Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  Can sodomy become a legal form of intercourse without irredeemably compromising male power over women, that power being premised on men being entirely distinct from women in use, in function, in posture and position, in role, in ‘nature’? Or will the legalisation of sodomy mortally injure the class power of men by sanctioning a fuck in which men are treated like women; the boundaries of men’s bodies no longer being, as a matter of social policy and divine right, inviolate?104

  Behind Lambeth’s contempt for gay men, there lay a deeper contempt for women themselves, because they too are incapable of the fuck in this primordial sense. Men fuck. Women get fucked. Q.E.D. That was the demon that was released that afternoon, and it will never go back whence it came. It began the unravelling of the Anglican Communion that has been gathering pace ever since, an unravelling that the saintly scholar who succeeded George Carey at Canterbury will never be able to halt.

  A Nigerian bishop had been spreading the rumour at Lambeth that my support for gay liberation was because my daughters were lesbians. He made the mistake of repeating the lie to the rector of a church in Connecticut where he went to preach after the conference. The rector, who had been one of my curates in Boston, challenged him on the claim, but he insisted it was true. It would not have mattered to me and Jeannie if it had been true, but it wasn’t. What it did was fortify my sense that there was a profound sickness at the heart of so-called Biblical morality, if it could lead to such hatred and cruelty. I wanted to get in my car and come home to Scotland. Michael Peers, the Archbishop of Canada, persuaded me to stick it out to the end. We helped put together a resolution apologising to the world’s lesbian and gay Christians for what the Lambeth Conference had said about them. Out of the 749 bishops present, 182 signed it, including the Primates of Brazil, Canada, Central Africa, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa and Wales.

  Finally the conference was over, with a sting in the tail, in the form of a meeting of the Primates who were asked to stay behind to review what had happened. I had a dust-up with George Carey during that fractious hour, but at last I was free to come north again. The only sweet memory I brought away with me was throwing my mitre into the Thames. I had announced my intention to do this two years before when I preached in Norway at a service to mark the signing of an agreement that brought together the Anglican, Baltic and Nordic Churches. In my sermon I had noticed that while the practice of the episcopate was increasingly personal and collegial, the theatre of the episcopate was still monarchical and hierarchical. We were too fond of the intricacies of address and title. We were too bound to the badges of office. And the more splendid our titles and the more gorgeous our robes, the more cautious we became. Saint Martin of Tours had said bishops came in two forms, shepherds and fishers: shepherds cherished the flock, but fishers pushed the boat out from the shore and launched out into the deep. The Anglican Episcopate had rarely pushed the boat out, but I hoped that this agreement would embolden us to be more daring and adventurous. I ended with a letter the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton had sent to the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Merton, a hero since my days in the Cottage at Kelham, had written about the need to undermine ‘this comfortable and social Catholicism, this lining up of cassocks, this regimenting of birettas. I throw my biretta in the river.’105 That had given me an idea. It was rumoured that during the 1998 Lambeth Conference the bishops were to be taken on a cruise on the Thames after the Buckingham Palace Garden Party. Wouldn’t it be great if the bishops could be persuaded to bring their mitres with them and chuck them in the Thames as a collective gesture of commitment to a simpler episcopate?

  My tongue had been in my cheek, but I had meant what I said. So I came to Lambeth prepared. I had an artist friend in Edinburgh make me four biodegradable mitres which I had with me on the boat that took us down the Thames after the Queen’s Garden Party. I knew mitre-drowning was unlikely to become a mass movement like the feminists’ bra-burning, because bishops liked their silly hats and even the women were wearing them now. But I had no difficulty getting a Scottish and an American bishop to join me in the gesture. That left one to go. I caught sight of the Archbishop of Canterbury downing a pint of bitter and I asked him if he’d like to join us. Smiling, he said he was game; so each of us stood at the stern of the boat and chucked a non-polluting mitre into the river. It was a joke for the others, but I meant it. I never wore the thing again. And there was a footnote to the tale. The Times had heard about the ploy, though not from me. One of their photographers followed us in a speedboat and snapped the Archbishop in the act. Next day I was told by a member of the Lambeth press team that The Times had phoned the Archbishop’s press office to say they planned to put the picture on the front page, though they might be open to a deal: an exclusive interview with the eleven women bishops present at the Lambeth Conference. I did not check the accuracy of the story. However, no embarrassing photograph appeared in The Times; but an exclusive interview with the women bishops did.

