A New ABC: That We All May Be One….
I am delighted
that the Church of England, the parent church from which my own Episcopal
Church arose, has elected Sarah Mullally to be its new Archbishop of
Canterbury. Mullally comes from an interesting background, the first ABC not to
have come out of either Oxford or Cambridge for several centuries and,
obviously, the first female to hold this position.
A former nurse
in the British National Health Service, Mullally began her faith journey in an
evangelical church but that journey has led her to a much broader perspective
which makes space for the wide range of churchmanship which marks Anglicanism.
Already challenged by those at both poles of that churchmanship, evangelicals
and Anglo-Catholics, in her role as Bishop of London, Mullally issued this
gracious recognition of differences in approach that sought to reassure her
challengers:
“I am very
respectful of those who, for theological reasons, cannot accept my role as a
priest or a bishop. My belief is that Church diversity throughout London should
flourish and grow; everybody should be able to find a spiritual home.”
Sounds like an
Archbishop of Canterbury to me.
Badly Needed Balance
Women’s
clerical leadership in the Episcopal Church was never a question for me. The
ordination of women, along with the church’s involvement in resisting the
Vietnam War, in the Civil Rights movement and its first steps toward embracing
its LBGTQ members in the mid-1970s, were all reasons I left the Methodist
Church to follow the Wesley brothers home to Anglicanism. I have never looked
back.
I was clear
that what I was observing was a church beginning to come to consciousness, intent
upon having a spiritual presence in our country and in a world that badly
needed it. I was also clear that women’s leadership would bring a whole new
element of valuing and decision making to a then-all male power structure badly
in need of change. Fifty years later, I am clear that my intuition was on
target.
Prior to my
beginning seminary, I would have described myself as an Anglo-Catholic. I loved
the liturgy, had a devotion to the saints and was about to be professed as a
Third Order Franciscan. Perhaps more important, I had bought into the notion
that Anglo-Catholicism was the only alternative to what I saw as a rather
mindless and frequently heartless charismatic religiosity which had captured
the Diocese of Central Florida where I lived.
Like all false dichotomies, I quickly discovered in seminary that there were other options, my multi-culture parish in San Jose where the Gospel was read in up to five languages on a given Sunday being one of them. I also quickly observed that the Anglo-Catholicism I encountered among fellow seminarians was marked by a decided misogyny and frequently by a homophobia sometimes articulated by closeted gay priests.
I wanted
nothing to do with them or their limited visions.
In my entering
class at CDSP which was predominately female, I quickly discovered that my
intuition about women in Episcopal ministry was right on target. Women were not
the cure for all of the church’s ills, but they brought a balance to its
decision making that was badly needed.
Anthropomorphized Bibles, Common Social
Prejudices
It was less
surprising that the response from the evangelical end of the theological
spectrum would be more aggressive and hostile. The Archbishop of Rwanda would
assert that “the majority of the Anglican Communion still believes that the
Bible requires a male-only episcopacy. Therefore, her appointment will make it
impossible for the Archbishop of Canterbury to serve as a focus of unity within
the Communion.” Whether he actually speaks for a majority of the Communion
is questionable. But he clearly speaks for many of the GAFCON (Global
Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans) dioceses found primarily in the southern
hemisphere.
The Archbishop of Southeast Asia, an archdiocese which does not permit women leadership at any level even within its parishes, said nothing about Mullally’s sex, focusing instead on LBGTQ issues. Chung asserted that Mullally’s election emphasizes “a pre-existing barrier to Anglican unity given her progressive opinions about homosexuality” and her involvement in the Church of England’s limited embrace of same-sex blessings. Apparently Chung feels the only way Anglicans can be unified is if they all buy into a theology which confuses common social prejudices with revealed religion.
A Common Social Prejudice is Not an Article of
Faith
That’s hardly
surprising. Women and gays have been the scapegoats du jour of religious
conservatives for the last several decades of culture wars, dividing
denominations and causing the implosion of congregations around the world.
Concerns about the place of LBGTQ Christians at the table have been the cutting
edge for a toxic patriarchy obsessed with control, a patriarchy which has for
too long controlled virtually every religious body on Earth.
Before we can
even begin to talk about these issues, we need to recognize that at their most
fundamental levels, sexism and its more sinister expression in misogyny as well
as heterosexism and its more sinister expression in homophobia in all of its
forms (including transphobia) are ultimately little more than common social
prejudices albeit prejudices with long histories. There is a tendency in human
reckoning to see understandings that have been held for long periods of time as
somehow self-evidently true, a pattern that would legitimate itself under the
rubric of “tradition.” That’s particularly true when, as in the case of sexual
orientations, the pattern reflects the experience of a majority of the
population. There is a sense that everyone thinks like us or ought to.
