An urgent ecumenical update: the conclave has taken place. The great community leader has descended from the summit of Sinai, bearing, not tablets of law, but sorrowful tidings. Yes: the Archbishop of Canterbury has ‘grabbed a coffee’ with Sandi Toksvig, following her twee plea for an audience a few months ago on the subject of the Church of England’s attitude to gay sex.
The good news is that the ‘long-promised coffee’ was ‘calm and considered,’ according to Toksvig. The bad news is that Sandi is sad: Justin Welby had to report, unsurprisingly to anyone paying the slightest attention, that any change in the Anglican Communion’s stance on same-sex relations is likely to be – in Sandi’s words – ‘glacial’. A chinwag with the affable host of QI over a couple of flat whites at Costa were, it seems, not enough to overturn millennia of Judeo-Christian teaching.
Does anything better demonstrate the turnabouts in the status of institutions in Britain – the diminishing of the Church, the upraising of TV celebrities – over the last half-a-century than this meeting? For the Archbishop of Canterbury to come running when summoned into the presence of an atheist BBC2 quiz show host to receive a moral ticking-off? If Robert ‘Call My Bluff’ Robinson had tried on something of this kind in 1973 I strongly suspect he would’ve got a bash on the nut from Michael Ramsey’s crozier.
A chinwag with the host of QI at Costa were, it seems, not enough to overturn millennia of Judeo-Christian teaching
Toksvig has reported her disappointment to the world via Twitter (naturally) in a slightly uncomfortable-looking – especially for a seasoned televisualist – to-camera address, seemingly delivered from the corner of a Center Parcs cabin. She’s not happy. You see, Sandi is on the side of love. It’s as simple as that. And the Church still counting gay sex as a sin (along with, let us not forget, many other things that make life go with a zing) is not love.
I have to repeat: in Christianity, ALL sex outside heterosexual marriage is a sin. This is a Bronze Age survival mode/settings ethic forged in inconceivably harsher times by nomadic tribes permanently on the verge of extinction or ‘ethnic cleansing’. It speaks to the need for big extended families and kinship ties as protection in a hard world.
That was strange even to the more settled, civilised peoples of the time of its origin. Of course, it is going to be even stranger to homosexual people of the 21st century, like Sandi and me.
In her address, Sandi speaks of the CofE ‘purport(ing) to represent’ British society? Does it really? I would’ve thought chopping and changing with whatever secular society is up to at that particular historical moment is pretty much the exact opposite of the Christian message of an extra-temporal panoply standing almost inconceivably beyond the sordid doings of the earth.
As for the African congregations which are the main sticking point on this issue: is the CofE failing to represent them? I would love to see Toksvig admonish those people directly, let alone some of the less amenable creeds out there. Somehow, I don’t think that is going to happen.
Toksvig calls for love ‘without exceptions’ – which, ironically, is the basic Christian message. If you commit a sin you can repent and join in and be forgiven, whatever you have done. You will never be turned away. This is a revolutionary idea, even if sometimes imperfectly expressed by the established churches over the centuries. What you can’t do is demand that your sin gets reclassified as probably OK.
So what next for Toksvig? At the close of her communiqué, she drops a bombshell: ‘I do not intend to wait upon the Church,’ she says. Her sorrowful tone is eerily reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain in September 1939. Adopting a regal Queen-at-state-opening ‘my government will’ voice, she goes on to say: ‘In the next few weeks, I will be reaching out to the LGBT+ community and all our allies to see what can be done.’
What? She’s going to speak to all the gays, and our ‘allies’, at once? Can even she do that? Is it a hive mind, like when all the Time Lords form a telepathic caucus? And what steps is she going to take? A march of cuddly celebrities?
At the moment Toksvig is merely urging Welby – God’s envoy on Earth, remember – to declare himself an ‘ally’, as if he were some poor call-centre grunt being asked to wear a rainbow lanyard by HR. Plus she has, it would appear, come up with the hashtag ‘Come Out For Love’. For who could be against love?
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