Living Together in the Church: Including Our Differences

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario. He is co-editor of
Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the
Second World War.

The Anglican Church of Canada is among those rare varieties of
Christianity struggling with homophobia as opposed to endorsing it. This
collection of essays takes an inclusive approach as opposed to the more
traditional views expressed in the 2003 collection The Homosexuality
Debate, released by the same publisher. Indeed, many of the contributors
to the current collection identify as gay.

Sexual orientation poses no greater a challenge to Christianity today
than circumcision, dietary laws, usury, heliocentrism, republicanism,
slavery, anti-Semitism, and women’s rights did in earlier centuries.
Among many Christians, homophobia is the last acceptable prejudice. As a
result, for many the treatment of gays and lesbians has become a test
for the Anglican Church. The worldwide Anglican communion is now divided
by the issue of homosexuality, and some leaders, such as Terence Finlay,
Bishop of Toronto, are reduced to simply pleading for more time for
further discussion. However, the bishop’s own position is clear: “it
makes more sense for the church to bless these [homosexual]
relationships than it does for the church to bless battleships and pet
cats.”

Sylvia Keesmaat, Michael Ingham, Mario Ribas, Walter Deller, and Eric
Beresford in their essays provide the groundwork for addressing sexual
orientation by looking at specific Biblical prohibitions in the context
of the broader Christian message of inclusivity and love. Keesmaat
discusses the treatment of Gentiles in the early church as an analogy
for the church’s possible approach to homosexual people. David
Townsend and Sister Thelma-Anne McLeod discuss the gifts that gays and
lesbians bring to their faith community. Nonetheless, the human tendency
to cling to beliefs despite contrary evidence, even from personal
experience—“belief perseverance”—is so manifest in Anglican
discussions of homosexuality that one of the essayists, Kawuki Mukasa,
finds compromise unlikely on this issue. In fact, what the inclusive
Anglicans wish is merely an arrangement, similar to the compromise
reached on women’s ordination, whereby some dioceses and provinces of
the church allow the blessing of gay and lesbian relationships and the
hiring of gay and lesbian priests.

Unfortunately, at the moment there is more debate than dialogue, more
confrontation than discussion. Yet compromise lies at the very origins
of Anglicanism. If this church were unable to reach a compromise on
sexual orientation, it would indicate not so much the intransigence of
this issue as a shift in the church’s own nature. This book provides
much needed evidence to make possible an accommodation of both sides in
the dispute.