THE Revd Dr Ian Paul once warned me against making an important mistake. He was right, but I went ahead and made it anyway, partly because I didn’t trust him. I don’t trust church politicians in general, but his letter in The Guardian is an example of a rather slippery argumentative style.
“Those opposed [to the prayers of blessing] are not ‘conservative’ or ‘traditionalist’, but simply Anglicans. It is not they, but the Church of England itself, which believes that marriage is a lifelong and exclusive union of one man and one woman ‘according to the teaching of our Lord’ (Canon B30) — and this teaching was specifically reaffirmed by Synod. This is canon law and, the church being established, is also the law of the land, assented to by parliament.”
The casual reader might suppose from this that Dr Paul was arguing that marriage, in English law, is “the lifelong and exclusive union of one man and one woman” — which, of course, it isn’t. English law, as determined by Parliament, allows all kinds of biblical abominations, even unto marrying your dead wife’s sister — or brother, if that’s your preference.
Nowadays, you don’t even have to wait until they’re dead.
Many people consider this progress. Some don’t. A majority, probably, have mixed feelings, accepting as divinely inspired only those aspects that increase their own freedom. It’s not unreasonable to call those who regard it all as change or decadence “conservatives”, or even “traditionalists”. Calling them “Anglicans” really isn’t any more helpful than calling them “people”, however accurate both labels are. What we want to do when describing the argument is to distinguish them from those, equally Anglican, who disagree. That is exactly the distinction that Dr Paul’s language is designed to erase. If you do not agree with him, you’re not an Anglican.
I prefer my own definition, reached after watching too many Lambeth Conferences: “An Anglican is any Christian who believes that someone else is mistaken about being an Anglican — and who thinks it matters.”
Whether Dr Paul is right in his main point — that the proposed prayers are to bless individuals and not their relationship — I don’t know. I suspect that it is arguable if you’re an Anglican (see above). More importantly, the distinction is incomprehensible and so invisible to the general public.
The Times ran a letter calculated to stretch the definition of Anglican, from a member of the Sea of Faith Network: “I am secretary of my parochial church council and a deanery synod representative. I call myself a Christian atheist and a humanist. Like many others, I continue to explore religion as one of humanity’s most enduring and interesting creations. Not just at Easter, but all year round.”
And it ran another from the kind of Evangelical who makes me wonder whether they are, in fact, puppies in human skins: “My own church is thriving, attracting young and old of all nationalities by intelligently preaching the Gospel. Next Easter why not have an article from a Bible-believing minister who spreads hope and joy? The Sunday Times is a great newspaper and its readers are worth more than doubt, Easter bunnies and chocolate.”
THE New Yorker has a brilliant and heartrending story by a woman whose mother was Jewish, and her father that style of American Evangelical who believes that faith will be rewarded, first in material terms and finally in the Rapture. The mother dies, after five years of cancer treatment, and the daughter hears her last words from outside the room. Her father is out of the house.
Months after the death, the father moves to a new city, and marries a woman he has met at a revival meeting, introducing her as “your new Mom”. In the new, much poorer household, it is forbidden to name bad things, by the same logic that “naming and claiming” good ones will bring them about.
Finally, the children of the blended family, now teenagers, are sent to see a film about the Rapture, which opens with a woman who thinks she’s a Christian discovering one morning that her husband has been raptured — his electric razor still buzzing in the sink — and she has been left behind, condemned to hell. She didn’t really believe. The narrator asks her father, greatly daring, and by indirection in the presence of her stepmother, how he knows that her mother and her other Jewish relatives aren’t in hell.
“My dad had maintained that my mother had accepted Jesus with her final whisper. For years, he insisted on this version of events. But, that night, I felt my stomach go cold. My father hadn’t been there. I had.
“‘I can’t breathe,’ she had said. ‘I can’t breathe.’”
She cannot ask about her mother directly, so she asks about her other relatives: “He told me that he prayed for them all the time. I believed him. Of course he prayed for them. But then there was also what I didn’t tell him: I had prayed once, too.”