NOT ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME, by Andy Newman, in: socialistunity.com/, 30 October, 2009

The invitation by his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for Anglicans to join the Church of Rome is not the sort of topic that the political left tends to find very interesting. So I was very pleased to see Splintered Sunrise tackling the issue. Although Splinty’s understandable irritation with the National Secular Society gives those numbskulls more significance than they really have.

The importance of the issue is recognising that any multicultural and pluralistic society will include within it individuals and faith communities who take their moral and ethical guidance from their religion.

Splintered Sunrise is particularly strong in recognising that debate among religious communities must be accepted in their own terms. Atheist liberals simply have no business in telling Christians what they should or should not believe; and Christians are as entitled as anyone else to participate in the wider democratic debate in our society, to seek to bring society closer to their own moral and ethical codes.

There is a naïve form of progressive politics that seeks to polemicise in favour of atheism and secularism. The assumption that a religious authority should not prevail over people who do not accept its values is a fundamental one for secularists. But conversely why should the authority of a secular society prevail over people who do choose to self-identify with a religious faith, and its entailed values? Secularists who are also atheists even argue that both the secular and the religious laws are both the product of human thought, so why should one be privileged over the other?

It is worth remembering Dr Rowan Williams’s controversial and misunderstood lecture on Sharia law in February 2008. Fundamental to Dr Williams’s argument is the importance of collective identities: in a multi-cultural society people who are all equally law abiding can have more than one sense of identity or allegiance. What is more, for the religious believer, the core teachings of their faith are Divinely inspired, and as such are typically non-negotiable. What we need to do is avoid a false polarisation that regards religious belief as inherently conservative, and which creates a mythology of progressive and universal humanist values – a “universalism” that by happy coincidence just happens to coincide with the preferred lifestyle choices of the metropolitan middle classes in our very own society.

As Dr Williams ably argued last year:

There is a bit of a risk here in the way we sometimes talk about the universal vision of post-Enlightenment politics. The great protest of the Enlightenment was against authority that appealed only to tradition and refused to justify itself by other criteria – by open reasoned argument or by standards of successful provision of goods and liberties for the greatest number. Its claim to override traditional forms of governance and custom by looking towards a universal tribunal was entirely intelligible against the background of despotism and uncritical inherited privilege which prevailed in so much of early modern Europe. The most positive aspect of this moment in our cultural history was its focus on equal levels of accountability for all and equal levels of access for all to legal process.

So “Universality” is itself a socially created myth. The universality of the human values of the Enlightmenment was no more than the particularity of the specific form of the French Revolution, (and the preceding reformism of the absolutist monarchy) to seek to establish a single collective and communal identity through promoting ubiquity of the French language and a single political authority and legal system around allegedly universal values. This was a political project of nation building. The limits of such universality could never extend beyond the protection of the bayonets of the Grand Armee, and couldn’t really be universal even within France for those who chose a different allegiance. We should not regard this enlightenment project as any more “universally” valid and rationalist than any other historically contingent ideology.

We must recognise that people who choose to self-identify with a religious community, and its associated laws and ethics have a right to do so. The actual, and so far relatively successful, experience of multi-culturalism and convergence towards consensual tolerant values in British society has not been on the basis of any campaign for secularism, but has succeeded by offering choice and empowerment.

The media discussion of the Pope’s offer to conservative clergy in the Anglican communion has been met with some alarmism, for example the front page article in the Times effectively predicting the end of the Anglican church, the discussion has also revealed some lazy thinking.

The final form of the deal is not yet clear, although it may involve “a church within a church”. Deacon Greg Kandra, in his blog, quotes two well connected Italian newspapers. According to

“Il Giornale and Il Foglio, canon lawyers are continuing to define what has been a particularly unclear aspect of the new provision: whether married Anglicans could train as seminarians. Andrea Tornielli of Il Giornale reports that over the last few days, the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts has been working to clarify this point. He writes that “everything suggests” seminarians in these future Anglo-Catholic communities “will have to be celibate like all their colleagues in the Latin Catholic Church.”

This would not apply to the converting clergy, but would reduce the distinctively Anglican flavour of the proposed “Personal Ordinariate” if new clergy could not marry; a question that might be of more concern to the laity is whether or not the “Personal Ordinariate” would be expected to rule against the use of contraception for heterosexual, married couples.

Despite the hype, there is not exactly a stampede for people to convert. For example Anglican Mainstream reports

The former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, a long-term mem­ber of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) and the International Anglican- Roman Catholic Commis­sion for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM), who was the subject of press speculation that he could accept the offer, said on Tuesday that he was not going to become a Roman Catholic. … The Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Most Revd Fred Hiltz, said that he did not expect “a groundswell of response” to the papal decree. Even among those who have separated themselves from the Angli­can Church of Canada, there is an abiding desire to remain in commu­nion with the Archbishop of Canter­bury.”

The lazy thinking revolves around stereotypes that Catholics are en bloc more conservative that Anglicans; and that the most conservative parts of the Anglican communion tilt towards Rome. Neither of these suppositions are necessarily true.

