At the risk of inflaming discussion – oh what fun –  I want to suggest that the Church of England and other Christian groups are doing a poor job of discussing marriage and gender issues for reasons they seem unable to recognise and there is a different kind of debate which needs to open up.

First, English Churchpeople feel they are defending marriage between one man and one woman as an institution. Why? Marriage around the world seems to be a life stage reality for over 80% of the world’s population. We include co-habitation, which has to operate like marriage, and serial marriage which is failed repetition, but marriage is the basic model worldwide. The institution seems fairly dominant. Billions live it and it has obvious social and sexual weight which will not go away. We could defend the fact that the sea is wet, but to feel under siege while doing it is not rational.

Of course, the Churchpeople we are discussing would point out that in “advanced societies” (oh the error of that idea) marriage is often later, incomplete, casual, disliked or very mixed up. “Singleness” or being “unattached”, both slightly slighting ideas, are more common. More to the point, gay marriage, transgender relationships and all kinds of other relational arrangements are appearing on the scene, and we Christians, we conservative Christians, orthodox Christians, need to defend marriage against this secular incursion into Christianity, otherwise the Christian faith, the orthodox Christian faith is fatally compromised.

On the other hand, and Churchpeople usually have two hands, Christians are aware that they have not been nice to gay, transgender and other non-orthodox people. They have been put beyond the pale, outside, seen as sinners and badly treated, when the culture as a whole has become more tolerant and retreated from a kind of Victorian moralism which Churchpeople still seem trapped in. More than this, these non-orthodox people are often good Christians, people with thought and integrity and we love them.

So, the English Churchpeople have two hands flapping. One is defending marriage between a man and a woman, and the other is inclusive, involves new patterns of respect and welcome, and suggests there needs to be patterns of revisionism in traditional views of marriage and gender.

This little study suggests that there are errors within the Churchpeople on both sides and also in wider, what is called secular, society, on both sides, and four wrongs do not make a right. First, we look at the two Churchpeople positions.

The orthodox Churchpeople hold a view of marriage which is either sacramental or moral. The sacramental view focusses in church weddings, vows, indissolubility and the NT simile between marriage and Christ and the Church. It moves from marriage as a human institution to a churchy view. Given perhaps three billion married people live in marriages outside a Christian validation, this becomes a limited perspective. In practice it also becomes subcultural surrounding marriage with a load of church accretions among the worst of which was the subjugation of women in line with Jewish and Christian patterns (as well as Islamic, Hindu and other cultures) Marriage is not a sacrament and the sacrament idea is significantly over-egged by Churchpeople. But marriage is also not “moral”. It is actually social, a relationship, an institution, with a complex social character. To see this clearly, we need to re-examine morality.

Churchianity became moralist in two ways. First it became the Church’s thing to do morals, especially personal morals, while the state did politics and the capitalists did business. It was a kind of division of labour  in many European establishments. The moral people dressed in black. The Churchpeople were quite good as morals, mainly because the Bible is. Faithfulness works. Honouring parents does, even when they are failures. Honesty is the best policy and so on. So, there is good stuff here. But being in charge of morals is dangerous for any group. This is obvious when we look at Jesus’ radical critique of the moralists of his time who took on themselves the task of applying morals, the Mosaic Law, to the people – the Pharisees. They, and the law were taken seriously by Jesus, but his critique was devastating at a number of different levels. They were finnicky and missed the important points. They were behavioural and rule focussed rather than structural and strategic in what was wrong. They did not see things wholly before God. They did not see that all were sinners and tended to self-righteousness and they did not understand the centrality of love or that they needed to be born again. And, by the way, they did not practice what they preached and were hypocrites. Churchpeople may not be Pharisees, and there were many good Pharisees like Nicodemus, but the institutional danger is there, and has surfaced in a number of ways around sex and gender issues in the churches.

