Christ, Culture and the Episcopal Church
The conservative American Anglican Council claims "the Episcopal Church has caved into the secular culture" by consenting to the election of the first honestly gay bishop and recognizing that the blessing of same gender unions is happening in some dioceses.
But it isn't the Episcopal Church that is being
driven by secular culture on the subject of homosexuality. Rather, it is the American Anglican Council's outspoken allies in Africa, Asia and South America.
The Episcopal Church's General Convention
has taken deeply counter cultural moves in affirming that gays and lesbians are cherished children of God entitled to full and equal inclusion in the Body of Christ. That kind of acceptance isn't the case in most of the United States.
Popular culture may be fun to watch, but it
doesn't write the law. Despite the success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, it still is legal in 36 states to fire people simply because they are gay. They can be denied access to housing with impunity in most cities and states. And, worst of all, they still are attacked physically and verbally on our streets because of who they are.
The American Anglican Council has been unhappy with the Episcopal Church's moves toward the full inclusion of gays and lesbians for several years, and it has been fanning the flames of Anglican indignation in Africa, Asia and South America, where deeply conservative views on homosexuality are embedded in the cultures.
Now, they hoped to reap the harvest of that
work and get what they wanted at the meeting of Anglican primates in London. They wanted to have the Episcopal Church's leadership "severely disciplined" and to have themselves named the "authentic expression" of the church in the United States.
But statements from the American Anglican
Council's allies make it clear which views are the ones being culturally driven. The poster child for the enraged conservatives is Peter Akinola, the archbishop of Nigeria.
The Economist magazine recently quoted him
as saying, "I cannot think of how a man in his senses would be having a sexual relationship with another man. Even in the world of animals ... we don't hear of such things."
What the American Anglican Council doesn't
talk about is how such culturally driven rhetoric from its allies plays out in the lives of Africans, Asians and South Americans who are gay. Amnesty International's 2001 report on torture and ill treatment based on sexual identity in those places makes for horrifying reading.
"Coming at midnight, they said, `We want
to show you something.' They took my clothes off and raped me. I remember being raped by two of them, then I passed out."
That is the account of Christine, a lesbian who
was tortured in a secret detention room in Uganda, where "homosexuality isn't just a social taboo, it is a criminal offense."
Amnesty International reports that at least 70
countries entered the 21st century with laws prohibiting same-sex relations. In some countries, same-sex relations will incur the death penalty. In other countries, the penalty for simply being homosexual is flogging. In Malaysia, same-sex relations are punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment and whipping.
Anglican religious leaders in those countries
don't protest such inhumane treatment. Indeed, they abet and exacerbate it with their fundamentalist antihomosexual rhetoric.
Jesus Christ's entire earthly ministry was profoundly countercultural. Time and again, he outraged the secular and religious leaders of his day by reaching out to those on the margins of the culture--to the untouchables of his day.
In this time and in these places where the culture and the church join hands to deny the very humanity of gays and lesbians, I don't even have to ask, "What would Jesus do?"