JUSTIN Welby’s declaration last week to Alastair Campbell that gay sex is not sinful has proven explosive in the Church of England.
The Archbishop of Canterbury dropped the bombshell during The Rest is Politics podcast recorded in the crypt of Lambeth Palace and co-presented by Campbell, director of communications during Tony Blair’s premiership, and by former Tory MP Rory Stewart. The Church Times reported Welby’s comment as if he had said something conservative.
‘No sex without commitment, Archbishop of Canterbury tells podcast audience,’ the paper’s headline proclaimed.
The paper reported that during the podcast Campbell returned to a question he had put to the Archbishop in an interview in 2017: ‘Is gay sex sinful?’ He recalled that the Archbishop’s answer had then been ‘I haven’t got a good answer’ and asked whether he now had a ‘better answer’.
Welby said he did: ‘What the Archbishop of York and I and the bishops, by a majority, by no means unanimous – and the Church is deeply split over this – where we’ve come to is to say that all sexual activity should be within a committed relationship, and whether it’s straight or gay.
‘In other words, we are not giving up on the idea that sex is within marriage or civil partnership, or whether marriage is civil or religious, and that, therefore, we have put forward a proposal that, where people have been through a civil partnership or a same-sex marriage, equal marriage, under the 2014 Act, they should be able to come along to a church and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together.’
But the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), which represents large and growing churches and networks opposed to the services of same-sex blessing, called Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF), reacted strongly to Welby’s statement. It has published an article by the Revd Dr Andrew Goddard, CEEC council member and tutor in ethics at Ridley Hall theological college in Cambridge. Goddard wrote: ‘The Archbishop’s interview gives the impression that the Church of England, with the agreement of the majority of bishops, now teaches that sexual relationships, including same-sex sexual relationships, are acceptable as long as the couple are in a committed relationship, either a civil partnership or a marriage . . . In fact, the theological argument presented by the bishops (and sight of the legal advice to bishops might demonstrate that this is also crucial for PLF’s legality) has been that any sexual relationship other than marriage between a man and a woman is contrary to the Church’s doctrine of marriage.’
He concluded: ‘Such significantly erroneous statements as these from no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury, unless swiftly followed by an apology and correction, can only add further to the widespread erosion of trust and growing sense of disbelief, betrayal, deception, anger and despair now felt across much of the Church of England in relation to both the PLF process and our archiepiscopal leadership.’
Before Welby was ordained, he attended Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), the evangelical charismatic flagship church in London’s Knightsbridge, which launched the international Alpha course for people wanting to explore Christianity.
During the 2010s HTB refused to engage in the controversy in the C of E over the acceptance of practising homosexuality because it did not want to ruffle feathers in the politically correct establishment. In 2012 the then vicar of HTB, Nicky Gumbel, interviewed Tony Blair at the HTB Leadership Conference at the Royal Albert Hall.
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