In his recent essay ‘Renewing Communion: A queering of unity and colonialism’ which he published on the Anglican.Org web site,[1]the Anglican academic Charlie Bell has responded to the recent report by the Inter-Anglican Standing Committee on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO) on the way forward for the Anglican Communion in the face of its current divisions over human sexuality.
The starting point for his response is the declaration that:
‘Two strands of liberation and method, anticolonialism or decolonisation, and queer affirmation (or queerness more generally), have been instrumentalised against one another with increasing frequency and intensity in recent years, as wider cultural norms have shifted but colonial ecclesial structures have not. This continued instrumentalization appears to be an attempt – unconscious or conscious – to maintain patriarchal, cis-heteronormative ideals which, far from aiming to remove Whiteness as a damaged and erroneous consequence of Christendom, retains the fundamental colonisation of the church with different actors.’
For those not used to the academic jargon which Bell is using, this statement may appear to be completely impenetrable, but what he is actually saying is quite simple.
First, the majority of churches which have accepted, or are in the process of accepting, same-sex relationships are churches in white majority countries, such as the Episcopal Church in the United States, the Anglican Church of Canada, or the Church of England. This reflects the fact that the countries in which they operate have in recent years become largely accepting of same-sex relationships and transgender identities.
Secondly, conservative Anglicans in these countries have attempted to use the structures of the Anglican Communion to fight back against the acceptance of same-sex relationships in these churches. using the black majority churches of the Anglican Communion as their tools to do so.
Bell sees this development as a bad thing, which perpetuates white colonialism in a new guise, and has a seriously detrimental effect on lesbian, gay and transgender people in the global majority world. In his words:
‘… what appears to have happened in the Communion appears to be the replacement of one norm with another – in this case, the norm of Whiteness with the norm of cis-heteronormativity and anti-queerness – and yet it is perhaps not quite this simple. For whilst we do see one form of colonialism replaced with another, yet we still see the original colonialism alive and well. Unsurprisingly, those most clearly negatively affected by this are queer Black people, a key example of anti-intersectionality. In addition, these two forms of colonisation of Anglicanism are in many ways simply different aspects of the same process – one that favours misogynistic purity politics, that necessitates some form of male-centric norm, that requires uniformity, that values rather than gives away power, and that stifles dissent.’
Bell’s solution to this problem is what he calls ‘queering.’ He defines queering as a theological approach that ‘ holds the feet of cis-heterosexual assumptions to the fire.’ What he means by this is that it challenges the assumptions of white male theologians who live according to their biological sex (are ‘cis’ to use the jargon) and who are heterosexual rather than gay or lesbian that their self-understanding should be regarded as the norm for understanding God and how God wills human beings to behave.
As Bell sees it:
‘Anglicanism, and the Anglican Communion, are in desperate need of queering, despite the institutional instrumentalization of and structural violence towards queer people – perhaps no coincidence. This queering helps its practitioners meet the real rather than the unreal, by challenging the lazy categorisation that is taken for granted and the idolatry of normativity, that is made prescriptive about God rather than descriptive about humankind. The minute we realise what it is that we are doing that gets in the way of engaging with God rather than god, it becomes much easier to avoid. Queering offers a tool to deconstruct the colonial mindset, yet there remains a great deal of determination in Anglicanism to retain it. Through an intentional refusal to accept colonisation as either inevitable or unbreakable – colonisation in any direction, and however concretely embedded in the life of the church – queering would enable us to take Anglicanism out of the straight jacked into which it has been forced and into the cold light of day, where the real can be sensed.’
The fundamental problem I have with Bell’s argument is an epistemological one. The starting point for his approach is that we encounter the ‘real,’ that is the truth about what God is like and how God wants human beings to behave, by taking as our starting point the reality of the different forms of sexual identity and behaviour that exist in the world today and seeing all of these as reflective of the nature of God and God’s will for the flourishing of humankind.
The trap into which I think Bell’s argument falls is that it provides no way of deciding which, if any, forms of sexual behaviour are to be regarded as unacceptable. I am sure that he rejects the acceptability of sexual violence and exploitation, but these are as much part of the reality of sexual conduct in today’s world as the consensual forms of sexual activity which I am sure he prefers, and could theoretically be justified on the basis that they are the outworking of the sexual identities of the persons concerned. The problem for Bell is that on the basis of the theological method he describes there would seem to be no coherent way of saying sexual violence and exploitation exceed the limits of permissible conduct.
To put it another way, Bell faces the unanswerable question ‘Says who?’ Who decides?
Traditional orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, has a coherent answer to this question. This answer is based on the witness of two authorities, nature and Scripture, God being the author of both.
Read it all in Reflections of an Anglican Theologian
[1] Charlie Bell, ‘Renewing Communion: A queering of unity and colonialism’ at Anglican.Org: https://anglicanism.org/renewing-communion-a-queering-of-unity-and-colonialism and
[2] C S Lewis, Mere Christianity (Glasgow: Fontana, 1984), p.86.
[3] Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Jesus (South Bend: St Augustine’s Press, 2007), pp.131-132.