Part I: Women Bishops and the Public Opinion Captivity of the Church of England

on November 22, 2013

Can any state-established church long retain the fortitude to speak truth to power when its leaders consider themselves obligated to follow “the trends and priorities of wider society”?

-Wesley J. Smith, quoting an excerpt of former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams’ farewell address in his article “The High Price of Establishment”

The Huffington Post’s Trevor Grundy reported on Wednesday, November 20 that the General Synod of the Church of England voted overwhelmingly to approve the introduction of women as bishops. Grundy notes that “the church’s General Synod passed a motion by 378-8, with 25 abstentions, that paves the way for the endorsement of women bishops. Bishops also approved a declaration that sets out guidance for parishes that reject female consecrations.” As the Daily Nation observed yesterday, while these proposals passed with almost no opposition, women will not be consecrated until next year:

The proposals will be put before the General Synod again in February and must then be submitted to each diocese before returning to the Synod again in July or November 2014. The legislation must also be approved by parliament.

Writing for the progressive/liberal news site, Grundy predictably did not quote any prominent opponents of the decision to begin consecrating women as bishops. He did not identify the eight people who voted against the measure, nor did he bother to mention opponents’ reasons for refusing to sanction the consecration of women as bishops (based on their reading of Scriptures, Church tradition, and the absence of women as bishops or priests throughout the previous two millennia of Christian history). Casting the proposal instead as both conciliatory and unifying, Grundy posited that

The package would end nearly two decades of bitter and damaging conflict, and the vote is a victory of sorts for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who was appointed last year just as the General Synod came within six votes of allowing women bishops. Welby called last year’s defeat “a very grim day for women and their supporters,” and vowed to find a way to allow women bishops without creating a schism within the church. Wednesday’s vote also creates an ombudsman position to rule on disputes involving traditionalist clergy who oppose women bishops.

The Archbishop’s condemnation of last year’s procedural defeat of the measure smacks of paternalistic sentiment. By equating support for the introduction of women as bishops with support for women at all, he reduces the debate to an almost comical level of absurdity. Dr. Welby offers a false choice between those who are “for” women and therefore, obviously support their consecration as bishops, and those who do not support the measure, who must, therefore, not “support” or value women.

Archbishop Welby’s language here incorrectly presupposes that all women in the Church of England, and all those who in any way value and support them, automatically support the consecration of women as bishops. Yet, as The Guardian‘s Sam Jones notes in this article, one of the most vocal opponents of the change, the director of the evangelical Anglican group Reform, is a woman. While Reform’s chairman, the Rev. Rod Thomas, shifted his position from having voted against last year’s proposed measure to vote in the affirmative this year, even apologizing to the assembly for his prior vote, Ms. Susie Leafe could not be persuaded to go against her theological beliefs:

The Rev Rod Thomas, chair of the conservative evangelical group Reform, conceded that his decision to vote against the previous draft legislation had been “a cause of shock, of bewilderment, of anger and of grief” to many.

Thomas said that although he still had reservations over some aspects of the new package, he intended to support it even if he found himself unable to vote for final approval for female bishops next year.

However, Reform’s director, Susie Leafe, said she simply could not bring herself to follow suit.

“How I wish that I, too, could stand here and say that all was well,” she said. “But I can’t … We claim that this package is designed to enable all to flourish yet I and my church can only flourish once we’ve denied our theological convictions and accepted a woman as our chief pastor.”

Jones observes that senior liberal advocates of the proposal, including one woman who serves on the archbishops’ council advising Welby, did not shrink from attributing the outcome of the vote to the providence of God:

Christina Rees, a member of the archbishops’ council and veteran campaigner for female bishops, said she could scarcely believe how far the synod had come in 12 months.

“If anyone had told me that one year on from last November we would be where we are, I would have said: ‘That’s impossible,'” she said. “But by the grace of God it has been possible and here we are. And I believe that what we are considering now is better than what we had last year and I also believe that we are better as a synod.”

While Grundy noted that “Bishop Christopher Chessun of Southwark, in south London, described the passing of the motion as “nothing short of miraculous”, the results of Wednesday’s vote surprised no one who has studied the shifts within the Church and British society since last year’s narrow procedural failure to approve women bishops. The British public’s reaction to last year’s vote was overwhelmingly negative, with leading public figures, including Prime Minister David Cameron, pressuring the denomination to gather the requisite number of votes for the measure to pass in the General Synod.

As Jones observed, the sweeping condemnations in the wake of last year’s vote created a highly polarized atmosphere in which Church leaders faced acute public and political pressure to ensure that the “right” decision was made when the measure was raised again this year: “The narrow defeat put the C of E under huge public and political pressure: its failure to resolve the issue was described by the church’s most senior civil servant as a train crash, while David Cameron warned that the church needed “to get on with it”.

