In the great American arm-wrestling match over homosexuality and religion, you don’t need a program to figure out who stands on which side.
On Wednesday in Washington, for instance, two press conferences addressed homosexuality. One featured evangelical Christians, an Orthodox rabbi and a conservative Catholic. The other featured activists and liberal church leaders. You can fill in the comments yourself.
On Monday in Dallas, the United Methodist “supreme court” issued a ruling that shored up a church ban on homosexual marriage. Immediately, one set of Methodist leaders hailed the decision, while another group vowed to change church doctrine at the next general conference.
What combatants and observers sometimes forget, however, is that the rest of the world does not see things quite the same way Americans do. Episcopalians, some to their great surprise, rediscovered that last week.
The 2.5 million-member Episcopal Church in the U.S. is part of the 70 million-member Anglican Communion worldwide. Like other mainline Protestants in America, Episcopalians have engaged in raging debates over homosexuality, dividing the denomination almost evenly. The most recent decisions, including a church trial over ordination of a gay deacon, have tilted toward accepting homosexuality.
But last week, at the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England, Anglican bishops from around the world voted overwhelmingly to oppose ordination of homosexuals and declare all homosexual activity “incompatible with Scripture.” The final tally was 526 to 70.
American bishops, along with their counterparts in Britain, Canada and Australia, made up many of the 70 dissenters.
For the first time at a Lambeth Conference, the Anglos were outnumbered by bishops from Asia and Africa. And it was the bishops from Asia and Africa who pushed hardest to condemn homosexual activity.
How is that gap between the liberal Anglicans of the West and the more conservative Anglicans of the developing world best understood?
It isn’t the heritage of the faith. As one Ugandan bishop wryly noted, the Anglicans on his continent are using the scriptures that English and American missionaries gave them several generations ago.
Bishop John S. Spong of Newark, N.J., one of the most outspoken liberals in the Episcopal Church, was quoted in The New York Times explaining the vote with the observation that the worldwide body of Anglican bishops “is where the Episcopal Church was 20 years ago.”
Perhaps this is an ungenerous reading, but Spong’s remark smacks of colonial condescension; that is, he seems to say, folks in the backward parts of the world haven’t quite caught up with the more spiritually evolved Americans. That is an attitude that does not sit comfortably with professions of tolerance and appreciation for difference.
A less partisan observer might explain the gap this way: Even within the church, attitudes about homosexuality have as much to do with the prevailing culture as they do with religion.
In the United States, much of the institutional culture–the law, the media, academia–is tolerant, even defensive of homosexuality. Many of the Asian and African cultures represented by the bishops are much more socially conservative, even as they chide the West for not being liberal enough politically and economically.
Since nobody experiences religion outside of culture, the attempt to discern what is absolute truth and what is worldly influence is guaranteed to provoke disagreement.
The Anglican culture gap, with its international flavor, makes that obvious. But the more subtle, less examined cultural divisions within the United States just as certainly drive the argument about homosexuality here. And as long as those gaps exist, it is difficult to imagine the debate here quieting down anytime soon.
Eastward Orthodox: The Orthodox Church in America’s Diocese of the Midwest has decided to move its offices from Oak Park to Chicago, taking up residence on North LaSalle Street sometime early next year.
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While Holy Trinity Cathedral, on North Leavitt Street, will remain the seat of Bishop Job, the diocese is opening up a new church next to its future headquarters, Christ the Savior Church, at 927 N. LaSalle. The first weekly liturgy at Christ the Savior will be at 9:30 a.m. Sunday.
With 10,000 members, the Diocese of the Midwest is the largest in the Orthodox Church of America, which severed ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in 1970. In Chicago terms, of course, that number is small. But the OCA will not feel lonely on LaSalle Street; the new headquarters is just a few doors away from the Greek Orthodox Annunciation Cathedral, heart of the 250,000-member Greek Orthodox Diocese of Chicago.
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