THE SPECTATOR

The C of E needs to talk about sex

My friend Andy is getting married. It’s about time – he and his girlfriend have a one-year-old daughter. He wants to get married in church, so I introduced him by email to the local vicar. I was copied in to their initial correspondence. The vicar told Andy that the Church of England prohibits sex outside of marriage, so a church wedding would not be possible unless the couple repented of their sin and lived apart in the run-up to the wedding.

Of course I made up the last bit. The vicar congratulated him and his partner on their decision and started talking dates. But isn’t it true that the church teaches that sex should only take place in marriage? Yes and no. The ambiguity sheds important light on the current crisis over homosexuality.

As with premarital sex, the church has made clear that its teaching on homosexuality is not a hard rule

The C of E is introducing a couple of significant reforms relating to homosexuality: blessing same-sex couples and (probably next year) allowing gay clergy to enter into civil marriages, which implicitly ends the current policy that they should not be in sexual relationships. However, it is holding back from same-sex marriages in church.

Conservatives say that these reforms involve a change to the church’s teaching on marriage and so require the full backing of General Synod. Liberals disagree that the reforms are changing doctrine. Their objections are perhaps on pragmatic grounds – they want to get the reforms over the line. I’m a liberal, but my initial reaction was that the conservatives are right: if it wants to affirm homosexuality with new fullness, the church must admit that it is changing its teaching on sex and marriage. Having given the matter further thought, I’m not so sure.

What is the C of E’s teaching on sex and marriage? The simple answer is that people should not have sex outside of heterosexual marriage. The real answer is subtly different. Consider premarital and extramarital sex. The church has always proscribed it, citing the various scriptural prohibitions of adultery. According to the Prayer Book, one of marriage’s functions is the prevention of ‘vice’, meaning non-marital sex.

 

Yet in practice this teaching has always been surrounded by vagueness. It can only be a rigidly enforced rule if bedrooms are policed. Though some Anglicans over the centuries have wanted the rule to be strictly upheld, a look-the-other-way pragmatism has mostly prevailed. In recent decades, the teaching has softened even further. It has become normal for couples to cohabit before they marry (one of my vicar friends says that if a couple asked to be married but were not cohabiting, he’d find it odd). In the light of this, should the teaching be explicitly changed, so that sex is permitted for those intending to marry? No need, most Anglicans think: let’s stick with the traditional teaching but treat it more as an ideal than a rule. This entails some muddle, but it also keeps a simple ideal in place.

It follows that the church’s teaching on premarital sex is not straightforward. It is misleading to say that the church prohibits it, for in reality its teaching also includes the approach actually taken by priests when they deal with cohabiting couples, and in almost all cases condone their behaviour without a second thought, like Andy’s local vicar. So the official teaching is not the whole story; it co-exists with an unofficial teaching.

Next question: what is the church’s teaching on homosexuality? Well, it follows from the official teaching that homosexuality is prohibited. But this is not the whole story. The church has indicated that its official teaching should not be rigidly enforced. For some years it did so implicitly, chiefly through condoning gay clergy, in an ambiguous, deniable way. Then it did so more explicitly, through issuing teaching documents affirming stable homosexual relationships among the laity, despite this creating a logical contradiction with its official teaching. Its current reforms are further steps in this direction: affirming homosexuality, but not completely, as the full ideal remains heterosexual marriage.

As with premarital sex, the church has made clear that its official teaching is not intended as a hard rule, that it co-exists with the unofficial teaching, that homosexuality should be tolerated, affirmed up to a point. Odd as it may sound, the church’s teaching is a mixture of its official teaching and its nuanced supplementary teaching. Thus the conservatives’ claim to be upholding the traditional teaching of the church is questionable. Yes, they are in tune with the official teaching of the church, but they are at odds with the fuller teaching of the church, which includes the idea that the official teaching should not be rigidly imposed.

 

The church has muddled along in this complicated way for decades. But now the whole approach looks very frail. The church’s leadership insists that the current reforms are not game-changing, just another instance of Anglican pragmatism. But the conservatives refuse to play ball. They insist on treating the official teaching as a rigid rule. They are denying the complexity of the church’s teaching, the fact that it is a mixture of official and unofficial elements. To risk a problematic analogy, they are Shylock, pointing to the letter of the law, demanding their pound of flesh.

It seems to me that the game is up, that the old approach cannot last long. If conservatives reject the old approach to sexual morality, that balances a traditional rule with flexibility, then liberals probably have to abandon it also. Maybe this is for the best. Ultimately the old approach does not allow for the full affirmation of homosexuality, which is now signified by same-sex marriage. The church will surely move to acceptance of same-sex marriage, and that means changing its official teaching.

 The current tussle in Synod is therefore the end of an era. The church will have to develop a new approach, a new teaching on sex and marriage, one that leaves old assumptions and evasions behind. It will be rather embarrassing, but we will have to think out loud about the meaning of sex – promiscuity, pornography, pleasure, the lot. You thought we Anglicans were embarrassing enough for wearing socks with sandals.