Dear Readers,
Good evening, and welcome to Off The Fence, a weekly newsletter that dovetails sweetly with the quarterly print magazine. We are down to the last box of Issue 12, and we’ll be sold out next week, so do move to the webstore at this link here if you want to secure your copy of the broadest and brightest issue yet.
Today, we’ve got a dispatch from Francis Martin, who is a reporter for the Church Times, and has been down in the Kent countryside watching a load of bishops take selfies with each other, and his piece offers a very handy explainer on the state of the Anglican church as it struggles to remain a broad church (in a literal and non-metaphorical way).
Leviticus 18:22
Back before it all started, you’d have got decent odds that the 15th Lambeth Conference would bring about the end of the Anglican Communion. What no one had money on was that the biggest headline would be the Archbishop of Canterbury setting up a coffee date with one of the hosts of Bake Off.
Sandi Toksvig’s incendiary letter, published on Twitter in the middle of the conference, came as Justin Welby was riding a rare wave of goodwill. For perhaps the first time, he was being praised by bishops within the Anglican communion who supported same-sex marriage, including the handful who are in such partnerships. ‘I’m elated!’ the Bishop of Maine, Thomas J. Brown, told me after Welby had made a speech in which he affirmed a conservative position as the predominant view within the Communion, while simultaneously indicating that the more liberal stance was also legitimate.
Given the situation at the start of the conference, this was a remarkable turnaround by Welby. It had seemed that all hope of a unifying tide had been repelled before the conference even began, after it transpired that bishops were going to be asked to explicitly vote whether or not to reaffirm the controversial ‘Resolution 1.10’ from the 1998 conference, which decried ‘homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture’.
Several provinces, including the US and Scotland, have gone on to ignore 1.10 by sanctioning same-sex marriage and ordaining bishops in same-sex relationships. Conservative bishops from countries in the Global South – where homosexuality is illegal – protested against such moves, and some have at least partially broken away: bishops from Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda boycotted the conference over this issue.
Everyone knows that the best thing to do with difficult issues is to strenuously avoid talking about them, and the Church has long been a flagbearer for said approach. So it was a surprise that 1.10 was explicitly cited, especially given that it could easily have been left unmentioned.
Its inclusion was an unforced error: there was an immediate uproar, intensified when a Canadian bishop, who was on the drafting committee for the relevant document, revealed that 1.10 had not been mentioned in their meetings and hadn’t been in the draft they’d approved.
Faced with the white-hot ire of liberal Anglican Twitter, the document was redrafted and the specific restatement of the impermissibility of same-sex marriage was removed. A temporary truce was called, and we waited to see what would go down when everyone arrived on the campus of the University of Kent, where the conference was to be held.
Then came another twist, in the form of the Global South – or at least, those that claim to represent it. The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) is a conservative group within the Communion, led by the Archbishop of South Sudan, Justin Badi. But the GSFA also includes (and is almost certainly funded by) the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA), which broke away from the Anglican Communion over the sexuality debate, and which is decidedly not in the Global South.
On the dawn of the conference the GSFA announced that they were going to introduce their own resolution to reaffirm 1.10, called for sanctions against the provinces that had permitted same-sex marriage, and vowed not to receive communion with bishops from those renegade liberal provinces. The announcement landed like a cluster bomb within the communion, but after backroom negotiations with Welby their plans were somewhat defanged – rather than a in-person vote on 1.10, they launched what amounted to an anonymous petition, and the demand for sanctions was softened to a call for ‘authentic repentance’ with the vague threat of ‘impaired communion’ if such repentance was not forthcoming.
Crucially, they vowed that they wouldn’t leave the Communion, though at one point, Badi, who has Jesus’ habit of responding direct questions with a story, seemed to suggest a semantic sleight of hand whereby the self-proclaimed orthodox churches of the GSFA were the real Anglican Communion, and so if they walked off in a strop they would effectively take the match ball home with them.
But despite all the talk of splits and schisms, the reality around the campus was one of sunny harmony. As a breed, bishops are inclined to hobnob, which in 2022 manifests itself in lots of selfies. The GSFA press team did their best to piss on the parade of hugs and handshakes, advising their bishops of the danger of being photographed in convivial conversation with liberals, but only the hardcore among them seemed to heed this warning. And this, for many, is the true meaning of the Lambeth Conference, and by extension the Anglican Communion: fellowship between churches from around the world which ultimately have more to unite them than to divide them.