 The second form of moralism arises from epistemological issues. It grew out of the emergence of the social sciences in the 19^th century. They, in order to validate their scientific status, adopted a range of epistemologies which were supposedly neural – empiricism, positivism, materialism, causal theory, behaviourism, historicism and others. Their academic success belied the fact that these theories of scientific knowledge were not neutral and did not allow the theory to be formed as it should. Their foundations were inadequate, partly because they were usually self-refuting or inconsistent, but especially because all human activity is normative and because they were supposed to be value-free. Gradually this modernist neutrality broke down in the late 20^th century, but not before it has dominated universities and the human disciplines for more than a century. Crucially, theology, which became the only obvious Christian discipline in this view of the social sciences took up ethics/morality as its specialism, because the social sciences could not easily move from an “is” to an “ought”. Many Christian ethicists appeared, for whom the spectrum of knowledge was theology/ethics/world. The main problem in this vast act of cultural formation was that Christianity became cut off from understanding all the areas of life – politics, economics, race, nationhood, marriage, sex and gender – to name but a few, which actually fill the Old and New Testaments. Christianity addresses the whole of life before God and Churchianity only takes up a limited space. Ethics was thus disengaged from understanding all these areas of life, including gender, family, sexuality and marriage. Christian became amateurs.

These two failures led to the brittle and inadequate Church responses which have dominated recent decades and prevented an obvious Christian understanding and critique of what has been going on. Churches bought into moralism and some of its self-righteousness and they became “ethicists” carefully defining what is right and wrong either in a situational relativism or a rationalist orthodoxy. Recently, the Churches have tried to bridge this gap, as with the recent LLF initiative and studies, but it has no consensus of understanding around it and perhaps we need to see the big picture problem in which it is set.

The conservative Church people appear to be defending marriage as some kind of moral absolute (never trust the word “absolute”). They would die for it, or at least leave the Church of England for it. But of course, heterosexual marriage is not a “moral absolute”; it is an institution overwhelmingly normal around the world, which is facing attempts at gender redefinition, but which involves human fallibility at all kinds of levels on a wide range of issues. The problem is that Jesus did not seem to have any problems with human fallibility. He welcomed prostitutes, traitors, nutters, thieves, betrayers, aliens and scum into the Kingdom so that they could begin living in relation to God and on God’s terms, because all are equally important before God. And then he addressed them with a range of principles which opened up change through lives centred on God. Obviously, for all of these different people their subsequent journey would be complex, except for the thief on the cross; he just had to die. Yet, as the Gospels make clear converting to God had consequences for issues surrounding sex and gender. Sexual chastity, caring, cherishing, honouring one another and all the characteristics of love are there and are good for us. The tone for example of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians are pastoral and faith filled. They go for general principles. Let us dwell for a moment with that word pastoral. It is leading people out to feed on good food and grow, very different from the Phariseeism Paul has left behind. For example, he takes the Corinthian Christians through a case of incest into restored relationships. The conclusions of Conservative Christians are often fine, part of a rich pietist and holiness tradition, but when they are cast in a moralist mode, rather than in terms of social and pastoral understanding, they still miss the point and are disastrously tainted by a citadel mentality and somehow are out of touch. What are we to make of this?

Well, first of all, we face the fact that generations have departed from Christianity in the UK. They have not remotely thought about God, read the Bible, understood Christianity, been converted, see their lives daily in relation to God or live as Christians. A few percent go to churches. More important the BBC, newspapers, political parties, the media, the commercial sector, the educational and university systems, popular culture and consumption have deliberately marginalised Christianity for six or seven decades. It is not sinister, though it has often been unfair, and a lot of Christians have been sidelined for their faith. But in Nazi and Fascist regimes, in the USSR, in China, mildly in India and throughout the Islamic Middle East Christians are being persecuted in this supposedly modern world. Britain does not face this kind of persecution, but the outcome of people wanting to live their lives their way and not wanting the church to tell them how to live, for they, too, have swallowed a moralistic version of Christianity. Obviously, empirically, British people are not Christian.

It’s not even complicated. We have Boris committing adultery all over the place and producing kids here and there, and he does not want to go to church and be told to repent, although, of course, no bishop in a pointy hat would be so direct. Adultery and fornication is fairly widespread and so lots of people do not go to church for the same reason. Often too, they do not understand what happens in church; I too do not and I’ve been going for decades. The church has been docked in the sacred, a separated arena of incomprehensibility, which normal life walks round, except for a few million who know what the Christian faith actually is in some way or another.

