The Archbishop of Canterbury resorted to Alastair Campbell’s own communications techniques when trying to explain what is going on in the Church of England over the divisive issue of same-sex marriage.
Appearing on The Rest is Politics podcast this week, Justin Welby told Tony Blair’s old spin doctor that he now has a “better answer” on gay sex and marriage than he did seven years ago, when he told Campbell he was “copping out”.
And certainly it is an answer more in line with what Campbell wants to hear, telling him that “where we’ve come to” is that straight or gay relationships are now fine, as long as they’re “committed”, by which he means a “marriage or civil partnership”.
Welby goes on to claim that he and a “majority” of bishops have “put forward a proposal” whereby people “who have been through a civil partnership or a same-sex marriage” ceremony “should be able to come along to… a church, and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together”.
There’s just one problem with these statements: not one of them is an accurate reflection of Welby’s latest proposals on same-sex relationships. In fact, the proposal that he and the other bishops have set out does not signal they approve of sex outside heterosexual marriage – contradicting what he told Campbell. Neither does it allow for special services for same-sex couples who have got married – again, the opposite of what he said. For one reason or another, Welby has managed to give Campbell and his listeners the impression that the proposed reforms are far more radical than they are.
Last November the latest version of the bishops’ proposals were placed before General Synod, the church’s governing body, and they included a clear statement that “the Church’s doctrine remains” unchanged. “We have been clear that we have no intention of changing that doctrine,” the bishops wrote. “We also note that the Church’s teaching on sexual relations has been treated as being part of the Church’s doctrine of marriage. We are not proposing to change that teaching.”
This is completely at odds with what Welby said on The Rest is Politics, namely that where he and the bishops have now “come to” is that sex in “committed” relationships, whether “straight or gay” is now fine. Did Welby misspeak under pressure? It seems unlikely. Returning to Campbell to discuss this topic was clearly part of the point of going on the podcast and he would have been prepared for his questions. Plus, he gave a similar answer on another recent occasion.
Welby also claimed that under his proposals, “where people have been through a civil partnership or a same-sex marriage… they should be able to come along to… a church and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together”.
But this, too, is at odds with what the bishops’ actual proposals contain. The proposal presented to General Synod in November is at pains to state that it “intentionally does not differentiate between couples who have and who have not entered into a civil same-sex marriage”. This is because the new prayers (known as ‘Prayers of Love and Faith’ or PLF) “are not being offered to be used as a thanksgiving for marriage or a service of prayer and dedication after civil marriage and do not refer to, or take account of, a couple’s civil marital status”.
In other words, the proposed new services may not refer in any way to the fact that the couple have recently got married – even though that is the reason people want the services in the first place.
What’s more, it’s not even true that the service may be “for” the couple, as Welby tells Campbell. Dancing on the head of a pin to avoid having to go through the full church process of introducing contentious new liturgy, the bishops told the synod that the new prayers (which are definitely not to mark the marriage, honest) may only be included as part of an ordinary extra service and not be a special service for the couple akin to a wedding blessing.
You may marvel at the ingenuity of Church of England bishops, who have managed to try to provide a service to bless same-sex marriages by proposing a service which cannot even mention the fact that the couple are married, may not endorse their relationship and may not even say that it is a service “for” the couple. But, constrained by existing church doctrine and unable to change it (the bishops don’t have the votes), they daren’t go any further.
Why then is Welby giving Alastair Campbell the impression that the changes are much more liberal than they really are? Is he just trying to impress the Rest is Politics audience, or is there something more going on?
Most likely, what he has told Campbell – that the C of E is poised to approve same-sex relationships and hold services of blessing after same-sex marriage, neither of which is true – is much closer to what he and the bishops truly want their proposal to be. It’s what they dearly wish they were about to achieve. But they have been unable to deliver that. So instead they have proposed something much weaker: an ordinary extra service, which may not say it is for the couple or mention they are married and which may not express approval of or formally bless their relationship.
You may wonder what the point of it is then. But in reality the expectation from those on both sides of the issue is that the services will in practice do all the things they are not technically allowed to do: they will be presented as services for the blessing of a same-sex marriage and be treated as such by all involved.
This may be exactly what Welby and the bishops want to happen. They want their modest proposals to be misused in this way in churches, as that is what they really wanted to happen in the first place (at least as long as actual same-sex marriage in church is off the table).
Welby’s mischaracterisation of the new services to Campbell is then most likely a manifestation of this wish for the services to be used well beyond the formal constraints technically imposed on them, constraints which Welby and a majority of the bishops don’t really agree with and wish they had the votes to change.
Neither side of the debate is happy with this state of affairs. Liberals are unhappy that if they use the services in the way they want to – the way that Welby is indicating by his comments to Campbell he is actually expecting them to be used – then they will technically be doing so contrary to what the rules around the services say. They’ve been doing this unauthorised for years anyway; what they were after is for such services to be put on a proper, legitimate footing. But this is not what they’ve got.
Conservatives of course are unhappy that services for same-sex couples are being rammed through in a way that technically may not change the church’s doctrine of marriage but which everyone knows will be used as though the doctrine has changed. Welby’s comments feed straight into this suspicion as they confirm that this is exactly what he and the bishops expect and even intend to happen. They want the public to think these are services of blessing for same-sex marriages, even though in order to comply with church doctrine and get them through Synod (and past the lawyers) technically they have had to characterise them as nothing of the sort.
Rev. Dr. Andrew Goddard, who has served on official working groups reviewing the church’s teaching on same-sex relationships, says that Welby’s characterisation of the reforms to Campbell is “either false or is proof that the argument which was presented to Synod to justify introducing ‘standalone services’ next year… was duplicitous”.
Goddard, a proponent of keeping the church’s teaching on marriage as it is, has demanded an urgent “apology and correction” from Welby. He speaks of “the widespread erosion of trust and growing sense of disbelief, betrayal, deception, anger and despair now felt across much of the Church of England” in relation to the Archbishop and the process he is overseeing.
Welby needs to take care that he doesn’t undermine the trust of all sides in this debate, which is already low. Wherever you stand on the underlying issues, no one wants an Archbishop of Canterbury you can’t trust because he says one thing to Alastair Campbell and another in church councils. No one wants an Archbishop – supposedly a Christian role model – who acts like an underhand politician, twisting truths to get a bill through Parliament and telling the public what they want to hear. Justin Welby might impress Tony Blair’s old spin doctor with his new lines, but he’s impressing nobody else.
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