Woe! That broad and steady liner the Church of England after many storms has turned off its long-developed navigation screens and dug out a rusty moral compass, somewhat magnetically distorted by a dangle of iron crosses and chastity girdles. The House of Bishops has steered away from law and custom, gentleness and pastoral care; diverging from the young, the searchers, the strugglers, the gay and exploited. Oh, and single parents (unless virtuously widowed).
Its “guidance” on sex last week was provoked by the new law allowing heterosexual couples to have civil partnerships. Apparently CPs don’t include vows and aren’t annulled by non-consummation or infidelity. Thus, in the harshest of tones, the bishops declare that the only proper context for any sexual intercourse whatsoever is heterosexual marriage. Priests may not bless civil partners but only “affirm the value of committed, sexually abstinent friendships”. Decent of them.
We knew this in principle. Christian teaching does traditionally formally restrict sex to heterosexual marriage. Indeed if you’re raised Catholic, there’s a further hurdle since every coupling must be open to conception however financially or medically disastrous. Play Vatican-roulette with thermometers and see where it gets you.
That bishops should put out this flat statement now is sad: church congregations may be dwindling but this is still a land with strong feelings for its gentle country churches and great cathedrals, for national prayer and hymnody and the charity at their heart. Not, though, for fundamentalist grandstanding without a trace of pastoral care or awareness of reality.
Nobody expects the C of E to be a wild rave, but make no mistake: these bishops are not just turning away from Love Island, Naked Attraction, YouPorn, adultery, hook-up culture and all the tedious, tittering, loveless, needily vapid priapism of our age. That’s reasonable enough. But here they are turning away from ordinariness: mistakes, bad luck, awkward lives, shy doubtful lovers straight and gay who won’t stick to celibacy before the ring is on, yet battle towards happiness and the healing of familiar touch. (Touch-loss, incidentally, has lately been flagged up as a common deficit: it seems that MeToo fears and lonely online socialising is depriving many people of it, and without enough hugs, sexual or not, none of us thrives).
The announcement was met with dismay. Social media howled, the Bishop of Buckingham and others wrote in protest. Many a vicarage will feel the heat as pastors, defiant if a little despairing, try to reassure the faithful gay congregants, the cohabitants, the young parents not quite married, the prostitutes with little choice, all the muddled, loving, decent souls they care for.
The worst thing is how diseased it feels. Humanity has long suffered a dark streak of fascinated, prurient dread about sex, often showing as authority and misogyny. Sometimes it is merely ludicrous, like last week’s story of the creepy boarding-school headmaster in Wales whose strictness about pupil relationships was accompanied by saucy texts to girls. Ugh. Sometimes it manifests as homophobia: the most censorious chaps you meet tend to betray their dark urges by showing an irrationally strong interest in the technicalities of the gay bedroom.
Hypocritical authoritarianism is a black joke dramatists have picked up for centuries: Angelo in Measure for Measure closes the brothels while demanding the virginity of a nun; lustful cardinals rampage through Jacobean drama. Often it is angry masculinity, Lear flinching from the female: “but to the girdle do the gods inherit; beneath is all the fiend’s! There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit— burning, scalding, stench, consumption!”
It taints Christianity like rat-droppings in good flour. St Augustine saw sexual desire as rebellion against God, virginity and monogamy were medievally overprized, procreation the sole excuse. Practicalities of inheritance and family suited that before contraception (though heaven knows, in many a holy male community boys were used by men to prevent the pregnancy problem). But medicine and an increasing understanding of desire gradually gave the West, at least, a sense that orgasmic genital stimulation, in all its many forms, is not terrifying but part of ordinary decency, affection and respectful bonding. Marriage at its best does that. But it is not, and never will be, the only place such connections happen between good, consenting, adult people.
The Churches at their best are showing signs of maturing beyond prurient prohibition towards loving guidance and enjoining respect. But that authoritarian sourness still seethes beneath. For me, one grim old memory stirs: 26 years ago The Times sent me to observe the Synod discussing the ordination of women priests. It was polite and sometimes funny (St Paul’s words on husbandly “headship” raised gags about the unlikelihood of actually enforcing it). But as it broke up we saw from the gallery two opponents of the motion quietly praying: the twin bishops Peter and Michael Ball. It was moving, even if you disagreed.
Yet now we know that Peter Ball was already a practised sex offender: exploiting, controlling, grooming and abusing vulnerable young men under the guise of religion. One killed himself. His was just one of the century’s many clerical abuses. And while psychoanalysing a whole institution is a bit absurd, it is also tempting. There’s sickness in church authority and it is time it hauled its priorities back above its belt and ours. Sin and sex are not synonyms. Chastity is not sanctity. There’s enough work to do fighting cruelty, coercion, lies and lovelessness.