But, I am goading you. We are talking about the Church again. What about the non-church ninety per cent? What do they believe? Of course, they largely believe nothing. They are secular non-believers, without faith. That is the official version, a state statement of faith in secular France. Yet, of course, that is fundamentally not true. That is the fiction. Everyone lives by a set of beliefs, views, a weltanschauung, their light, their thing, and the overwhelming faith in the late 20^th century and now is in the individual, myself, to do it my way, to be happy, consume, be rich, be a success, a celebrity or just choose what I do when. We live in ego time. Consumption, preached by millions of “you owe it to yourself” ads, dominates much of this self-realisation. This consumption moves from bought things to experiences and states of being, but the self is central. It is a manipulated idol which has dominated public culture in our lifetimes. A load of corrupt priests worshipping Mammon use the ego to keep their money-making shows on the road, at least until Coronavirus.  “I did it my way” plays as the coffin slides out of view. Liberalism is the self in politics. Rights is the self in law, and utility and maximisation in economics. In popular philosophy, kids are constantly urged to “be themselves” without questioning what that self can be. It is so dominant that few dare to contest it. Self is what the British worship, however difficult that might be.

But it has probably, and this is where the debate begins, failed on an enormous scale in the West and elsewhere in intimate relationships. Of course, we now say, divorce, serial monogamy and multiple partner sex is “good”, because people want it for themselves and so it must be. A bit of romanticism hangs round stupendously extravagant wedding events, but marriage is about individuality and happiness. Except a lot of people are not happy in their relationships. Say 50% of US first marriages end in divorce and 40% plus in the UK. Subsequent marriages are more divorce prone and millions cohabit formally or informally so that they can break up with less fuss, because the relationship is likely to fail. Serial relationships without cohabiting are normal, and then, as we say, people move on. The great liberal consensus, dominant in all our institutions, does not allow this to be questioned. Indeed, in sociology, studying this stuff, the liberal individualism remains so sovereign and unquestioned that this cannot be failure.

But it is, often with serious damage of great significance, say in well over half of all adult modern intimate relationships. And all the other relationships will probably have a few serious problems as well. Millions are rejected, hurt, experience relationships which do not work, cruelty and domestic violence or know the inability of shared living. The most toxic forms have been brought into the open. Gender studies have shown that men have special problems, but the contributions of women to broken and abusive relationships are now appearing. All this occurs when couples have money, holidays, cars, treats and small families compared with Victorian families with many children, work down the pit and a day washing and drying clothes was a far greater pressure. It is relational failure off the charts, unquestioned, not circumstantial and of deep damage. Millions have retreated into isolation, game playing and as we now say, mental ill-health.

The generational outcome is similarly bleak. If, and this is part of the Christian debate, children “need” two parents, man and woman, who love one another to bring them up, then actually their lives a bleak. Many are being reared by single parents. Many individualised parents leave their kids to be brought up by social media. Parental levels of child contact can often be measured in minutes a week, and many children experience embittered relationships among adults and have to negotiate their upbringing. What sociologists used to call “socialisation”, a suitably secular term, is often a jungle loosely held together by school. We simply do not know what the outcome of this deep cultural change will be.

So, and this is the obvious Christian point, this direction in western culture – so strong that in the States supposedly Christian people back the arch narcissist Trump, want guns, the individual right to deny virus lockdown behaviour, and to do everything their way – fails because the idol, the god Self, will not replace God the Creator of all human life so that we love our neighbour as ourselves. Further, worshipping the self is just silly, about as reliable as trying to ride a rabbit. Jesus, as always, puts his finger directly on the pulse by requiring us to die to self. He confronts the idol and buries it. Why? Because self-worship is toxic, and loving the neighbour, the spouse, the child, the enemy requires massive ego shrinkage. Western liberal individualist culture has goofed. All that enigmatic Christian stuff about being meek, humble, repenting, poor in spirit and a sinner actually cuts it in life. We all get ourselves so wrong every day,we need resetting before God. We need to follow Jesus, not Sinatra. Individualism is no way to run the world, and we have not even mentioned global warming, wars, self-worshipping dictators, failed celebrities, addiction or being overweight. So, the big cultural debate needs to happen. This is where our intimate relational problems come from.