And so back to Toksvig. For while the climate seemed as fair as could be hoped for in Canterbury, her version of proceedings overshadowed the narrative. ‘So, you and your other religious pals got together at the Lambeth Conference and the main take away seems to be that gay sex is a sin,’ Toksvig wrote, overlooking the fact that 175 of those religious pals signed up to a statement affirming the holiness of gay relationships, while only 125 subscribed to the GSFA’s restatement of Resolution 1.10.
This was just one of Toksvig’s misunderstandings (or, if one is inclined to be less charitable to a patron of Humanists UK, misrepresentations), though the basic point that she made was fair: the Church remains equivocal, at best, on homosexuality. And ultimately this fact didn’t change in the course of the Lambeth Conference, despite the surfeit of good vibes in Kent.
You should follow Francis on Twitter here.
Pints for The Fence
A fair few months after Jimmy McIntosh and two TF staffers ventured out to The Lighterman, the most isolated pub in London, we can now bring you the sweet prose rundown from that evening, which started in Soho, continued in Barking and finished up in London Bridge. Generally speaking, these sort of Iain Sinclair-style ventures are often fey, self-indulgent endeavours – but this is a cracking piece of writing from Jimmy, and the first outing in what we hope will be a long-running series.
The Ideas Man
Last week, we published James Waddell’s investigation into the Institute of Art and Ideas, an events company helmed by Hilary Lawson. The piece chimed with a number of former employees there, and you can see some of their comments in the quote-tweets here, though our favourite comment was from Tom Bolger, who writes how the piece reminded him of ‘being interrogated by Hilary in interview about the difference between reality and fantasy (for an hour), whilst he reclined in his chair eating nuts like King Louie, the monkey from the Jungle Book.’
And one correspondent dug up something really rather special: a YouTube tribute to Hilary Lawson from an unknown admirer, in which it is claimed that ‘goddesses’ are attracted to the IAI head honcho – and that he performs ‘S & M with ideology’. You can watch it here, but you should definitely read or re-read James’ investigation, which was the product of four months’ serious slog on his part, significant advice from our lawyer and the subject of our very first legal letter.
Magic Money Tree
While some of Hilary’s activities have a comic element, there is nothing funny about the toll that working for him has taken on the beleaguered former staffers James spoke to for the piece. The IAI took advantage of the recession to hire young graduates desperate for employment, who didn’t know their workplace rights, and who laboured miserably for low pay (and sometimes for no pay).
The manner in which the company operated has been subject of a whisper network for some years, but even though the IAI is very much in the public eye – as are some of its former employees – it has taken an investigation by a small quarterly publication to bring these allegations to light. But why would no broadsheet paper report on these allegations? We can only wonder why.
But if you’d like to see more pieces like this one, you should subscribe to the print magazine at the cost of only £25 for the year. We were only able to publish James’ piece with the support of our current subscribers – do join them today.
In Case You Missed It
Dan Colyns tells the story of Moritz Hochschild, the ruthless Bolivian industrialist who saved 20,000 Jews from the Nazis.
Foeke Postma showcases the astounding ways new tech can investigate old photographs, for Bellingcat.
Intelligencer’s Lane Brown asks What Is Elon Musk?
Friend of Off The Fences passim, Mike Sacks, has another great comedy interviewee in Mike Judge.
At Harper's, Christian Lorentzen asks what time did to Christopher Hitchens.
And Finally
If there’s one thing that unites Britain, it’s a hatred of paedophiles, or ‘nonces’ as they are colloquially known, so the founders of the ‘nonce rooftop’ are a brave bunch – the bar may be in Seoul, more than 5,000 miles away, but oceans will not be enough to stop a mob once they’ve been whipped into a range by a couple of misleading tabloid headlines. Funnily enough, the etymology of the term ‘nonce’ was revealed in a documentary this year – genuinely very interesting factoid!
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We’ll wrap things up on that note. If you have some comments, bon mots, postal issues, please let us know by replying to this email and we’ll get back to you shortly, and we’ll join you at the same time next week, after a few days of soft, refreshing rain. Until then.
All the best,
TF
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