The
tension that currently exists inside the worldwide Anglican
Communion is
undeniable. But what
many don’t realize is that it is as much about how its
unforeseen legacy of unbridled missionary efforts expanded
into the Third World as it is about the conservative arm of
the Church
repudiating homosexuality. But the two feed off each
other with Gene Robinson, the ninth bishop of the Diocese of
New Hampshire
in the Episcopal Church
of the U.S. (ECUSA) and the first openly gay non-celibate priest
in the episcopate. Ever since his consecration, he’s been
the Church’s fall guy.
By pitting marginalized groups like gays and Africans against
each other, the Church masks the geopolitics of race and power,
while bating homophobia.
Does this scenario sound familiar?
When the liberal wing of the
ECUSA consecrated Robinson, the Anglican’s Global South – comprised mostly of Third
World countries in Africa, South America, and Asia – did
not embrace the Church’s radical shift from a religion
of personal transformation to a faith of personal affirmation.
For the Global South, that shift raised not only questions about
theological belief, but also about their ecclesiastical power
within the Church.
With centuries of Anglican missionaries traversing worldwide
into the hinterlands and jungles of Third World countries to
transform heathens of indigenous religions and fertility cult
practices into good Christians, its globetrotting evangelizing
carried not only racist and homophobic messages that had strong
theological holds on its colonial subjects, but it also brought
the notion of power to disenfranchised countries that wanted
in the Anglican ecclesiastical fiefdom.
One sign of entry is an invitation to Lambeth conferences.
They are once-a-decade global gatherings of Anglican archbishops
and bishops that once upon a time functioned as the Church's
only white male club of heterosexual power brokers. They ignored,
without moral compunction, its missionary churches.
But things changed. And when they did, they changed not only
radically but also racially.
“In 10 years, when African bishops come to the microphone
at this conference, we will be so numerous and influential that
you will have to recognize us,” said Joseph Adetiloye,
a retired official with the church in Nigeria, at the 1978 Lambeth
Conference, according to The New Yorker.
While the U.S. has, at best, approximately 2.2 million Episcopalians
today, the center of Anglican gravity is neither here nor in
Britain, but in Africa. There are approximately three million
in Kenya, and nine million in Uganda. But those two countries,
combined, do not come close to the 20 million in Nigeria, making
Peter Akinola, the archbishop there, one of the most influential
men in the Anglican Communion.
A vociferous opponent of gay and lesbian civil rights, Akinola
has used Robinson as his whipping boy to flex his muscle as a
sign of African power in the Anglican Church as well as to expand
his missionary power by capitalizing on the theological schism
that has developed.
“Granted, the American society as a super-power is in
the forefront of human adventure. However, in this case of human
sexuality, it is nothing but adventure in ungodliness. For people
like Gene Robinson, who was, for years, married and with children,
to wake up one morning and discover that they are homosexuals,
is nothing but adventurous promiscuity and unfaithfulness. The
Church condones that at her own peril. If this is not yet clear
to many today, it will surely be tomorrow,” Akinola wrote
in The Kairos Journal, an online Christian publication.
By installing Bishop Martyn
Minns of Virginia, a white man, as the new leader of the so-called
Convocation
of Anglicans in
North America – a Nigerian Anglican body in the U.S. comprised
primarily of American Anglican and Episcopal churches that have
disaffiliated from ECUSA – Akinola’s U.S. influence
now competes with that of Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, the
first female presiding bishop of the ECUSA. She unwaveringly
supports Robinson.
“If we are not willing to re-examine our assumptions about
who is in and who is out, I don’t think we are adequately
faithful in our spiritual journey,” Schori told the Boston
Globe.
The Lambeth Conference has
always been about who’s in
and who’s out. Where Lambeth could once summarily dismiss
the voices of bishops from Third World countries, it can no longer
do so because their numbers are overwhelmingly important to the
life of the Anglican Communion.
But Robinson is now a lone
voice in the wilderness among bishops. And the Church’s decision not to invite him to the 2008
Lambeth Conference cements Robinson’s status as a fall
guy. It’s also a way for the Church to avoid addressing
its heterosexism head on.
“I have to reserve the right to withhold or withdraw invitations
from bishops whose appointment, actions or manner of life have
caused exceptionally serious division or scandal within the Communion,” said
the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, according
to the Associated Press.
And indeed, Williams does
reserve that right, but it comes at his own theological hypocrisy
of once expressing
liberal views
on homosexuality. After all, he once said, "If the Church's
mind is that homosexual behavior is intrinsically sinful, then
it is intrinsically sinful for everyone. It is that unwillingness
to come clean that can't last. It is a contradiction."
Let’s hope that Williams,
one day, will come clean.
BC columnist, the Rev. Irene Monroe is
a religion columnist, public theologian, and speaker. She is
a Ford Fellow and doctoral candidate at Harvard Divinity School.
As an African American feminist theologian, she speaks for
a sector of society that is frequently invisible. Her website
is www.irenemonroe.com. Click
here to contact the Rev. Monroe. |