Holy Ridiculous

Well now, the Church of England, that static old monolith, has vetoed women bishops, prompting the current archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to state the institution has ‘some explaining to do it’ (though considering the Church’s explanation of how the world came to be, I wouldn’t be all that anxious to hear it… unless I was depressed and needed a good laugh) and everyone’s favourite PM, David Cameron, to tell the CofE to ‘get on with it’ (which is a bit rich considering how much women are under-represented in his government and cabinet at the moment).

Why this should surprise anybody, however, is beyond me. A woman was responsible for The Fall after all. That another woman was also responsible for apparently carrying the earthly incarnation of God into the world – which you think might have gone at least some way towards mitigating the subsequently disastrous table choices of she-who-fancied-an-apple – is by-the-by.

The Church also has (shock, horror!) some pretty rigid ideas about gay marriage too, again to the oddly surprising disbelief and confusion of a generally inclusive and incredulous populace. To be honest, it’s not so much the backward edicts of the Church which I find surprising but rather the reactions and demands of those hearing those edicts. The Church is misogynistic and homophobic? Of course it is. It has been for centuries.

It does absolutely no good to insist that the Church ordains female bishops or allows same-sex couples to join in wedlock beneath the roofs of its solemn stone prayer-huts; it does no good to tell the Church to get with the times… because the Church is about tradition, about standing utterly stock-still in the face of progress; the Church is about absolutes, the Absolute in fact, and the thing about absolutes is, well, they’re absolute, aren’t they? They’re immutable. Change, to put it another way, is simply not in the nature of absolutes.

So, basically, asking the Church to change to fit the modern world is more or less asking it to change its entire belief system. And why would it do that? To do so would be to admit that its whole existence has been entirely pointless. When you’ve staked absolutely everything on tenets laid down by a giant, bearded magic pixie in the sky… hell, when you’ve staked everything on the existence of a giant, bearded magic pixie in the sky, and that said magic pixie made everything in existence, you’d better hold on to that concept for dear life and certainly never, ever, let go. Especially if it’s made you rich and powerful into the bargain, too – though, of course, that’s not as important as the actual Word of the Pixie, Who is Love… unless you’re gay… or a woman with ideas of her own.

Anyway…

That the Church of England does not reflect today’s culture is not a reason to force it to conform to that culture, to drag it kicking and screaming from millennia-old Mesopotamian sands to the bright lights of the 21st Century; it is, in fact, a very good reason to leave it very much behind. What this whole thing illustrates is not that the Church must redefine itself to better represent modern culture, but that modern culture has evolved beyond the Church; that modern culture is, in truth, much better equipped emotionally and intellectually to really exercise inclusivity and equality and love than the Church ever has been or ever will be.

Faith is one thing, certainly, but the Church is a spiritual cul-de-sac. The institution represents no-one but itself (although it has brainwashed enough people and has a good enough publicity department to make that seem far from the truth). The Magic Pixie’s advocate on Earth struggles to make itself relevant; its various branches forbidding condoms in countries in the grip of AIDS, forbidding abortions, forbidding this and forbidding that in the face of utter incomprehension from those who expect an establishment apparently built on understanding to actually show some.

It also follows, then, that such an unrepresentative, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic institution should no longer have so much say in the running of the State either. If religion is a matter of personal conviction, it has no place influencing legislation over so many personalities with very different convictions. There is a reason for Church and State separation. Government is for the people (well, technically, it should be, but that’s an argument for another day); the Church is for the Pixie, who demands you bow down to His Almighty Will lest you spend the rest of eternity burning in the pits of Hell. You see the difference? The Pixie by the way (and let’s take a brief but important moment to remember that’s just the one Pixie, out of a whole host of others, that’s favoured by the UK’s purple-robed pontificators), currently holds some 26 seats in the Parliamentary House of Lords. That, most definitely, is something that does have to change.

So then, just to reiterate one last time, in simple terms, it isn’t time for the Church to modernise; it’s time for it to fade away into history… where it belongs.

Relevant Magazine 2009