Not all Anglo-Catholics are conservative; and many of the conservatives in the church are evangelicals. For example, two Anglican bodies, the Society of Catholic Priests and Affirming Catholicism issued a joint press release pointing out that:

The majority of catholics within the church are in favour of women’s ministry and wish to remain loyal to the Anglican tradition within the Anglican Communion.
The Society of Catholic Priests, which has over 500 members in this country and is about to establish chapters in the American Episcopal Church and in Australia, and Affirming Catholicism which draws together clergy and laity in this country and throughout the Anglican Communion, are committed to the catholic nature and teaching of the Church of England. We are actively working to see women ordained to the episcopate and hold that this is entirely consistent with the teaching of the church and the historic nature of our orders. We are also convinced that the issues of human sexuality should not be ones that divide the church.

On the other hand, it is conservative evangelicals not Catholics who have been stirring up bigotry against gay people in Uganda; and the Anglican Church of Uganda has so far been silent about the proposed draconian anti-gay laws in that country, despite the ruling of the 1998 Lambeth conference that committed the whole Communion to “listen pastorally to the experience of homosexual persons and … to assure them that they are loved by God…” and to “minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation and to condemn the irrational fear of homosexuals…”.

In modern British society organised religion is not a structurally conservative social force, although it can be conservative it can also be progressive, - for example those Catholics who are both conservatively opposed to abortion, and yet deeply opposed to nuclear weapons and social injustice. Such people are not simply “bigots” even if they do take illiberal positions on some social issues. The task is to work with them on the political issues we agree with them over, and via the democratic process we seek to minimise their influence over those issues we disagree with them.

Churches provide institutional continuity and expression for religious faith. There will always therefore be a tension between an evolving and changing society and the what believers hold to be eternal truth embodied in the faith. Father Ivan Aquilina, the Anglo-Catholic priest of St John the Baptist in Sevenoaks, expresses how this affects the divergence between Rome and Canterbury like this:

“The fact is that what happened in that process is that the two communions entrusted God to lead them on, if they have not arrived where they had hoped to then it is a question of seeking what the Spirit is saying to the Churches. However some Churches are happier to listen to the spirit of this world than the Spirit of the living God.”

But the question is, for religious believers, how do you know what is the spirit of the world, and what is the spirit of God? The conservative evangelical, Revd John Richardson, poses a very good defence of Anglicanism on his blog

the Church of England is not a Church which operates by ‘Scripture alone’ in the sense that it gives people the Bible and nothing else to represent its core beliefs. Rather, there are many points of potential theological controversy where the formularies of the Church of England take a settled view —on infant baptism, for example, or on the nature of bread and wine at Communion.

The Church of England has therefore set itself under the authority of Scripture, but via its formularies it also offers at certain critical points an interpretation of Scripture. And this allows it to be a dynamic, rather than a static body. In particular, it does not require us to be committed to the formularies as if they were infallible and beyond criticism.

We may compare this with the way that most Christians still use the Apostolic and Nicene Creeds. There are indeed those who are willing to question even these, but there are far more who regard them as, in some sense, having settled certain theological disputes, if not beyond question, at least in a way that means questioners must acknowledge they are departing from certain historical ‘norms’

In other words Scripture needs human interpretation, and the human interpretation is fallible and open to modification.

This is of course a workable dividing line between what is human and what is Divine in the church’s teaching. But moving the goal posts has not solved the problem. This is because the scriptures are themselves the work of human beings, and indeed with regard to the New Testament, the books included and the books rejected from the years of the early Church were clearly a human decision.

So reference to scripture requires not only interpretation of how the Bible applies to novel situations, but also human interpretation of what parts of the Bible merely reflect the social norms of the Judaic and early Christian societies who created it. Unless you believe that God himself directly wrote the Bible, then it was open to the authors of the Gospels to misinterpret the spirit of God’s law in light of their own fallible, human, and socially contextualised experience.

How that question is resolved one for religious individuals and communities to decide for themselves; and non religious people should have no voice in the matter; which is why the bleetings of the National Secular Society, and the Richard Dawkins’s of this world are so annoying.

We should accept that in reality the content of religions and religious observance is not static, but changes with time as influenced by the changing values of society and by political pressure, so the political battles should not be between secularism and religion, but to shape the values of both wider society and the religious communities.

As society moves in a more liberal direction, then there will be those within religious communities who resist that change, and there will also be those who believe that the liberalisation of social attitudes is also the working of God’s love. For the former, the word of scripture acts as authority, for the latter the spirit of scripture needs to be reaffirmed in the light of the changing values of society.

Of course, life is never even that simple, and there will be those who are conservative on what they see as moral issues, and yet who are strong believers in social justice and equality; and there will be those who are liberal on social issues, and yet have conservative politics on economic justice.

What the left needs to do is understand that the past traditions of militant atheism, telling religious people that they are wrong, stupid or bigoted, are indefensible and counter-productive. Many people with liberal, socialist or emancipatory politics are inspired by their religious faith.