The publication of the Church of England’s Gloucester Report on homosexuality by the Anglican Board of Social Responsibility in 1979 as Homosexual Relationships: A Contribution to Discussion marked a turning point for many Anglican evangelicals.59 This was the Church’s first attempt at official guidance on homosexuality since the 1950s, when it was still criminalised. It was dogged by controversy and in the event it was not officially adopted, leaving the Church once again without official guidance on the issue. The Board (which included the evangelical and future founding member of Reform David Holloway amongst its members) was sharply divided in its response, taking the extreme step of appending its highly critical ‘observations’ to the published version of the Report prepared by its own working group, which although relatively conservative was clearly not conservative enough for some.60
The Report declared that further discernment was necessary on the appropriate way of life for gays, as total prohibition of sexual activity and explicit recognition of the validity of homosexual relationships were both seen
59 Similar controversy surrounded the Methodist report A Christian Understanding of Human Sexuality, published in the same year, which was even more liberal – urging for homosexual relationships to be judged on the same criteria as heterosexual ones. It was attacked by the evangelical President of Congress Donald English and sent back for further work. Sean Gill (ed.), The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement: Campaigning for Justice, Truth and Love (London:
Cassell, 1998), 40.
60 It upheld traditional teaching, saw homosexuality as a departure from the natural heterosexual order (meaning that some discriminatory practices might be legitimate), and asserted that marriage was only for heterosexuals. General Synod Board for Social
Responsibility, Homosexual Relationships: A Contribution to Discussion (London: Church Information Office, 1979), 20, 37, 49, 52, 55-‐7.
as mistakes. Clergy, however, were not at liberty to engage in any homosexual sexual relationships, and any within them should resign.61 Where it created most disquiet amongst evangelicals was in its handling of scripture. A
hermeneutic of suspicion was implicitly applied to scripture, in which moral teaching was assumed not to be capable of a straightforward transferance from the Bible to everyday life. Biblical writers were argued to not have a true
understanding of homosexuality, their works were assumed to be culturally conditioned, and Jesus’ summary of the law was asserted to make the Old Testament teaching irrelevant.62
The Report posed a real problem for Anglican evangelicals, who now found themselves needing to justify the adoption of carefully nuanced positions in relation to official statements that were in some ways very close to their own.
It pleased no-‐one, being condemned by both the Gay Christian Movement and Raymond Johnson, director of NFL, (who linked it explicitly to recent liberal publications).63
Homosexual Relationships confronted Anglican evangelicals with a liberal approach to scripture being applied to homosexuality by their own church, prompting a turn to apologetic rather than pastoral concerns in the issue of homosexuality. As the apparent unity of Keele gave way to a recognition of the diversity within evangelicalism, and fears about evangelical identity spread, homosexuality began to be addressed more as a symbolic issue for deeper questions about responses to liberal theology and liberal hermeneutics. The
61 Homosexual Relationships, 52.
62 Homosexual Relationships, 34-‐6.
63 Gill, The LGCM, 42.
issue of homosexuality became a cipher for the issue of biblical authority – something central to evangelical identity.
A year after the publication of the Report, David Holloway published The Church and Homosexuality to refute it. It contained contributions from himself, Michael Green and David Watson, who between them commanded respect from both conservative and charismatic wings of evangelicalism.64 The intent was clearly to delineate an evangelical position that could count on wide acceptance, and the tone was combative. There was a tendency throughout to present the evangelical position as one that stood in sharp contrast to that of ‘homosexuals’, used as a synonym for ‘liberals’, as in Holloway’s statement that: ‘the Church over the centuries has been clear that the homosexual way is not the way of Jesus Christ.’65 Both Green and Holloway warned readers against uncritically accepting liberal thought and attitudes, Holloway explicitly arguing that the Working Party had fallen prey to this danger in writing this report.66 David Watson’s more sensitive and sympathetic chapter on pastoral issues (which references both White and Moss with approval) was essentially relegated to an afterword, with pride of place going to Holloway’s systematic demolition of the Report.
Holloway’s contribution represents one of the first clear presentations of the myth of the gay-‐liberal conspiracy that became central to exclusivist
approaches. He presented the Report as the work of a group of liberals who
64 David Holloway (ed.), The Church and Homosexuality: A Positive Answer to the Current Debate (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980).