  Like downing a good dram, throwing my mitre in the Thames afforded only temporary relief. I was beginning to wonder how long it would be before I followed it. My problem was not so much with God as with increasing disbelief in religion’s claim to possess precise information about his opinions, including his sexual and gender preferences. The ceaseless flow of history was a big problem for religion, especially in those versions that believed they had received a timeless revelation that answered every question and solved every problem. I was increasingly conscious of the circularity of the claim. How can we be sure these scriptures and their unchanging commandments are from God? Because they themselves tell us so! To believe them you had to believe them. Religion’s old Catch-22. The problem with authoritative revelation was that, rather than stopping all the clocks of history, it only opened itself to constant challenges from the future. The strangers in the wings of Louis MacNeice’s poem who were emerging onto the religious stage were women and homosexuals, neither of whom was prepared any longer to be defined by religion’s Stone Age attitudes. Though I was completely on the side of the new challengers, in spite of myself I felt some sympathy towards those who argued against any accommodation with them. If you had been brought up to believe that sacred revelation had defined our identities for ever and that any alteration in understanding them would be blasphemous, how can you be blamed for being loyal to your code even if your heart protests against its cruelty? Once you start pulling the threads out of religion’s carefully crafted quilt of precedent and prejudice, the whole fabric might unravel.

  That is what they accused me of doing when I published Godless Morality in 1999, the year after the Lambeth Conference. The urge to write the book had been provoked by the Lambeth debates on sexuality and the gulfs of incomprehension they revealed. Biblical moralists did not negotiate; they asserted their position – God’s position – and denounced all others. It was God’s role in moral debate that struck me as increasingly problematic. Humanity had been inconclusively debating both the nature and possibility of God for centuries. God’s history was under constant revision as humanity had constantly changed its mind about him. Had he once commanded child sacrifice? Yes, but that had been a mistake – our mistake. We’d misunderstood him. Had he once permitted slavery? Yes, but we got that wrong too – or maybe he changed his mind. What about the subordination of women to men, and stoning for sodomy? Is it possible we are getting him wrong on these things as well? Almost certainly, said some; definitely not, said others. Might it not be better, since God’s opinions seem to be so constantly misunderstood or so varied, to leave him out of our moral disputes and debate them on good human grounds? Even without God, it was obvious that good people could disagree passionately about what was and was not the best way to live. And I was coming to believe that there was an inescapably tragic dimension to moral debate. Moral opinions were incurably plural, even within religious groups. I doubted if there would ever be a single version of the perfect life or perfect society. Life was manifold in the forms it to
ok; it was gloriously and inescapably plural. That was why in practical daily life we made trade-offs between conflicting goods and evils; and there was no infallible system for measuring them. Isaiah Berlin had described this as the incommensurability of values, and it was why he thought the struggle for humans to be wise and good was necessary but intractable. Things were tough enough without importing rival interpretations of God into our debates. That only made it more difficult to find ways forward. Wasn’t it better to leave God out of the debate and find good human reasons for supporting the approach we advocated, without having recourse to divinely clinching arguments? In support of my case I quoted from the philosopher John Harris:

  For a moral judgement to be respectable it must have something to say about just why a supposed wrong action is wrongful. If it fails to meet this test it is a preference not a moral judgement at all.106

  To meet Harris’s test it was not enough to quote the authority of God, a move that had a tendency to extinguish rather than elucidate moral judgement. To say that God commanded or forbade a particular action gave you religious not moral information. It might illuminate your theological convictions; it would cast no moral light on the act itself. According to the Book of Joshua, the god of the Old Testament ordered the Israelites to massacre the original inhabitants of the land they grabbed in Palestine. Belief in a divine command like that might explain the motive for the activity, but it told us little or nothing about its moral status. There was nothing new in what I was arguing, though it may have been new coming from a bishop. As far back as Plato there had been arguments over whether a particular behaviour was right because the gods commanded it or whether the gods commanded it because it was right. I thought it significant at the time that my book was well received by philosophers and widely repudiated by bishops.

  The most dramatic repudiation was a fatwa on the book delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury in my presence in the good Scottish city of Dundee. Let me hasten to add that he did not call for an assassination squad to rid the world of my presence. The Salman Rushdie affair gave fatwas a bad name, which is why they are now erroneously associated with violence, whereas a fatwa is a religious ruling on a matter of Islamic law, such as whether a good Muslim is permitted to smoke tobacco or only marijuana. What the Archbishop did was deliver himself of an authoritative ruling on my book. It happened in Dundee because in September 1999 the Scottish Episcopal Church, of which I was then Primus, was playing host to a meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, the only international assembly in world Anglicanism that contains lay people. Godless Morality had just been published, and it got things off to a bad start, placing the Archbishop of Canterbury between a rock and a hard place. Scotland was the hard place.

  In many ways Scotland has always been the embarrassing wee drunk uncle at the Anglican dinner party. The Scottish Church is the exception to the rule of Anglican fusion I described earlier in this chapter. Unlike the other provinces in the Communion, the Scottish Church had never been an outpost of the Church of England. Scotland had had its own Reformation in 1560, but it took more than a century to decide between winners and losers. Because the Scottish bishops had supported the Stuart kings in the Revolution of 1688, and continued to support them in the Risings of 1715 and 1745, they were outlawed and penalised for their loyalty to the Jacobite cause. During this period of persecution an event occurred that can legitimately claim to be the real beginning of the alliance that came to be known as the Anglican Communion. When America declared its independence in 1773 it created a problem for its Anglican clergy. Who would now provide them with Episcopal oversight? To solve the problem, in March 1783 the clergy of Connecticut elected Samuel Seabury as their Bishop and sent him to England to be ordained. The Church of England refused to perform the task because as an American citizen he could not take the oath of allegiance to the King of England, who was also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. So he turned to the Scottish Episcopal Church, which refused allegiance to the English king. On 14 November 1784 Seabury was ordained by three Scottish bishops as the first Bishop of the newly autonomous American Episcopal Church.

