JESUS-COME-LATELY CHRISTIANS
Jerry Harkins

The English were not history’s most obnoxious colonialists for which they can thank the Belgians. But they were, by far, the most successful. For nearly three hundred years it could be said that the sun never set on the British Empire and, although Winston Churchill did not become His Majesty’s first minister to preside over the collapse of said Empire, he did his best. Personally he was probably the nastiest colonialist since George III and he tried valiantly to stick his finger in the dike against the tide of history. It did not work and when the “blood-dimmed tide” was loosed, the world was swept up in a sea of unintended consequences that still plays out tragically in Ireland, the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Southeast Asia. But the Brits always tried to be soldiers of the cross, trading salvation for slaves and raw materials. They saw it as their Christian duty:

Take up the White Man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child. (1)

One of the more amusing consequences of Kiplingesque insouciance was the emergence of Anglicanism in the former colonies. The Church of England has its roots in the marital misadventures of Henry VIII. Unlike other Sixteenth Century exercises in religious reform, its Protestantism was confined mostly to liturgy except, of course, for His Majesty’s marital preferences. Theologically, its mainstream has always remained close to Mother Rome and it claims the true apostolic succession. It tends to be more flexible than Rome in the breezes of change but it is still essentially a very conservative organization. Indeed, in some parts of the world—Africa notably—it is more Catholic than the Pope. There are several reasons for this. First, the Africans are new at Christianity. While today they are a majority of the world’s Anglicans (2), they are only a generation or two removed from their pagan past and they must constantly struggle against regression. They are surrounded in many places and under siege by the most extreme sorts of Muslims. And, of course, they cannot be indifferent to the reality that they are a remnant of the white man’s burden. This puts a chip on the shoulders of many African hierarchs, especially those whose churches remained more or less loyal to the mother country during the wars of liberation.

These forces converge to produce an attitude toward women and homosexuals that is as extreme as any to be found anywhere in the world. The Africans are currently in the process of causing a schism within Anglicanism over these issues and, worse, they are carrying the day within the worldwide Anglican Communion. In terms of practical effect if not hateful rhetoric, they are a more serious threat to the Christian ideal of brotherhood than Pat Robertson and all the other fundamentalists combined. Consider, for example, the leader of the evangelical (i.e., conservative) Anglicans in Nigeria, His Graciousness the Primate Peter Akinola. In February 2006, he issued a communique on behalf of his Church of Nigeria Standing Committee lending support to a law outlawing same-sex relationships in Nigeria. The bill also proposed to criminalize gay clubs and other organizations and prohibit publicity, procession and public display of same-sex amorous relationships through the electronic or print media directly or indirectly. This was too much even for the Bush Administration which denounced it a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. When you’ve been labeled a human rights violator by George W. Bush, you are well advised to get your spiritual affairs in order.

Not all African prelates are so burdened as Akinola. The Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, retired Anglican Primate of South Africa and Archbishop of Capetown, recently wrote:

“Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?” (3)

The difference is that Tutu has been on the front lines of the struggle for human rights all his life. For him, it is not a theological abstraction or a political ideology. It is personal and emotional. "I am deeply saddened,” he said, “at a time when we've got such huge problems ... that we should invest so much time and energy in this issue...I think God is weeping."

There are two intriguing questions about the coming schism: why is so much of the African hierarchy so vehemently opposed to homosexuality, and why is the Anglican Communion taking its lead from the Africans? As to the first, the simple answer is that the Africans are more literalist in their reading of the Bible than their more experienced fellow religionists. Unlike Europeans and Americans, they do not have the witness of two thousand years of the horrific effects of Biblical inerrancy. Nor have they been forced to cope with Christian hypocrisy. They have been told the Bible is the inspired word of God and they do not yet understand the winking of the theologians. When the well known Anglican theologian John Stott writes, “However strongly we may disapprove of homosexual practices, we have no liberty to dehumanize those who engage in them,” they do not parse the logic carefully. They jump at a chance to hate the sin and love the sinner without reflecting on the fatuous disapprove/dehumanize dichotomy. It does not occur to them that making hand holding a five-year felony for gay couples but not for straight ones is, in fact, dehumanizing the former.

