Rubiconic Crossings
13-12-2007, 21:22
http://www.religiousintelligence.co.uk/news/?NewsID=1009
This article was written by the Guardians religious affairs correspondent. The article is not about his loss of faith in God but rather the rabid nature of evangelicals.
While that is interesting it is actually the way the author neatly skewers the evangelicals and their rabid hatred that makes it worth the read.
Sketch: preparing for the Anglican summit
Friday, 21st September 2007. 12:31pm
By: Stephen Bates.
Ah! New Orleans – the Big Easy, birthplace of the Blues and Louis Armstrong, city of Mardi Gras and Voodoo, the least Protestant town in the US: what better place to witness the latest stage in the break-up of the worldwide Anglican Communion? No prizes to be awarded – can you hear me, Bishop of Carlisle? – for the first one to pronounce God’s judgement if a hurricane hovers into view.
This week’s meeting between Rowan Williams and the American bishops will be my swan-song as a religious affairs correspondent, after eight years covering the subject for The Guardian. I’d have been less keen to attend had the venue been Detroit, but where better to end it? It is time to move on for me professionally, and probably for Anglicans too and this marks a suitable place to stop. There is also no doubting, personally, that writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians.For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.
I had no notion in 2000 that it would come to this: I had thought then that we were all pretty ecumenical these days. I was soon disabused of that. I had scarcely ever met a gay person, certainly not knowingly a gay Christian, and had not given homosexuality and the Church the most cursory thought, much less held an opinion on the matter. But watching and reporting the way gays were referred to, casually, smugly, hypocritically; the way men such as Jeffrey John (and indeed Rowan Williams when he was appointed archbishop) were treated and often lied about, offended my doubtless inadequate sense of justice and humanity.
Why would any gay person wish to be a Christian? These are people condemned for who they are, not what they do, despite all the sanctimonious bleating to the contrary, men and women despised for wanting the sort of intimacy that heterosexual people take for granted and that the Church is only too happy to bless. Instead, in 2007, the Church of England and other denominations jump up and down to secure exclusive rights to continue discriminating against a minority of people it does not like. What a spectacle the Church has made of itself! What hope of proselytising in a country which has accepted civil partnerships entirely without rancour or bigotry?
A lot of people have wished me God speed (I dare say some have wished me good speed too) not least of them Andrew Carey in this paper the other week, when he was generous enough to praise me for holding the Church hierarchy to account.
Unfortunately, I cannot entirely reciprocate the compliment because Andrew claimed I had ‘an attitude of barely-concealed loathing towards the vast majority of evangelicals’ Always supposing Andrew instinctively knows that the vast majority of evangelicals all believe the same thing, I am reassured to see that – as with so many columnists – he hasn’t allowed his ignorance of my position to tamper with his natural indolence by troubling to find out what I actually do believe before presuming to write about it.
I can claim no such loathing for the vast majority of evangelicals, or indeed for evangelicalism, though it is not part of my Roman Catholic religious inheritance. I could scarcely have such a loathing, married as I am to my wife Alice, who is a devoted evangelical and not merely a perfunctory one. She has just returned from New Wine, where she has served in the prayer ministry team for a number of years; she works at Burrswood Christian Hospital and she is just starting training to become a lay reader (at the enthusiastic suggestion of her vicar, incidentally a graduate of Oak Hill). I hope this admission doesn’t get her hounded out. Her diocesan bishop took particular, some would say prurient, pains to scrutinise her marital background before agreeing that she could go forward, precisely, he admitted, because of who she is married to. We’ve only been married for the last 21 years.
Furthermore, our three children have also been brought up in the evangelical tradition. Two of them were Christened by Bruce Collins, now one of the leaders of New Wine and the third by Doug Holt, now canon of Bristol and husband of Anne of the Bible Society. These are people we count as friends. But perhaps I am mistaken and these folk aren’t true evangelicals – that’s one of the troubles, isn’t it: the exclusivism and mutual antagonism of some of the sects? No, it’s not evangelicalism, or evangelicals, I loathe, merely some of the practitioners who have made such a spectacle and scandal of the Church in recent years. They are by no means the majority, though they would like to pretend they are and presume to speak for all the rest.
They are the sort of people who claim themselves so superior to their bishops that they won’t allow them to touch them for ordination, or who would not allow the Archbishop of Canterbury to preach from their pulpits (they should be so lucky) for fear that he might dangerously challenge the comfortable beliefs of their flocks, the sort of people who pick and choose the sins that are acceptable and condemn those – always committed by other, lesser people – that are not. Why is remarrying divorced people now OK – allowing them to continue fornicating – but not recognising the lifelong commitment of gay people to each other? Why does the Bishop of Carlisle happily bless nuclear submarines and, for all I know, dogs and cats, but not the unions of people who wish to demonstrate their devotion to each other for ever?
The trouble with these people, my wife always says, is that they don’t read their Bibles, for they know nothing of charity. I think she’s right and I am in mortal danger of losing mine. It’s time to move on.
