Where’s the Science? A Conversation with the Presiding Bishop

From the Anglican Communion Institute:

Written by Dr. Jacqueline Jenkins Keenan

Tuesday, 15 January 2008

In August of 2007, we posted on the ACI site an essay by Dr. Jacqueline Jenkins Keenan. (Why Theology Should Precede Change ) In this essay, Dr. Keenan provided an overview of a number of recent scientific studies questioning the claims made by many that there is a biological basis to homosexuality that renders it an immutable condition. These claims have also been made by some leaders in the Episcopal Church as part of their defense of the church's affirmation of homosexual unions. They were made quite formally by the official response of TEC to the Anglican Communion's request for an explanation of the American church's reasoning in pressing for such affirmation, a response contained in the report To Set Our Hope On Christ. Dr. Keenan's essay, therefore, stood as a direct challenge to at least one important aspect of TEC's argument offered to the rest of the Communion. Over the past few months, Dr. Keenan has attempted to gain clarity regarding the Presiding Bishop's own understanding of the "science" behind her support for homosexual unions. The main part of this correspondence is printed below. We note that, some days after the exchange the exchange copied here (and some other brief emails), the Presiding Bishop's office requested that her letter to Dr. Keenan be kept "private". This after-the-fact request is one Dr. Keenan and the ACI have struggled to evaluate. The public nature of the correspondence was noted from the beginning, both in the general terms and copied recipients in the original letter, and later explicitly in an email. Only several days after sending her response did the PB's office - and not she herself - ask that her letter not be shared with others. We are now, furthermore, in a situation where the PB has gone before the public herself, criticizing others in the Communion for a lack of willingness to discuss these kinds of matters openly. Having weighed these factors, and given the importance of the subject and, frankly, its unproblematic content - in which nothing personal, pastoral, or inherently secretive is being communicated - we have decided to go forward with the originally communicated plan to share these concrete discussions about this difficult subject with the people who need and deserve to follow such conversations - the people of the church. "The Episcopal Church lives in a society that values transparency, increasingly values transparency, in all kinds of operations, not just within the church. To have other parts of the Communion express distress at having to have conversations about sexuality, is certainly understandable in terms of different contexts, yet that is where this church has felt led to be and felt led to have conversation, to bring these issues out into the public sphere where we can do public theologizing about them." - Presiding Bishop Schori in a January 1, 2008 interview with the BBC.