first who is open about it.”
Conservatives have clearly grown impatient with this sort of equivocation. As they see it, the church has grown far too willing to put consensus above traditional right-and-wrong certainties. What’s needed, they say, is clear guidance from the church’s spiritual leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury. For the moment, that’s unlikely. The newly enthroned archbishop, the Right Rev. Rowan Williams, a former Cambridge theologian, must tread a fine line if he’s to maintain unity. Already he’s suspect in the traditionalist camp for his supposed pro-gay thinking. Rather than speak out now, he’ll await the emergency summit of church leaders that he called last week for October.
Would failure to agree mean an inevitable rupture? For practical reasons alone this may not be the preferred solution of either side. Take the question of money. If the south has the numbers, the north has the cash. If more traditional southern churches were to break away from their liberal brethren, where would they get the funds to run the organization that only the northerners can provide? Furthermore, if any of the individual churches should split, who’d own the property? Who would a court deem to be the true Anglicans with a right to inherit?
Time may offer the best hope. In the past, the doomsayers’ warnings of schism over crunch issues have proved badly wrong. Remember only how the church, led again by the Americans, shifted its ground over the acceptance of women priests. Says the Right Rev. Barbara Harris, appointed the first female Episcopal bishop in 1988: “At the vote for women’s ordination there was a lot of anguish that it would split the church. But the church still thrives in many ways.” Perhaps so. But right now it takes a lot of faith to banish the demons that each side sees in the other.
