[Financial Times] 11 Jul 2008--At the Lambeth conference, which meets once a decade, bishops from the 38 provinces of the worldwide Anglican communion gather to think, pray and talk about sex. No binding votes are cast, but Lambeth has been a venue for airing Church preoccupations since it was first convoked in 1867. For decades, women, gays, abortion, polygamy and venereal disease have divided the attendees. At this year’s conference, which starts on July 20, the bishops are expected to clash over the ordination of Gene Robinson, a non-celibate gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. In recent days, the Church of England, at its general synod, approved ordaining women bishops, souring relations with the Vatican. And the London press revealed that one C of E priest had celebrated an unofficial gay marriage ceremony for two others.
The only thing preventing a walkout by conservative bishops is that so few of them are attending the conference to start with. A thousand conservatives, mostly Africans, including 300 bishops, travelled to Jerusalem last month for an alternative meeting, the first Global Anglican Future Conference. Bishops from Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya plan to boycott Lambeth. Many are on the verge of a “breaking of communion” with the mainstream US Church over its policies on gays. Why, in general, is sex such a pressing issue for religion just now? Why, in particular, does homosexuality among US Episcopal priests threaten to tear up a world religion in a way that, say, the past decade’s revelations of homosexuality among US Catholic priests did not?
According to the conservative Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, these fights are a “symptom”. The biggest thing they are a symptom of is the newfound might of African Christianity. There were 9m Christians (of all denominations) in Africa in 1900 and 393m in 2005. Half the world’s Anglicans are Africans. Their views differ. Christians in poor countries, the historian Philip Jenkins has shown, see the Bible as more authentic and authoritative than North Americans and Europeans do. They read it in a more literal way. This is not because African christians are less rational but because the Bible’s world resembles theirs more. And the stakes are higher. In much of Africa, Christianity is a fighting faith: to evangelise is to recruit. There is no similar desperation on the western side of these controversies – the sexual rights for which reformers are fighting inside the Church are widely available in institutions outside of it.
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