Of course,
destructive, misanthropic patterns of thought become no more respectable or
defensible simply by the passage of time. That we have thought and acted poorly
for many years doesn’t mean that such thinking and action was ever reasonable
or respectable and it certainly doesn’t make it either of those things now.
In the case of
religious bodies, particularly those within the 2000 year Christian movement,
there is a tendency to seek legitimacy for these prejudices in the words of
scripture. That is reflected in the Archbishop of Rwanda’s assertion that “the
Bible requires a male-only episcopacy,” an argument also used in condemning
LBGTQ people. His argument suffers from three fatal flaws.
The first is
the tendency to anthropomorphize scripture. Bibles are not people. Bibles don’t
speak, teach, demand, or require anything. Those are human behaviors arising
from relational patterns. Bibles are the repositories of human experience. And
their words reflect the understandings of their human authors.
That points to
the second fatal flaw. It fails to take into account the presence of the
prejudices in the writers which inevitably become reflected in their writing.
Given that sexism and homophobia are socially constructed prejudices with long
pedigrees, why would the writers of scripture have been any more immune to them
than people today?
It’s important
not to see these authors in larger-than-life terms. They were imperfect human
beings, capable of mistakes, just like us. And thus their words must be weighed
with the same skepticism that any other human words would be weighed.
That, in turn,
points to the third fatal flaw in this assertion. While Christians have always
seen the scriptures as divinely inspired, that does not mean that they were
divinely dictated. There is much in scripture that points toward something
larger than ourselves, beyond our day-to-day experience, that we would call the
divine. We call such writings wisdom literature, prophetic writings, parables. But
there is much in scripture that reflects human imperfections as well, not the
least of which is our common social prejudices.
Where that
becomes problematic is when we project our prejudices into the mind of G-d. As
writer Anne Lamott’s priest put it, “You can be assured you have created God
in your image when he hates the same people you hate.” There is a jarring
disjuncture from words which reflect the providential deity Jesus spoke of who loved and cared for
all living beings and words which are tribal in nature, dividing the world into
us and them, providing human targets for the projection of our individual and
collective Shadow.
Jesus engaged in a thoughtful, values driven biblical criticism. I believe that we who follow him are called to do the same. For the same reasons.
That We All May Be One…
In the Prayers
of the People of our Book of Common Prayer, we Episcopalians often pray the
following: ”We pray for the holy Catholic Church…That we all may be
one". Catholic means universal.
And to the degree that we are all part of this movement with its 2000 year
pedigree, that means all of us who follow Jesus.
But the words
of our prayer do not state “That we all may hold the same understandings.”
The reality is, we don’t. We never have. A brief read of St. Paul’s writings
reflects the fact that from the beginning, this Way of Jesus with its varied
communities which ultimately merged into a Christian church has never shared
the same understandings and often fought bitterly over their differences. At
some level, there have always been as many Christianities as there have been
Christians.
That makes
sense at a basic level. People are drawn to expressions of religion which speak
to their most essential needs as human beings. Anglo-Catholics are drawn to a
formal expression of religion, highly aesthetic, deeply dogmatic, and
hierarchical in structure. That’s what speaks to their souls. Evangelicals are
drawn to an authoritarian deity from whom they must be rescued whose earthly
representatives readily tell their flock what they must believe and police the
boundaries of their tribe by projecting their Shadow onto those outside those
circled wagons.
I understand
that those are the needs of those believers. But they are not mine. And they
are not those of many Anglicans.
When I repeat
that prayer, I hear it recognizing that what draws one believer will not speak
to the needs of those the beliefs exclude. I hear that prayer simultaneously
saying that while we are all one human family, we seek a path to the Holy in
the ways that make sense to us. And, like Sarah Mullally, “everybody should
be able to find a spiritual home.”
Aquinas and Bonaventure taught us, “We come from G-d, we exist in G-d, we return to G_d.” St. Paul taught us we are all one in the G-d in whom we live and move and have our being. Ultimately, we are already one and find our very existence in the One.
In the Meantime….
In my
elderhood, I find that I have less and less time, energy or inclination to
argue about who can be included in the church and who must be excluded. In all
honesty, those questions have never made much sense to me.
If there are
those among us who feel the need to circle their wagons, engage in the
self-adulation of the tribe, exclude all other voices and project their
collective Shadow onto those outside their circled wagons, I simply say, “Do
what you need to do.” So I cannot waste my time and energy grieving over
those who leave the Anglican Communion to pursue a vision in which common
social prejudices are conflated with revealed religion. Life is too short. Go
with my blessing and may you know the presence of the Holy One as you journey.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry
Scott Coverston
Orlando,
Florida
If the
unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it
religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do
not come in sound bites.
Those who
believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma
Gandhi
For what
does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with your G-d? - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures
Do not be
daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are
you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish
Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston, 2025
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