65 David Holloway, ‘A Watershed in the Church’, 9-‐11, in Holloway (ed.), The Church and Homosexuality, 10.
66 David Holloway, ‘”Homosexual Relationships” – the discussion continued’, 35-‐128, in Holloway (ed.), The Church and Homosexuality, 16, 64.
gave primacy not to scripture (indeed he argued they deliberately presented positions condemned by scripture) but to themselves, believing that God’s will was identical with human fulfilment.67 Quoting from the US evangelical Richard Lovelace (whose work he and Green make extensive use of), he argued ‘if we can interpret Scripture to endorse homosexual acts among Christians, we can make it endorse anything else we want to do or believe and our faith and practice are cut loose in a borderless chaos.’68
The quotation makes it clear what Holloway saw as the real danger represented by the issue of homosexuality: a liberalism that would dissolve evangelical and even Christian identity by striking at the authority and
interpretation of scripture. Liberal positions on homosexuality represented the crisis of undifferentiation. The degree to which this (rather than concern about gays and their lives per se) was the real issue that prompted Holloway’s concern was particularly apparent in his seemingly wilful lack of empathy towards gays and his unwillingness to seriously engage with the real social issues highlighted in the Report.69 For Holloway, gays and liberals represented the visible side of a dark and shadowy conspiracy that threatened both church and society.70 He suggested that homosexuality was more of an actively chosen lifestyle than the Report acknowledged, and created a ‘network of evil’ in which gay Christians
67 Holloway (ed.), The Church and Homosexuality, 43, 46, 88.
68 Holloway (ed.), The Church and Homosexuality, 92. (Citing Richard F. Lovelace, Homosexuality and the Church: Crisis, Conflict, Compassion (London: Lamp Press, 1979), 78, 111-‐2.
69 Despite the Report’s concern about the vulnerability of gays to prejudice, violence, malicious prosecution and suicide, Holloway refused to countenance any further legal reform and refused to recognise the necessity of any form of support for gays that was not attempting to change their orientation or encouraging abstinence. Holloway (ed.), The Church and Homosexuality, 110-‐113.
70 Holloway (ed.), The Church and Homosexuality, 52-‐4.
were complicit, involving blackmail, bribery, exploitation, prostitution paedophilia and promiscuity.71
In fact, Holloway’s rhetoric notwithstanding, his position was not far removed from that of the Report. Both of them asserted that homosexuality was best understood as a result of the fall and that the norm was heterosexual marriage, with homosexual unions unable to claim equivalence. Both saw promiscuity as unacceptable, and abstinence as the appropriate way of life for the unmarried. Both were clear that this was not the same as a call to celibacy.
Unlike the Working Group, Holloway asserted that for many if not most gays a cure was possible. Unlike Holloway, and largely as a result of this key difference, the Working Group asserted that genuinely gay Christians were victims of the fallenness of the world suggesting that the Church should view moral choices made by gay Christians in expressing their sexuality with respect and
compassion.
In The Church and Homosexuality, both Green and Holloway made reference to two significant books on the subject that had been published by American evangelicals: Virginia Mollenkott and Letha Scanzoni’s Is the Homosexual my Neighbour? and Richard Lovelace’s Homosexuality and the Church. Both books were to have a decisive influence on the English evangelical understanding of the issue. One of the reasons why evangelical engagement with homosexuality as an issue shifted from a pastoral to a more apologetic tone towards the end of the 1970s was the taking up of liberal positions and liberal
71 Holloway (ed.), The Church and Homosexuality, 47-‐9, 59-‐65, 104, 106-‐7, 114-‐5. The slander that the gay Christian ‘scene’ was inherently promiscuous also occurs in Green’s chapter, 30.
interpretations of scripture by those who continued to define themselves as evangelicals. Virginia Mollenkott & Letha Scanzoni’s Is the Homosexual my neighbour? was the earliest and best-‐known example. It was published in a UK edition by SCM in 1978, the same year it was published in the US.72 Green was sufficiently concerned about it that he explicitly referenced it in his discussion in The Church and Homosexuality, though it is possible he had engaged with them through Lovelace rather than directly, as his critique mirrored
Lovelace’s.73
Scanzoni and Mollenkott were evangelical biblical scholars with a credible pedigree who had done significant work on marriage and gender. The book was dangerous for conservative evangelicals seeking to maintain that there was a single biblical position (or even a single evangelical position), because it was clearly rooted in biblical study with respect for the authority of scripture. As well as asserting that gays were vulnerable and needed love, support, and acceptance, Mollenkott and Scanzoni suggested, drawing on critical scholarship, that the biblical basis for traditional teaching was not as assured as other evangelicals had assumed. Asserting that homosexuality was a naturally occurring stable alternative sexuality (inversion) and declaring that this understanding was completely absent from scripture, they argued that there therefore was no clear biblical position. 74
72 Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Is the Homosexual my Neighbour?: A Positive Christian Response (London: SCM Press, 2nd ed., 1994), 1st ed. 1978.