Stephen Bates will be succeeded as the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent by Riazat Butt, the first Muslim to be appointed to such a post by a British national newspaper.
This article was written by the Guardians religious affairs correspondent. The article is not about his loss of faith in God but rather the rabid nature of evangelicals.
While that is interesting it is actually the way the author neatly skewers the evangelicals and their rabid hatred that makes it worth the read.
Sketch: preparing for the Anglican summit
Friday, 21st September 2007. 12:31pm
By: Stephen Bates.
Ah! New Orleans – the Big Easy, birthplace of the Blues and Louis Armstrong, city of Mardi Gras and Voodoo, the least Protestant town in the US: what better place to witness the latest stage in the break-up of the worldwide Anglican Communion? No prizes to be awarded – can you hear me, Bishop of Carlisle? – for the first one to pronounce God’s judgement if a hurricane hovers into view.
This week’s meeting between Rowan Williams and the American bishops will be my swan-song as a religious affairs correspondent, after eight years covering the subject for The Guardian. I’d have been less keen to attend had the venue been Detroit, but where better to end it? It is time to move on for me professionally, and probably for Anglicans too and this marks a suitable place to stop. There is also no doubting, personally, that writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians.For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.
I had no notion in 2000 that it would come to this: I had thought then that we were all pretty ecumenical these days. I was soon disabused of that. I had scarcely ever met a gay person, certainly not knowingly a gay Christian, and had not given homosexuality and the Church the most cursory thought, much less held an opinion on the matter. But watching and reporting the way gays were referred to, casually, smugly, hypocritically; the way men such as Jeffrey John (and indeed Rowan Williams when he was appointed archbishop) were treated and often lied about, offended my doubtless inadequate sense of justice and humanity.
Why would any gay person wish to be a Christian? These are people condemned for who they are, not what they do, despite all the sanctimonious bleating to the contrary, men and women despised for wanting the sort of intimacy that heterosexual people take for granted and that the Church is only too happy to bless. Instead, in 2007, the Church of England and other denominations jump up and down to secure exclusive rights to continue discriminating against a minority of people it does not like. What a spectacle the Church has made of itself! What hope of proselytising in a country which has accepted civil partnerships entirely without rancour or bigotry?
A lot of people have wished me God speed (I dare say some have wished me good speed too) not least of them Andrew Carey in this paper the other week, when he was generous enough to praise me for holding the Church hierarchy to account.
Unfortunately, I cannot entirely reciprocate the compliment because Andrew claimed I had ‘an attitude of barely-concealed loathing towards the vast majority of evangelicals’ Always supposing Andrew instinctively knows that the vast majority of evangelicals all believe the same thing, I am reassured to see that – as with so many columnists – he hasn’t allowed his ignorance of my position to tamper with his natural indolence by troubling to find out what I actually do believe before presuming to write about it.
I can claim no such loathing for the vast majority of evangelicals, or indeed for evangelicalism, though it is not part of my Roman Catholic religious inheritance. I could scarcely have such a loathing, married as I am to my wife Alice, who is a devoted evangelical and not merely a perfunctory one. She has just returned from New Wine, where she has served in the prayer ministry team for a number of years; she works at Burrswood Christian Hospital and she is just starting training to become a lay reader (at the enthusiastic suggestion of her vicar, incidentally a graduate of Oak Hill). I hope this admission doesn’t get her hounded out. Her diocesan bishop took particular, some would say prurient, pains to scrutinise her marital background before agreeing that she could go forward, precisely, he admitted, because of who she is married to. We’ve only been married for the last 21 years.
Furthermore, our three children have also been brought up in the evangelical tradition. Two of them were Christened by Bruce Collins, now one of the leaders of New Wine and the third by Doug Holt, now canon of Bristol and husband of Anne of the Bible Society. These are people we count as friends. But perhaps I am mistaken and these folk aren’t true evangelicals – that’s one of the troubles, isn’t it: the exclusivism and mutual antagonism of some of the sects? No, it’s not evangelicalism, or evangelicals, I loathe, merely some of the practitioners who have made such a spectacle and scandal of the Church in recent years. They are by no means the majority, though they would like to pretend they are and presume to speak for all the rest.
They are the sort of people who claim themselves so superior to their bishops that they won’t allow them to touch them for ordination, or who would not allow the Archbishop of Canterbury to preach from their pulpits (they should be so lucky) for fear that he might dangerously challenge the comfortable beliefs of their flocks, the sort of people who pick and choose the sins that are acceptable and condemn those – always committed by other, lesser people – that are not. Why is remarrying divorced people now OK – allowing them to continue fornicating – but not recognising the lifelong commitment of gay people to each other? Why does the Bishop of Carlisle happily bless nuclear submarines and, for all I know, dogs and cats, but not the unions of people who wish to demonstrate their devotion to each other for ever?
The trouble with these people, my wife always says, is that they don’t read their Bibles, for they know nothing of charity. I think she’s right and I am in mortal danger of losing mine. It’s time to move on.
Stephen Bates will be succeeded as the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent by Riazat Butt, the first Muslim to be appointed to such a post by a British national newspaper.