(This is part of the paper circulated in the Jacksonville Diocese recently. I worked with Dr Turner on the Primates' project that produced "To Mend the Net". Here he speaks words that we can all can benefit from, I believe. The full paper is available from the diocese.)
Dr Philip Turner on the real background to the Gene Robinson election:
The Robinson election in fact serves to highlight the primary challenge all the churches in America face; be they Catholic, Orthodox, "mainstream" Protestant, Evangelical, or Charismatic. I speak of the subversion of Christian belief and practice by the logic of autonomous individualism, and their transformation into simulacra. For one should make no mistake! What has happened in ECUSA is not the particular problem of a once (overly) proud denomination. Rather, it provides an exemplary case of the sort of subversion and transformation that, in one way or another, threatens all American's denominations.
To display this point with some clarity, I will freely borrow from the account Alasdair MacIntyre has given of the tradition of liberalism in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The present economic and political cultures of America plainly stem from this tradition, and it is this tradition that currently is bringing all its force to bear (in a hostile way) on more traditional forms of Christian belief and practice. MacIntyre notes that the tradition of liberalism cannot allow for a single notion of good to possess "the public square." Liberal society must remain neutral in respect to the good. What one can express in public are not notions of good but preferences. Of course, some way must be found to order preferences both in respect to individual life and to social policy. No rational way can be found to achieve this goal, however, because there is no common notion of good to which appeal can be made when it comes to sorting out conflicting claims. Thus, the way in which one establishes preference in the public arena, if it cannot be done by force, is by bargaining. Everything, both in respect to private and public life becomes a "trade off." Social life becomes a sort of free trade zone for preferences. All one needs to be able to play the game is the ability to bargain.
There are two things in particular to be noted about this form of social economy. The first is that theories of justice abound. They must for the following reason. To have one's preferences excluded is to have one's rights denied. Then the question arises of how one person's right to his or her preference is to be balanced against a contrary right claimed by someone else. At this point, some theory of justice must be invoked, but in a liberal social economy of preferences, no one theory can establish itself. Theories of justice simply multiply exponentially and interminably. Given this social reality, one can see easily why supporters of Gay rights hold ordination and the blessing of Gay unions to be matters of justice. One can see also why supporters of Gene Robinson hold that his election was above all "a justice issue."
The dominance in America of a liberal social economy also provides another reason for regarding the Robinson election and the permission given for Gay blessings to be more than an Episcopalian anomaly. Within a liberal social economy there comes to be a view of moral agency that gives special significance to sexual preference and sexual satisfaction. The denizens of a social order based upon competing preferences think of themselves not as inhabitants of a pre-established moral order but as individuals who are utterly unique, as selves that have particular personal histories and needs, and as persons who have rights that allow them to express their individuality and pursue their personal well-being within the social world they inhabit. For moral agents who think of themselves as individuals, selves, and persons, sexuality becomes, along with money, both a marker of identity and a primary way of expressing the preferences that define identity.
It is precisely this notion of moral agency and personal identity that makes the Robinson election so understandable. Here is a unique individual, who is a self with a particular history and a person with a right to express his preferences and put his talents to work in the social world he inhabits. To deny him that right on the basis of sexual preference is, at one and the same time, to deny his personal identity. This notion of moral agency also makes understandable why the issues of abortion and euthanasia take their place alongside self-chosen sexual expression as centers of moral controversy both within the churches and without. At the basis of each of these arguments lies the characterization of moral agents as individuals, selves, and persons who have the right to pursue the preferences that provide them with personal identity. In the culture wars that rage over abortion, euthanasia, and sexuality defenders of more traditional Christian teaching and practice often miss the fact that they must confront American culture on a deeper level than any of these specific issues. If they are to be effective, they must take on the very way in which Americans think of themselves as moral agents. The "socio-logic" that stands behind ECUSA's recent action beckons thinking to an even deeper level than the sad history of this Church's search for a distinctive place on the spectrum of America's denominations. It calls Christian thought to confront a perception of moral and social life that runs counter to the very foundations of Christian thought and practice. It raises the question of whether we inhabit a moral universe with an order we are called upon to understand and to which we are required to conform, or whether the moral universe we inhabit is properly the creation of preference pursuing individuals, selves, and persons who create a social world suited to their self-defined goals through an elaborate process of moral bargaining.
The Robinson election in fact manifests the social forces that at present erode the ability of America's denominations to act like churches: that is to say, to form people in a pattern of belief and a way of life which may run against preference but nonetheless accords with what Christians have, through the ages, held to be the truth about God and his intentions for human life.
It is important to recognize these social forces, but it is important as well not to conclude that the recent actions of ECUSA can be adequately explained by the play of these forces alone. Christians through the ages have faced social forces that threaten to compromise the truth they have been given to live and proclaim, but they have not always succumbed to them. To think well about what is happening in ECUSA one must ask why the sirens of modernity have sung so sweetly in ECUSA's ears.
My belief is that a religious rather than historical or sociological answer must, in the end, be given to this question. The English theologian P. T. Forsythe once wrote, "If within us we have nothing above us we soon succumb to what is around us." The history recounted above suggests that the internal life of ECUSA may well lack a transcendent point of reference-one that can serve as a counter balance to the social forces that play upon it. A certain vacuity at the center is suggested also by an analysis of the theology that currently dominates ECUSA's pulpits. The standard sermon in outline runs something like this: "God is love, God's love is inclusive, God acts in justice to see that everyone is included, we therefore ought to be co-actors and co-creators with God to make the world over in the way he wishes."
Here is the theological projection of a society built upon preference-one in which the inclusion of preference within common life is the be all and end all of the social system. ECUSA's God has become the image of this society. Gone is the notion of divine judgment (save upon those who may wish to exclude someone), gone is the notion of radical conversion, gone is the notion of a way of life that requires dying to self and rising to newness of life in conformity with God's will. In place of the complex God revealed in Christ Jesus, a God of both judgment and mercy, a God whose law is meant to govern human life, we now have a God who is love and inclusion without remainder. The projected God of the liberal tradition is, in the end, no more than an affirmer of preferences. This view of God is, furthermore, acted upon by an increasing number of ECUSA's clergy who now regularly invite non-baptized people to share in the Holy Eucharist. It's just a matter of hospitality-of welcoming difference. An inclusive God, it would seem, requires an inclusive sacramental system.
[Note: if Turner is right - and I think he is so - then we are all at fault and not least those who think that the only real thing wrong with the ECUSA is its adoption of the gay agenda. Its various innovations of the last fifty years all together are examples of the spirit that Turner so well explains. Reform and renewal are needed root and branch in American Anglicanism, and one branch is the gay issue - but there are a lot of others as well!]
The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon M.A., D.Phil. (Oxon)
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