73 Green, The Church and Homosexuality, 22.
74 They questioned whether any of the passages traditionally used could legitimately be applied to contemporary homosexual relationships. Is the Homosexual my Neighbour?, 27-‐42, 51, 81-‐2.
Suggesting that Christians were free to construct a responsible ethic following the example of Jesus and Paul in setting aside taboos, they noted that similar things have happened in relation to contraception, oral sex,
masturbation, and intercourse during menstruation –pointing out that this last is never approved in scripture and always condemned, yet was now commonly seen as acceptable.75 On this basis they argued that even if it were seen as less than ideal, a Christian ethic that called for exclusive, stable, non-‐exploitative homosexual relationships might be an ethic that was biblical and sincerely aimed to please God rather than self.76
Few of these arguments were new, but in being made from an explicitly evangelical hermeneutics and spirituality they appeared to give the lie to Holloway’s argument that any move from traditional teaching must represent complete disregard for the authority of scripture. They were revisionist yet cautious, occasionally disputing more liberal interpretations (such as that of Sherwin Bailey). Much of what they said echoed earlier pastoral writings and the position they finally advocated – upholding a covenantal union between two people as the ideal for human sexuality – was comparatively conservative.
Ironically it was this moderation in Scanzoni and Mollenkott, their sameness, that threatened more conservative evangelicals like Holloway and Green. In showing that biblically faithful evangelicals might adopt a more liberal position they embodied the crisis of undifferentiation.
75 Is the Homosexual my Neighbour?, 132.
76 Is the Homosexual my Neighbour?, 143-‐4.
Richard Lovelace’s Homosexuality and the Church: Crisis, Conflict,
Compassion was also to exert a powerful influence over English evangelicals in this period as the consensus position was being formed. Published in a UK edition a year after it was published in the US, it was at the time the most in-‐
depth treatment of the issue by a more conservative evangelical. Significantly, Lovelace’s handling of the biblical material was moderate, and in many places he accepted the arguments of Scanzoni and Mollenkott that certain passages traditionally thought to be relevant for understanding homosexuality were not.
At one point he even admitted a theoretical possibility that some homosexual unions might be acceptable.77 He commended theological liberals for taking seriously the need to reach out to the gay community with the gospel, which he acknowledged evangelicals had failed to do.78
It was the form rather than the conclusions of Lovelace’s argument that were to have the greatest (perhaps unforeseen) influence. For Lovelace, the real issues at stake were theological liberalism and biblical authority. His overview of literature on the subject of homosexuality suggested (perhaps
unintentionally) a ‘slippery slope’, whereby liberal writers move from
approving homosexual behaviour to far more radical positions.79 Also, by failing to clearly distinguish between the terms, he implicitly linked ‘gay’, ‘liberal’, and
‘worldly’, suggesting that gay Christians were almost all liberal theologically and
77 Homosexuality and the Church, 24-‐7.
78 Lovelace’s work actually contained some elements radically critical of conservatives: he suggested that homophobia was a greater sin than gay sex, and that witch hunts in the church and seeking to separate from ‘liberal’ churches would be a mistake. Homosexuality and the Church, 67, 121, 123.
79 Homosexuality and the Church, 52.
uncritically identified with contemporary culture.80 The overall effect was to suggest that those evangelicals advocating a more liberal position on
homosexuality, whatever their protestations of orthodoxy, were contaminated by worldly values and were opening the door to serious heresy and possibly to the disintegration of church and wider society.81
Lovelace helped set the tone of later conservative evangelical discussion of homosexuality – less concerned with homosexuality as a pastoral and ethical issue affecting real people and more concerned with homosexuality as a
battleground in the conflict with liberalism. It was this aspect of his work that appeared to have had the greatest impact on Green and Holloway and those who were to follow them.