What is in Kelvin's Head?

Well-meaning but homophobic

26/08/2014

A week has now passed since the Guardian published the following snippet commenting on the twitter exchange that I had with the Director of Communications for the Church of England after Vicky Beeching came out.

The Church of England’s director of communications communicated himself into a corner last week, after a well-meaning but homophobic tweet about Vicky Beeching, the gospel singer who’s just come out as gay. The Rev Arun Arora tweeted that Vicky was welcome in church because “we are all broken”. In a cringe-inducing exchange with Kelvin Holdsworth, provost of St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow, @RevArun defended his comparison of Vicky’s sexuality to the brokenness of humanity. Holdsworth tweeted: “It would be racist to say that black people are welcome in church because all are broken. It is homophobic to suggest same re LGBT.” The the reverend went strangely quiet.

Now that the dust has settled a little bit it seems to me to be worthwhile just reflecting on what happened.

It strikes me first of all that the phrase “well-meaning but homophobic” is perfectly judged. I’ve always said that I knew that Arun Arora had no intention of causing the offense that he caused. The trouble is, that lack of awareness seems these days to be rather culpable for anyone, never mind someone who is in charge of communications for a large and supposedly caring institution. Not knowing how offensive it was is worse in a way than being fully aware.

“Well-meaning but homophobic” – doesn’t just capture last week’s unfortunate tweet though. It perfectly captures the way that the Church of England in particular and the churches in general might be viewed by the general public. Well, actually, many people think that the churches are not even well-meaning these days but there’s still many in society who would acknowledge Christianity as a force for good. Many of those people are bewildered at how the churches seem to find themselves so badly led on this issue. “Well-meaning but homophobic” seems to me to describe something that is more complex than a simple lack of awareness of what can be said by an individual in polite society these days. It seems to me to describe something more systemic – more institutional than merely personal.

I was trying to explain the complexity of the situation in the church to someone the other night. After listening to me talk for some time about why some churches are progressive on the issue and some positively harmful, after listening to theological explanations, after listening to sociological explanations he simply shrugged and said, “Yes, but it is still us who get queerbashed in the end”.

And he was right.

Let’s just focus on the piece from the Guardian for a moment again. The Guardian reports that I compared a particular situation involving someone coming out as gay to a situation dealing with race.

Let me just do that again. What do you think would have happened if the Church of England had been reported by a national newspaper as having a Director of Communications who was tweeting things that were “well meaning but racist”?

I hope that a week later there would have been clear statements that such behaviour was unacceptable. I hope that there would have been an apology. I might also hope that there would be an advert for a new Director of Communications being hastily written for the Church Times. I hope that it would have been completely unacceptable.

I ask these questions fully aware that things are not all sweetness and light for those who do happen to be black and in the church.

But I ask, respectfully and persistently why things are different when the issue is sexuality to when the issue is race? I don’t forget that people have used the bible plenty of times to justify racist behaviour, so I know it isn’t just that the bible says it should be so.

Well-meaning and homophobic.

The Director of Communications of the Church of England was described last week in a national newspaper as tweeting something that was well-meaning and homophobic and of course, nothing has happened since.

There has been no statement from the Archbishop of Canterbury. None from the Archbishops’ Council. Nothing from those who run the national institutions of the Church of England. Nothing at all.

And what’s more, most people wouldn’t expect there to be any reaction at all.

And that’s why I find myself wondering whether another analogy between race and LGBT issues might continue to be helpful.

Very many gay people would say that “well-meaning but homophobic” behaviour from individuals and corporate bodies contributes to getting people dead.

Remember when the Metropolitan Police accepted that their behaviour over Stephen Lawrence amounted to “institutional racism”.

Why do I find myself thinking that “well-meaning but homophobic” behaviour on the part of whole denominations amounts to nothing less than institutional homophobia?

arun arora, Church of England, Director of Communications, LGBT

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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