Icons Of Christian Decadence
ROD DREHER
DEC 18

(photo not copied)

That’s Catherine Bond (left) and Jane Pearce, a lesbian couple who are both priestesses in the Church of England, and both the recipients of the first formal blessing of their partnership in a C of E service. It happened yesterday. Excerpt from the BBC report:

During the prayers, Canon Andrew Dotchin said the pair were continuing on a "pilgrimage graced by your (God's) blessing, with you as their companion in the dark where they can rejoice and hope in sustaining their love for all the days of their lives".

The Guardian added:

Catherine and Jane, both ordained priests and in a civil partnership, will receive their blessing during the traditional Sunday morning communion service at St John’s. The vast red brick Victorian church will be filled with the sound of organ music and Christmas carols, and a gay pride flag will fly outside, as it does most days.

“Their love helps them to be more faithful Christians, and their love helps other people to understand that God is generous and no one is left outside,” said Dotchin. “Sunday’s blessing will be a celebration of that.”

Meanwhile, a dissenting Church of England vicar faces church discipline for calling a penis-haver a penis-haver:

The Rev Brett Murphy faces an official rebuke from the CofE over “intentionally derogatory and disrespectful” remarks he made about the Rev Canon Dr Rachel Mann shortly after her appointment in June.

LGBT+ campaigners had hailed her appointment as a “beacon of light and hope”.

The Rev Murphy, in a 32-minute-long YouTube video, criticised the CofE for putting “a radical rainbow activist” in a “position of high authority in a diocese”.

The Rev Murphy, who quit the CofE a month after the broadcast, had said in reaction to the appointment: “Now you may wonder ‘is that really newsworthy, Brett?’

“You may roll your eyes, if you are a complementarian, that another feminist is getting a prominent high-ranking position in the CofE, but this is worse than that.

“The Rev Rachel Mann is in fact, biologically, a bloke, who identifies and lives as a woman.”

Father Murphy refuses to live by lies, and faces sanction by his church — the same church that blesses the partnership of lesbian vicaresses. Cambridge professor and practicing Anglican James Orr is right:

I have friends in the Church of England — James Orr is one of them — who are faithful Christians, and who suffer greatly from its apostasy and ongoing self-dissolution. I don’t know how much longer they’re going to be able to hold on. Once I spoke with one of these brave and faithful friends about the prospect of converting to Catholicism as a way out. Nope, he said, he had done that earlier in his life, but found the Catholic Church in England to be dispirited, with a clergy that is heavily gay. I don’t know if this accurately summarizes his view, but I left that conversation with the impression that his years as a Catholic in England stripped him of his belief that the Catholic Church is what it claims to be, and pushed him back to Anglicanism, because at least there, the lines between good and evil were easy to identify — versus in Catholicism, where, as he put it, so many of the clergy hid their de facto apostasy, especially on sexual sins, behind the official doctrines of the Church.

I know, I know: your mileage may vary. It is important that before any of you choose to abandon your declining church for a different communion, that you not have any false hope. This is true of Orthodoxy as well. It is not the case that all churches are the same, so it doesn’t matter which one you belong to. Nor is it the case that because all churches are dealing with corruption of one kind or another, you might as well stay put. I’m simply saying that one should try to be as realistic as possible, and not allow oneself to be swayed by one’s understandable hope that the grass is greener Over There, With Those People.

It might be greener than where you are, but I assure you there will be problems. As a Catholic priest once put it to me, discussing the decadence within all the churches today, “Churches are made of people, including the clergy. Whatever sins the people of a time and place have, they will bring them into the church.” His point was not that we should reconcile ourselves to sin, much less engage in woke mumbo-jumbo to declare sin to be a blessing. His point, rather, was that we should not allow our idealism to get the better of us, such that we become scandalized by the failures within ecclesial bodies.

We had that discussion many years ago, when I was still Catholic. I don’t know what that priest thinks now. As my example shows, for better or worse, I believe that there is a point beyond which one cannot be pushed without leaving. The Church of England really does seem to be doing its dead-level best to be pushing conservative Anglicans out. I suppose some will go to breakaway Evangelical-style Protestant bodies in the Anglican tradition, like the Rev. Calvin Robinson has done. Others will go Catholic, and others Orthodox. Leaving aside theological-ecclesiological claims for the sake of argument, I can say that you search in vain if you look for a church that isn’t facing internal division over these issues; in US Orthodoxy, they are far less pronounced than in Catholicism or most Protestant bodies, but believe me, there are well-financed factions pushing for this. Sooner or later, it will have to be confronted. My advice to you is to look for a parish, and a communion, where the fight for Biblical orthodoxy has not been lost, and where you can take a stand without being on the margins.

It is worth thinking about, though, why homosexuality has become the pre-eminent wedge issue across Christian churches. Church progressives have this dishonest strategy of pretending that it’s a minor issue, except for the fact that they won’t give it up and reach a compromise with conservatives. I suppose if I believed what progressives do about homosexuality and transgenderism, I would be bound to think that this is an issue on which compromise is impossible, for the same reason I would find it impossible to compromise with Christians inside my ecclesial body who believed that (say) black people were living in a state of sin by being black.

I do not believe what progressives do on the point, however. I do not believe that homosexuality and/or transgenderism is a characteristic like race. I won’t argue the point here and now, but I simply want to highlight the profundity of the disagreement with Christian progressives here. If you believe that LGBT status is in the same moral category as race, then everything else follows. It becomes incomprehensible, outside of raw bigotry, why conservatives within the church object.

