A pink reformation

Theo Hobson
February 5, 2007

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/theo_hobson/2007/02/a_pink_reformation.html

What emerged from the gay adoption business is that the issue of homosexuality is terribly dangerous to the Roman Catholic church. It comes away from such a debate with its public image damaged. And of course this is true of the Anglican Church too. Indeed, it seems to me that the debate about homosexuality poses such a serious threat to organised religion in this country that it is not absurd to compare it to the reformation of the 16th century.
Some will reply that the churches have always faced difficult moral issues, and they have muddled through: the gay issue is nothing unusual. Until quite recently I would have agreed. But it becomes ever clearer that the issue of homosexuality really is different. It has managed to tie the finest Anglican theologian of his generation in knots, effectively disabling him from leadership. And more widely and more seriously it is undermining the churches' claim to the moral high ground.
The Church of England has faced all sorts of controversial moral debates over the years, but none of these has really threatened it. There is a journalistic cliche that sex is the problem: church leaders are "obsessed" with it and find it fatally problematic. But it's not really true. The Church of England has faced countless questions relating to sexual ethics and has muddled through fine. It is not sex in general that is so threatening to churches: it is homosexuality in particular. Why? Why is this issue doing such damage to religious institutions?
It seems to me that a couple of factors coincide. Firstly, this is an issue that shuns compromise. It has a stark "either/or" quality. Either homosexuality is a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality or it is not. There is no room for compromise, no third way: poor Rowan Williams is trying to make himself a perch on a barbed-wire fence. You don't find such absoluteness in other moral debates, such a complete absence of shared assumptions and aims. This is not a normal moral debate but a pure clash of visceral responses.
The second factor is the sheer speed of the homosexual cause's success. Something that was assumed for centuries to be unspeakably immoral has emerged as an alternative form of life, an identity that merits legal protection. The demand for gay equality has basically ousted traditionalist sexual morality from the moral high ground. The speed of this is stunning: feminism was brewing for a century or two before it started to win the argument, and the same applies to the case for racial equality.
And there is another, more complex factor. The public change in attitudes towards homosexuality is not just the waning of a taboo. It is not just a case of a practice losing its aura of immorality (as with premarital sex or illegitimacy). Instead, the case for homosexual equality takes the form of a moral crusade. Those who want to uphold the old attitude are not just dated moralists (as is the case with those who want to uphold the old attitude to premarital sex or illegitimacy). They are accused of moral deficiency. The old taboo surrounding this practice does not disappear but "bounces back" at those who seek to uphold it. Such a sharp turn-around is, I think, without parallel in moral history.
These factors have combined to make the gay issue the church's perfect storm, perhaps even its nemesis. Because previous shifts in public morality have been slower, and more amenable to compromise, thecChurch has been able to move its clunky stone feet, and keep standing. This shift has floored it. By resisting the new moral orthodoxy on homosexuality, and hardening against it, the church is fast losing the aura of moral authority it has more or less retained all this time. When a bishop defends discrimination against homosexuals he is, in the eyes of most of the population, displaying a lamentable moral deficiency.
So the issue of homosexuality has the strange power to turn the moral tables. The traditional moralist is subject to accusations of immorality. And this inversion is doing terrible damage to the Christian churches.
But it might not be so bad for Christianity. For it revives the huge question of whether Christianity is meant to uphold a moral law at all. The original answer was no: Jesus and Paul wanted to sever the link between religion and the idea of a divine moral law. (It is therefore amazingly ironic that Paul is used as a "legal" authority for Christian homophobia.) But in practice Christianity became an organised religion, and therefore laid down the moral law - at first this law applied to a subculture, and later it merged with official public law. This was semi-challenged by the reformers of the 16th century, who wanted to revive the notion of "freedom from the law". But actually most forms of Protestantism returned to, and even intensified, the association of God and the moral law.
The crisis over homosexuality is reawakening us to the question that inspired Paul and Luther. The real question is not whether homosexuality is against "Christian morality" but whether moralism is against the Christian gospel. It seems to be - but how can a church adapt to this insight? All religious groups seem to unite around a holy moral code. Can Christianity jettison the whole idea of the moral law - and remain an organised religion? The debate about homosexuality is ushering us into strange new religious territory; making us contemporary with Paul. God works in truly mysterious ways.