Jones further reports that, almost extraordinarily, the Rt. Rev. James Langstaff (the bishop of Rochester who introduced Wednesday’s legislation) somehow felt comfortable denying that “the church had felt under political pressure to resolve the issue, saying: “We had to do this anyway and it’s far better that we should have done it ourselves than had somebody else do it for us or put pressure on us and we have done it.” Bishop Langstaff’s contention that it was better that the Church had voted accordingly than waited until public pressure caused  “somebody else [to] do it for us” amounts to an unintended admission that, in fact, the Church did face an extraordinary degree of pressure in the past year to produce the result which numerous MPs and public commentators insisted was the only “right” one for the denomination.

Given the increasingly secular nature of British society, marked by low rates of church attendance and general observance, it is hardly surprising that senior MPs and Government leaders would seek to align themselves with the side advertising its intent to make the Church more “modern” and “relevant” by introducing women as visible leaders among the denomination’s prelates. The incumbent Prime Minister, who serves as the head of Britain’s Conservative Party, has unreservedly aligned himself with liberals (self-styled as “reformers”) in the denomination and society at large.

His Government managed to push same-sex marriage through the houses of Parliament last July, arguing that extending the right to marry to homosexual couples was the “conservative” thing to do. Given this history, it should hardly be surprising that the Prime Minister issued this statement in support of Wednesday’s vote in favor of introducing women as bishops:  “I strongly support women bishops and I hope that the Church of England takes this key step to ensure its place as a modern church in touch without society.”

Since the Church of England exists as a national charitable organization and (for now at least) as the established State Church, whose prelates alone of all Christian denominations enjoy the privilege of sitting in the House of Lords, and to whom all British monarchs must belong and swear allegiance at their coronation, it is not unreasonable that theological and political liberals should seek to have a role in the ongoing conversation about  the denomination’s direction as an institution. Naturally, the debate on opening the episcopate to women has aroused much controversy, and this tension is all the more pronounced given that the Church of England is supposed to operate within the established political system while remaining decidedly above the mire of parliamentary politics.

This envisioned balance is, if anything, the antithesis of what we have witnessed in the past year. While the extent to which the Church of England has ever been free to operate above politics is debatable, given its initial separation from the Roman Catholic Church under Henry VIII who became, with the 1534 Act of Supremacy, “the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England”, what is absolutely clear is the role which senior British political figures have played in pressuring the Church to make this major change in its policy.

Were theologically conservative voices to have somehow prevailed on this issue, I would hope that they would not have intimidated or sidelined their opponents. Yet this is what theological liberals have done. What we have seen in the past year has been highly disturbing: the insistence by senior politicians and Church prelates that the Church introduce women as bishops not because it is permissible in Christian theology, or because it has recognized historical precedent, nor because it is necessary for the defense and growth of the Anglican faith, but because it is what public opinion demands and political leaders deem necessary for the Church to prove itself as a relevant, “modern” institution of an increasingly unchurched, secular society.

Part II of this two-part entry will be published here tomorrow, November 23.

  1. Comment by Ken Miller on December 4, 2013 at 9:33 am

    Let me preface by saying that I am a former Anglican who has found a home in Russian Orthodoxy. I think the Orthodox need to court the African Anglicans. Even “conservative” Anglicans in the US and Europe will not get their feathers too ruffled over a woman bishop – they accepted women clergy a long time ago. If Canterbury accepts the Episcopal views on homosexual bishops, that would cause those who left the Episcopal church to also give up on Canterbury. In that case, they might simply continue in an ad-hoc Anglicanism separate from Canterbury, or they might seek a home among the Catholics or Orthodox. There are different strands of conservative Anglicans, including anglo-Catholic traditionalists, who would be right at home in Orthodoxy, and there are the evangelicals. Whether the evangelical Anglicans are ready for Orthodoxy, and whether Orthodoxy is ready for the evangelical Anglicans is an open question. The best “model” to look at for how it might work is the charismatic churches that joined the Antiochian Orthodox years ago. There were probably growing pains, but overall it was a success story. Another wild card in that discussion is the Calvinism inherent in the 39 Articles. The Orthodox have a visceral distaste for Calvinism. The anglo-catholics would shed their calvinism without thinking twice. However, there is a strong tradition of Calvinism among some of the evangelical Anglicans, including notable names such as J I Packer and J R W Stott. A possible working arrangement to bridge the gap would be for the Orthodox to accept Augustinianism as within the acceptable bounds of Orthodoxy (as was the case in pre-Schism Orthodoxy), and for the Calvinists to abandon those areas in which Calvin/the 39 articles go beyond Augustinianism.

  2. Comment by Ken Miller on December 4, 2013 at 9:53 am

    By the way, a great short book that discusses the place of Augustinianism within Orthodoxy is “The Place of Blessed Augustine” by Fr Seraphim Rose, published by St Herman Press.

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