By Briane K. Turley
Special to VirtueOnline
www.virtueonline.org
8/7/2008
You really do have to hand it to them: leftist Anglicans keep on saying the darnedest things! Understandable when you consider the fact that as left-leaning theologians grow short on substance, the air around them begins to waft thick with analogic smokescreens. When the smokescreens clear-their audiences generally are not all that impressed-a fair number of theological revisionists throw what looks a great deal like a tantrum. At this point, the name calling, either explicit or implicit, begins.
It will come as no great surprise that a favorite weapon in the general leftist arsenal is the "you are being a racist" card. I must confess that in the current debate over the authority of scripture and human sexuality, I find it a mite entertaining that the once tried-and-true race card has proven so hard to play. That is, when the vast majority of your biblically-orthodox opponents happen to be economically dispossessed people of color, the typically white, well-monied left's recourse to accusations of racism comes across altogether cockamamy. After all, even the US Congressional Black Caucus has rejected the sweeping generalizations that equate the cause of homosexual unions with the Civil Rights movement.
Recently, a lot of left-leaning bishops got together in the United Kingdom for their big decennial luau, called the Lambeth Conference. Even the absence of more than 270 of the most conservative, mainly African, bishops did little to help their case. After just a couple of Indaba sessions, the gentrified Episcopalians woke up, smelled the coffee (perhaps mainly Kenyan?), and at long last recognized the irony of their predicament.
Not wishing to look silly, they jettisoned their generic racist diatribe in favor of a more specific challenge, one that goes something like this: "Those who oppose our hermeneutic and our agenda are akin to the proslavery advocates of old." Mind you, leftist intellectuals lap this stuff up. I have sat in conference rooms when academics pull out the proslavery analog and have gazed about me as scores of well-educated clergy and theologians nod in agreement while filling the air with "tsk, tsk" sounds.
This accusation floats in these settings because no one sitting in the conference room currently holds or likely ever has held proslavery sentiments, but if you can successfully hang such a label on a closeted conservative who managed to sneak into the room, the shame will drive him or her to the mat. As it was in the days of old, under Stalin, those individuals in Eastern Europe who resisted tyranny, consistently denying they were mentally ill, were considered the sickest citizens of all. So, few people enjoy the prospects of standing before a rarefied group of scowling Episcopal clergy and stammering, "Please believe me, I really don't think my opinion in this matter bears the slightest resemblance to proslavery advocacy!"
Just last week Dr. Richard Burridge, Dean of Kings College London, delivered a lecture (one that he's been delivering for a long time now) before a crowd of bishops seeking refuge from the grueling Indabas titled "Being Biblical? Slavery, Sexuality, and the Inclusive Community." As in the past, Burridge opened his lecture with the appearance of objectivity and evenhandedness. Burridge approaches his presentation with such balance that at times, one wonders what his argument actually is or if he is in fact arguing anything at all.
He generously informs his audience that facile linkages between orthodox Anglicanism-represented mainly by his primary target, the Anglican Mainstream-and proslavery sentiment "are too simplistic." Yet what puzzles, is that Burridge then sets out gobs of evidence, which suggest that there just might, in fact, really be a linkage. After twice reading his speech, I got a distinct impression that he wants the orthodox Anglican Mainstream crowd to humble themselves enough to admit the possibility that they MAY actually be every bit as mistaken as slaveholders and proslavery advocates. Revisionists, he seems to urge, need to be open too. At least, they need to listen to the voices of the orthodox Anglicans in the same way that abolitionists needed to hear the stories of slave traders. At least I think that is what he telling his audiences:
Thus, if there was biblical study driving the abolitionists, it was a result of reading and re-reading their Bibles in the light of that listening to the experience of former slaves and slave-traders.
Here in the States, we'd probably ask Burridge to put his "nickel down" and tell us, straight out, what he really thinks because his trajectory is not all that easy to follow. I may be mistaken, but it is my impression that his lecture is deliberately vague and obfuscatory-I mean, I know it is vague and obfuscatory but can only assume that it is deliberately so. So let me at least try to "put a nickel" down for him. I read him as saying that while the Anglican Mainstream means well, the organization comes across as some sort of modern-day plantation owner. On the other hand, the organization's intellectual counterweight, the Inclusive Church Network, represents abolitionism, and while it may fall short in its willingness to listen to the Anglican Mainstream members, the ICN nevertheless approaches the summum bonum.