But, you rightly say, you have gone round the houses and ignored what you are supposed to be talking about – contemporary gender relations LGBT – and the church. You may say this because you want to ignore the big point. Now we need to unpick this Churchpeople polarisation. The gay movement has partly been defined in terms of being gay or lesbian and therefore needing the individual rights which they have lacked. This pitch is, in part, a biological formulation and obviously cast in terms of individual rights, for those are the terms of late western culture. Our concern is not to attack rights, or people’s self-identification – except to say that none of us in Christian terms is defined by our sexuality but by our full personhood before God and the word sex was only invented in the late 19^th century. Rather, we can question whether social experience, rather than genetics or biology is not much more important in all human formation and social development including gender relationships.

When we do this, the shallow positions on all sides of the debate are exposed. There is the immediate point that throughout history gay communities have obviously been related to sexual segregation – whether in ancient Greece, Egypt, Islamic groups, public schools, Kings College, Cambridge or celibate priests. It is in part not a genetic condition, but a formed one. And here we look more generally at all of us. We do not fully understand the deep formative effects of parental relations – between parents and towards children – on gender and sexual formation in the next generation. Again, those whose growth is centred on, or thwarted by, by one parent or adult are likely to have gender issues later. Further, sexual experience, like all experience, forms all of us for better and worse, and people are induced into prostitution, immature marriage, required celibacy and promiscuous relationships in gay and straight contexts. Yet again, trauma, bullying, rows, defective and controlling friendships, alienation, racism, school, neighbourhood, family are problematic for most of the population in many different ways. Again, tribes of race, class, education, faith and gender have their own powerful, but false forms of validation which shape gender and prevent us loving our neighbours as ourselves. Now, too, many self-serving and even hateful social media channels are spreading destructive stuff. Finally, the journey of the self, centred on the self, leads millions of us into alienation, self-pity and isolation. It is amazing that secular sociology, supposedly value-free, has gone along with its own liberal cultural milieux with such unself-critical abandon while these issues pile up in our culture. All of us, therefore face a range of issues which are defeating people in their intimate lives and gender and sexual identity is enmeshed in that. That needs acknowledging and when it is done a range of issues can be discussed with trust and for the good Especially, we realise that ego worship is both a gay and straight issue, which distorts the discussion of both..

But equally these issues expose the silly polarisations of Churchpeople on gender issues. We have focussed on a “Straight-Gay” polarisation of the truth, and ignored the vast range of relational issues across and within generations which result from the selfish ideology of individualism. We have strained out the gnat and swallowed the camel, as someone once said. Christianity is about living with God through being educated by and recentred on Christ. It therefore involves dying to self, and that is the great antithesis of our age. This is great good news. To focus, with warped understanding, on the gender thing as the necessary defence of orthodoxy, while ignoring adultery, capitalism, slavery, excess, hypocrisy, status, the hoarding of wealth and self validation is a perverse understanding of the New Testament and the big picture of the human condition. It is time to wake up and get things in perspective, folks. There is a world culture out there going to pieces.

Of course, when the dust settles, we will find that faithful marriage, gender mutuality, sexual chastity, a meek economic life, the importance of children, recognising suffering, patience, repeated forgiveness and all the other things present in the teachings of Christ are wise and not easily reached in one generation. We will rediscover parenting and generations will heal. We will learn why we have to love others more than ourselves. We will be strong enough to be weak. The false modernisms of progress, neutral science, controlling the environment, personality and celebrity culture, happiness, self-fulfillment, success and failure, consumption and ego-centric choice will drop away. Both the respect of people with varying sexualities and the holiness of marriage will be part of the journey of the two billion Christians walking with Christ as we set about saving the planet from the egos, our egos, which have been let rip across the globe from the pseudo-Christian west. Nobody throws stones in Christ’s Kingdom, but we have scarcely started naming the big truths of our age, despite having the best teacher ever and realising we are still growing up…