First published in the Chicago Free Press on August 13, 2007.
I've been thinking a lot about Anglicans lately, which seems only fair since they have obviously been thinking a lot about me. Not me individually, of course, but me generically—me as a gay man.
As you're probably aware, for the last few years the Anglican Communion has been wracked by conflicts over gays and lesbians as priests and bishops and the issue of whether to bless (much less marry) same-sex partners.
The conflict pits gay-supportive American and Canadian and some British bishops against bishops from Africa and Asia (along with a few fractious American bishops) who are adamantly hostile to granting any rights to gays.
The church recently held its decennial Lambeth Conference, which normally addresses church issues and might have made some determination about all this, but Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams managed to avoid having the conference take any position at all, thus avoiding the possibility of open schism in the church.
Ironically, the anti-gay fundamentalism of the Africans is in some measure the fault of the British and American churches. The British and Americans have supported the missionary work in Africa to convert the populace to Christianity. And both, especially the wealthy Episcopal Church in the U.S., have given the impoverished African churches considerable economic support.
Unfortunately, the missionaries seem to have taught a fairly primitive version of Christianity—stressing the Bible but not the Anglican tradition of the role of reason and compromise. In other words, they gave the Africans and Asians a rule book, and the Africans and Asians have followed it more literally than the British and Americans.
The African bishops are not necessarily well-educated. Many have had little or no seminary training, and little acquaintance with the problems of interpreting biblical texts, nor with reading them in their historical context. They certainly have no grasp of the current research on homosexuality as a basic orientation. And they clearly have no awareness of the native African tradition of homosexuality in the form of mature men with "boy-wives." A well-placed American priest told a friend of mine that some African bishops have little more than an 8th-grade education.
Archbishop Williams' efforts to preserve church unity were not wholly successful. Even though he vowed to uphold traditional (anti-gay) Anglican traditions and went so far as to ban openly gay American bishop Gene Robinson, about 220 of the 880 Anglican bishops met in Jerusalem to form a potentially separatist communion within the Communion and voted to declare that they no longer recognized Williams as the head of the Communion. Yet one wonders what more Williams could have done short of exclaiming, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome bishop?"
Robinson said that Williams even refused to answer his letters. The Apostle Paul wrote that Christians should behave so that the world would say, "How these Christians love one another!" So where is Williams' love? What kind of pastoral concern does Williams show? His actions are neither cordial, nor collegial, nor Christian. They are petty, frightened and small-souled.
It seems to me that Anglican liberals should just allow the Africans and Asians to split off and leave the Anglican Communion, taking their poverty and ignorance with them. The North Americans and British would be well rid of them. What, after all, is the benefit of including people who may nominally be Christians but seem to lack any understanding of what Christianity means?
The only reason to try to keep the Africans and Asians in the Communion would be the hope that eventually the liberals can bring them around on such issues as female priests and homosexuality. But the chances of that happening seem slim. After all, they have their reading of the bible on their side.
Alternatively, the North Americans could withdraw and say, You go your way and we'll go ours. That might rattle some of the Africans who need the American subsidies. And it would certainly rattle Williams, who seems to have given little thought to this possibility.
The Anglican church has a strong sense of history. What Williams is probably doing is trying to stave off any open schism, hoping that things will somehow change over time. In any case, he certainly does not want to enter the history books as the archbishop under whom a major schism occurred.
But after all, the Anglican church was founded in the 16th century by an act of schism. So schism is a venerable part of Anglican history. Who is to say it would be worse than a conflicted and specious "unity"?