Long ago, I figured out that when my students shifted from strong, active voice sentences into passive constructions, they were usually trying to cover up their ignorance of a specific topic. Burridge makes good use of passive voice sentences in his lecture in order to cover what I believe in fairness to be an average grasp of his historical topic and its demographics while making efficient use of these deficits to shame his opponents.
Burridge declares, "But sadly, the caricature that the slavers were just selfish capitalists and the abolitionists were the only biblical Christians around is just not true. If anything, it was the other way around. Slavery was viewed as a 'biblical' doctrine, supported by the laws of God and human law, while the abolitionists were seen as dangerous liberals, preaching sedition and revolution."
Well, yes and no. There is at least a measure of truth to be found in this statement, but the passive makes it impossible for anyone to sort through the complexities of who, precisely, thought what. For example, the history of proslavery sentiment in the United States is far more complicated than even Burridge might care to admit.
Let's consider one significant example. It is not true that on the eve of the American Civil war that many Christians in the South were-as almost everyone seems to believe these days-still arguing that the Bible supported slavery on the basis of texts such as Ephesians 6. By this I mean that the proslavery position did not represent a dominant evangelical ethos that could trace its origins to colonial America. Among the southern churches, the pro-slavery argument represented a radical shift in ecclesiological policy, a capitulation to the dominant elitist culture-and only after slavery became highly profitable with the advent of the cotton gin in 1793.
The earliest evangelical Christians like the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists generally opposed the southern US slave system in the eighteenth century and were bound by church teachings to withhold church membership from white slave owners. Consequently, many Virginia Baptists and Methodists faced persecution at the hands of their "enlightened" well-monied Anglican and unchurched neighbors because they actively protested slave ownership on biblical grounds (tar and featherings were commonplace). As one eighteenth-century southerner opined, it was because of the antislavery sentiments that evangelicals "weare (sic) held in contempt by most of the people." (Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross, 17)
It was not until the early nineteenth century that an insidious cultural captivity driven to a great extent (sad to say) by a gentrified Episcopalian society gained momentum. Even northern Episcopalians like the family of Bishop Mark Anthony deWolfe Howe could be counted among the most active slave traders in the world at the time. Having grown weary of the punishment they received, southern evangelicals capitulated to largely economic incentives of their surrounding culture. After 1800, the evangelicals began, gradually at first, allowing slave owners membership in their congregations.
The widespread proslavery argument that emerged especially after 1830 was largely an innovative thread, a "new thing" in what until then had been, until that time, the evangelical anti-slavery fabric. This point was underscored by the literary work of countless northern U.S. abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, leaders of slave rebellions like the Methodist pastor, Denmark Vesey and, later, Civil Rights activists who relied heavily on the biblical texts to turn the tables against the specious biblical pronouncements of white southern preachers.
Burridge's cryptic thesis seems to be that thoughtful Christians must be willing "to hear the biblical teachings within the context of an open and inclusive community-and this applies to sexuality as much as to slavery and to apartheid." Mixed parallels aside (sexuality is a biologically determined state-for the left-or a behavioral choice-for the right-, whereas slavery and apartheid are institutions of oppression), what Burridge really seems to assert is that Christians who teach that same-sex intercourse is sinful probably relate closely to proslavery advocates while those who reject this premise are akin to abolitionists.
In all of this, Burridge misses the point that, to a great extent, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white, gentrified Anglicans were telling Africans and Western evangelicals what was right for them and were striking out in anger when the Africans and local evangelicals protested that they had it all wrong.
So here we are again: the gentrified, Anglican West is, once again, preaching a new thing, and their African counterparts are not buying it. Don't look for the tensions to subside any time soon. Only time will tell if the Western evangelicals will succumb to the defrockings, disfranchisements, and other forms of punishment they currently endure.
---Briane K Turley is Rector of Church of the Holy Spirit Anglican in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He received his Ph.D. in Modern European and American Religious History from the University of Virginia and was the recipient of two Fulbright Lectureship Awards during his career as a Professor at West Virginia University. He is author of two books, including Religion in World History (Routledge 2006)
Check out the following links: http://www.westminster-abbey.org/events/lectures-seminars/symes/31387
http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8786
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