BRAVO ZULU Ruth Gledhill

Yesterday, the Diocese of Los Angleles welcomed Diane Jardine Bruce and Mary Glasspool as their new suffragan bishops. Normally suffragan bishops don't attract that much attention - especially internationally. Unless, of course, one of them has sleeping arrangements that fall prey to the particular obsessions of the Anglican Right.

Ruth Gledhill has written a brilliant article in The Times of London in which she challenges those who falsely inflate the sexuality issue and make it more important than real doctrines like the Incarnation or the Resurrection.

Some years ago, at the Greenbelt Christian rock festival that takes place every August Bank Holiday near Cheltenham, someone close to the Archbishop of Canterbury told me that a person’s view on homosexuality was now what defined them on the Christian spectrum. What this person of considerable authority and intellect was saying was that it was no longer possible to be both pro-gay and evangelical.

In other words, the infighting over homosexuality means that for the 77 million Anglicans worldwide, more important than the Resurrection, the Crucifixion, the Virgin Birth and the Trinity is what one person does in bed with another.

snip

Sexuality figures nowhere in the creeds. It is not mentioned in the church’s liturgies. When godparents bear witness to a baby’s baptism they do not swear to help to raise the infant as straight.

BRAVO ZULU Ruth.