The reason why homosexuality, and human sexuality in general, is the pre-eminent wedge issue is because of Christian anthropology. That is to say, the Bible gives us a clear idea of what it means to be a being made in the image of God. We know from direct Scriptural teaching, as well as from reasoning from revealed first principles, that homosexuality runs contrary to bedrock Christian teaching. That homosexuality is, to use the language of the Roman catechism, “intrinsically disordered” — meaning that by its very nature it cannot be reconciled to the Logos. I am unaware that the Bible has anything to say about transgenderism, but if that’s not intrinsically disordered, nothing is.

In contemporary times, many, perhaps most, people do not see either homosexuality or, increasingly, transgenderism as disordered, in part because they do not recognize an intrinsic order, at least not one that excludes either phenomenon. Rather, they believe that human will decides what counts as rightly ordered — that we create order out of chaos, as distinct from discovering, through revelation and reason based on what has been revealed, order within the chaos.

I touched on this in the following passage from The Benedict Option:

Back in 1993, a cover story in The Nation identified the gay-rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

They were right. Tying the gay rights cause to the Civil Rights movement was a strategic master stroke. Though homosexuality and race are two very different phenomena, the media took the equivalence for granted, and rarely if ever gave any opposing voices a chance to be heard.

Though the unrelenting media campaign on behalf of same-sex marriage was critically important to its success, it wasn’t the most important thing. Americans accepted gay marriage so quickly because it resonated so deeply with what they had already come to believe about the meaning of heterosexual sex and marriage.

We have gay marriage because the straight majority came to see sexuality as something primarily for personal pleasure and self-expression, and only secondarily for procreation. We have gay marriage because the straight majority, in turn, came to see marriage in the same way—and two generations of Americans have grown up with these nominalist values on sex and marriage as normative.

To be modern, as we have seen, is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).”

Gay marriage and gender ideology signify the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because they deny Christian anthropology at its core, and shatter the authority of the Bible. Rightly ordered sexuality is not at the core of Christianity, but as [Philip] Rieff saw, it’s so near to the center that to lose the Bible’s clear teaching on this matter is to risk losing the fundamental integrity of the faith. This is why Christians who begin by rejecting sexual orthodoxy end either by rejecting Christianity themselves, or laying the groundwork for their children to do so.

“The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling,” Rieff writes. By that standard, Christianity in America is in mortal danger.

Do you see what I mean? A church that assimilates to the reigning therapeutic order begins by becoming liberal — often passively (that is, by pretending sexual disorder among the congregation either doesn’t exist, or is no big thing) — and ends by affirming LGBT. It begins with the belief that the material world is just dead matter; that the Logos is not written into all matter, and called to redemption. It ends with the belief that the subjective disposition of an individual’s psyche is the only meaningful indicator of morality and spirituality. Jesus was clear that merely observing the Law is no guarantor of moral worth (“whitewashed sepulchres”), but he was equally clear that he did not come to abolish the Law, rather to fulfill it. You can be perfectly chaste, but your hard, icy heart can still drag you down to hell. But that is no excuse for sexual debauchery, just because you are a nice guy who does kind things for his neighbors.

Everyone comes to church with his or her own sins. The point of going to church is, in large part, to acknowledge one’s sinfulness, to learn how to repent, and to seek mercy from the Lord. We know that the Lord values mercy, not sacrifice. But mercy means nothing absent acknowledgement of guilt. Why ask for mercy when you think you’ve done nothing wrong? Once, on a trip within Europe, I had lunch with a nice local fellow I met. He asked about my family, and I told him that I was in the process of getting divorced. We talked about that for a bit, and he encouraged me to “have some fun” after so many years of unhappy marriage. He meant to start having sex.

I told him that was not possible for me, because I am a Christian, and that is sin. He genuinely didn’t understand what I was saying. He was not a Christian himself, and he could not grasp why someone in my position would deny himself sex. Mind you, this man was not a cad; to all appearances, he was a normal middle-class European professional, married and a father. His perspective on sexual behavior codes is totally normal in post-Christian Europe. I explained to him that yes, I have normal desires like everybody else, but that I love Christ more than I love my own desires, and that means I have to sacrifice to live the life He desires for me. If that means living the rest of my life as a celibate, then that’s what it has to be.

I could tell that this man was deeply confused by what I was telling him. And look, I was basically a stranger to him. My sense was that living in a post-Christian culture, and not being a believer himself, he had never met someone who was like him in most every other way, except on the matter of sex. This was in a Latin country (e.g., France, Spain, Portugal, Italy), so it may be the case that even churchgoing Christians rationalize their sex lives. It’s what you do these days. But it’s living by a lie, and I can’t do that.

I don’t say that to boast of my own virtue, Lord knows. I only bring it up to highlight how weird normative Christianity is on the question of sex, within contemporary culture. In fact, it’s a lot like the days of the early church in pagan Rome. One of the main things that set Christians apart was their sexual code.

You may be certain that any church that abandons the Bible’s teachings on sex and sexuality is well on its way to apostasy. It is not the case that sex is the most important thing about the Christian claim, but for reasons I’ve discussed here, what sex symbolizes, and what it means anthropologically within a Christian matrix, means that you cannot be meaningfully Christian if you reject Christian sexual teaching. And to put a fine point on it: it is possible to affirm Christian sexual teaching yet fail in one’s own life to live up to its demands. That’s what confession and absolution are for. That’s why God is merciful to the penitent. What’s not acceptable is finding the teaching difficult to live out, and rejecting it.