| CULTURAL and religious identities in the Anglican Churches have been shaped by the colonial past, and discussions are long overdue on this issue, which has a huge bearing on the current divisions in the Communion, say scholars of colonial theory and Anglican history.
Serious scholarly attention to Britain’s colonial and post-colonial influence was not keeping up with the “urgency of polarising relationship questions facing the Anglican Communion”, said the Revd Joe Duggan, convener of an international conference at Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute earlier this month.
“The controversies of the Anglican Communion have been focused on questions of identity, unity, and authority, without any consideration of what influence the colonial might have on shaping contemporary expectations of interdependence.”
He noted that indigenous stories and history were markedly absent, and colonialism had been “sanitised and silenced”.
The Lambeth Conference in prospect and both the Covenant Design Group and the Windsor report have attempted to bring coherency to the polarised Communion through shared principles. But their concern with the question “Who has the power to say who is in and who is out?” was at the expense of an emerging postcolonial Anglicanism, Mr Duggan suggested.
Key insights into current controversies over sexuality came from the Revd Dr Steven Shakespeare, Anglican chaplain at Liverpool Hope University. Calling for renewed engagement with the “many faces of Anglican imperial legacy”, he argued that it was the suppression of “a certain sort of wildness — a fear of the particular other — which hinders an honest facing of disputes within the Church, not to mention its witness to the world”.
Sexuality itself had been re-imagined in the past two centuries, Dr Shakespeare suggested. It had become “one of the sites of political and colonial struggle, of ambiguity and resistance. If bodies, too, can be colonised, the linkages between sexual identity, repression, control, and the techniques of empire to subjugate and redefine colonial populations become suggestive. Sexuality becomes the key to defining what makes us human, and this unites those who take the most contradictory stances on particular issues of sexual morality.”
For President Mugabe, who notoriously associated same-sex activity with the behaviour of animals, resistance to the acceptance of homosexuality was allied to an affirmation of post-colonial African identity. “Homosexuality is seen as a Western infection, an alien import into a culture which knows nothing of it.”
The association of homosexuality with “bestiality, monstrosity, paedophilia, and subhumanity in particular” as set out in the position paper of the Church of Uganda, was certainly not unique to the African context, said Dr Shakespeare. But, “when African political and church leaders make the case against homosexuality, resistance to imperialism, affirmation of African particularity, and the assertion of binding human norms go hand in hand.”
In the story of the Bugandan martyrs of 1886, invoked by Ugandan bishops in their refusal to accept homosexuality, the historical significance of the martyrdoms could not be reduced to same-sex practices, said Dr Shakespeare.
“The weaving together of themes of imperialism, despotism, ‘foreign’ influence, Islam, Christian mission, symbolic power, and African authenticity makes any one-level reading of the story as about homosexuality very dubious,” he suggested.
“Instead, what we have is a story shot through with ambiguities of colonial negotiations, in which iden-tities are unsettled and it is unclear who is on which ‘side’.”
The Revd Amos Kasibante, chaplain at the University of Leicester, and former fellow-student with many of those who are now African bishops, identified a key factor in identifying the things that divided the Communion. “The debate is carried on at completely conceptual levels,” he suggested. “The language doesn’t communicate with many of the bishops.
“The conversation about sexuality has been debated in the West for several years, but most parts of Africa have not been engaged in this debate.”
THE Assistant Bishop of Adelaide, the Rt Revd Stephen Pickard, declared himself as “entirely a child of a colonial Church, the Church of England in Australia from the early 1950s; brought up in a middle-of-the-road C of E [with] a sort of no-frills, sacramental, social, religious ethos.” Could such an insider be “saved from the inherited institution, saved through it and saved for something larger?” he asked.
Place — the location of a
colonial church 12,000 miles on the other side of the known world on
the largest and driest island-continent on earth — continued to be a large driver in the development and shape of Anglican ecclesiology in the Antipodes, Bishop Pickard said. “It continues to shape the way Australian Anglicans conduct themselves nationally and see themselves in relation to the storm and tempests of contemporary Anglicanism.”
Australian Anglicanism had a long history of struggle, trying to make “a home away from home”, he suggested. “A colonial Church always generates modifications, whether intended or not. Furthermore, it is not surprising that, eventually, more dissident voices emerge advocating a more authentic local voice and shape.”
The conversation will continue at the Lambeth Conference, where the Lincoln Theological Institute and The Journal of Anglican Studies are co-sponsoring a fringe event on 21 July, “Anglican Identities and the Postcolonial”. |
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