Would that the explanation were so simple! Of course, if you believe it, you have to also believe the Africans are stupid or at least unsophisticated—the half devils, half children of Mr. Kipling’s poem. Sadly they are neither. His Righteousness Akinola is a very smart man as is evident from the ease with which he is dominating the discussion. By contrast, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Douglas Williams is a naïf. Both may think they can undo the American Revolution and intimidate the U.S. branch of the Communion but Williams is leading from wishy-washy hope and Akinola from steely determination. For both of them, this is not theology, it is politics—for Akinola, power politics of the most brutal kind. Williams, in the great tradition of Neville Chamberlain, is merely trying to appease his brother in the Lord. His position, of course, has evolved although always in the context of what he claims is his profound concern for the dignity of gay and lesbian people. In 1989, he said, “In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures." Yes, this is gobbledygook but it is gobbledygook clearly on the side of the angels. By 2007, however, he was calling for the exclusion of the Americans and Canadians from forthcoming meetings of the Communion unless they repented and changed their ways. This is not gobbledygook. It is high church hypocrisy. But it is necessary to placate the noisiest members of his flock.

On the face of it, it is absurd to imagine that the Africans can excommunicate the Americans even though they outnumber them twenty or so to one and even though the Americans themselves are divided on the subject. The problem is that the Episcopalians contribute fully 70% of the Communion’s budget. His Grace Akinola knows this and appears to take the view that God will provide or, failing that, the Americans are so pusillanimous, they will continue to provide. His assumption is based on his experience of the English and his belief that the Americans are their genetic clones.

The problem His Excellency does not dwell on is that he and his congregants live in a maelstrom of chaos. Nigeria is an oil-rich nation with a Gross Domestic Product per capita of about $1,400 a year. The average age expectancy is about 46 years and about 6% of the adults are living with AIDS. Even Sudan is richer, healthier and in many ways more stable than Nigeria. Akinola’s self-sufficiency is empty braggadocio. He may be able to open his churches on Sunday but his Christians are routinely “disappeared” and without American political support he himself would be dead meat for the Muslims in the North. Thus when His Magnanimity denounces gays, he is acting out of fear. He tosses a red herring to his tormentors hoping thereby to distract them. He reasons that the Islamic fundamentalists hate gays more than they hate Christians. By waving his homophobia in their faces, he does not have to denounce their theocratic idealism too loudly and can hope to live another day. Those of us who have never lived in terror of night visitors must not be overly critical of this strategy.

The second question is even more intriguing. Why are the Africans winning the debate? Again there is a simple answer: they are enjoying the natural fruits of being the majority. The rubber ducky is theirs and the rest of us need to accede humbly to this democratic reality. The founder, of course, was a man who consorted with prostitutes and tax collectors. His reverence for democracy was never obvious and his followers have never felt it necessary to put doctrinal issues to the vote of the “faithful” who are regularly referred to as sheep or pigeons.

In theory, the Archbishop of Canterbury might think Akinola’s crusade was an opportunity for loving instruction in the gospel of love. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Whoever. The class of the saved is coextensive with the class of the believers. Whoever. Males and females, sinners and the just, whites and blacks, cowboys and Indians, even blonds and soccer players. But God forbid a white Englishman should be seen as instructing a black Nigerian.

Notes
1. “The White Man’s Burden” was written for Empress Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 but Kipling decided to go with “Recessional” instead. The latter reflects on the inevitability of hubris in the colonial enterprise and portends its ultimate decay. It is said that he tweaked “Burden” to turn it into a commentary on American imperialism in the aftermath of the Spanish American War. But it should not in any way be read as an anti-colonialist screed.

2. At least 40.5 million of the world’s 77 million Anglicans (53%) belong to one of eight African Provinces, and that does not include the Provinces of Congo and Sudan for which there are no reliable statistics.

3. Preface to Sex, Love and Homophobia by Vanessa Baird, Amnesty International UK, 2004.