  This means that the originating event in the creation of global Anglicanism happened in Scotland under the hands of Scotsmen who owed no allegiance to the Archbishop of Canterbury or the monarch of England who had appointed him. So I was not pleased when the English Archbishop upbraided me on my own turf like a colonial governor calling a junior officer to heel. But it was not just his assumption of authority over me that irritated; his attitude towards the search for truth annoyed me more. I do not mind being disagreed with. Had the Archbishop offered an analysis of my book, showing where he disagreed with it and why, I would have relished the opportunity to take the argument further and maybe even change my mind – God knows I’ve done that often enough. That is not what he did. He pronounced against it. He offered not argument, but a sort of quasi-papal judgement that my book was erroneous. And in doing so he angered the delegates to the Dundee ACC. Few of them had heard of the book, and most of them would have disagreed with it had they read it, but they considered it discourteous of the Archbishop to condemn his host in his own home. They asked that I be given the right of reply. I took the opportunity and pointed out that what bothered me was the implication in the Archbishop’s address that he had the right to pronounce judgement on the doctrinal status of my book, rather than offering specific arguments against it. He could say authoritatively that seventeen plus thirteen equals thirty not thirty-three, but he could not apply arithmetical precision to complex matters of ethical evaluation. Let him argue, therefore, not fire anathemas.

  To be fair to the Archbishop, he did have a point, though he chose to deliver it in an inappropriate way. He claimed that a morality without God could not be a fully formed Christian morality, which may be true, but is not what I was talking about in my book. As I have already indicated, I was wondering whether the time had not come to leave religion outside our search for moral agreement – including agreement to disagree – since its presence inhibited rather than encouraged discussion. There were obviously many different moralities, including one that could be described as Christian – though Christians disagreed among themselves almost as much as they did with unbelievers – so would it not be better to leave religious justifications for conduct to one side and try to find good moral reasons for the approach we advocated?

  If Scotland was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s hard place, then his rock was Singapore. The city state that brooks no dissent from its citizens was the appropriate base for the Archbishop of South-East Asia, an icy authoritarian who resisted any modification in the Church’s age-old persecution of homosexuals. In an encounter I had with him in the lavatory in Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, during a meeting of Anglican Primates, he had accused me of filling Hell with homosexuals because I was giving them permission to commit a sin that damned them to eternal punishment, since no Sodomite could enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I resisted the impulse to deck him and left him to go on pissing his wormwood and gall into the Queen’s urinal. So I was not surprised when he too delivered a fatwa against Godless Morality. I doubted if he had read it, but its publication provided him with an opportune casus belli. Though supposed to represent the Province of South-East Asia at the Dundee ACC, he issued a press release to say that because the Scottish Primus had just published a heretical book he would not attend the assembly. And, in a nice guilt-by-association touch, he went on to declare Scotland to be a heretical province. This was tough on the Scottish Church because, while it was more liberal and inclusive than most Anglican provinces outside North America, many of its members had become unsure of me as their Primus and would have swapped me for the man from Singapore any day.

  In spite of these ructions, we got through the assembly in good heart, and I returned to Edinburgh to reflect on my situation. Was I so out of step with my colleagues at home and abroad that I should consider my position? Was this my midnight?
<
br />   At midnight, when suddenly you hear

  an invisible procession going by . . .

  don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,

  work gone wrong, your plans

  all proving deceptive – don’t mourn them uselessly:

  as one long prepared, and full of courage,

  say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving.107

  I was in a reflective mood when Jeannie and I drove into the Borders one Sunday weeks later to visit one of my favourite churches. The rector had been one of my own appointments, and I was fond of him and his family. Through the generosity of my friend Nadir Dinshaw we had been able to help support his wife’s sister through medical school and I had been at her wedding not that long before, so I felt secure in their affections even though I knew there were theological differences between us. On the almost infinitely nuanced continuum of Anglican theological positions, Paul would have been described as an open Evangelical, an intelligent conservative with a pinch of liberality in his make-up. I knew Godless Morality would not have been his cup of tea, but I did not anticipate any difficulties. After all, there were lots of things we disagreed about, but they did not undermine the affection we felt for each other. Sure enough, when I arrived in the sacristy to get into my robes for the service he told me he’d been speaking to the Scotsman about my book. And I bet you denounced it as heresy, I joked. I was puzzled by his tense and nervous manner but thought no more about it, and we got on with the service.