Women In Church Leadership - A Novel Idea

In the UK, most Christians I know (myself included) support women in leadership, and by extension, women preaching. However, I do have quite a few Christian friends who don’t support women in leadership, and they attend churches that do not permit women to deliver sermons. They tend to base this on their interpretation of St. Paul’s teaching on the subject (notably, 1 Timothy 2:12 - “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man” and 1 Corinthians 14:34 - “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.”). But most Christians take those verses to be contextual admonitions directed at particular church cultures of the time, not blanket prohibitions of women’s roles in leadership to be religiously adhered to in perpetuity.

Certainly, the spirit of the Bible, and other verses, seem to indicate the acknowledgment and encouragement of the role of women in leadership. St. Paul, in Romans 16, speaks of Phoebe as a “deacon of the church”; Luke, in Acts 18:26, acknowledges Priscilla as a teacher; and in Acts 21, we learn that “Philip the evangelist had four unmarried daughters who prophesied.”. Moreover, great Old Testament women - like Rebecca, Leah, Deborah, Rahab, Esther, to name but a few - were given great authority and responsibility in furthering the Biblical story and enhancing God’s Kingdom.

Consequently, I think the correct Biblical interpretation is that it’s not just fine, but beneficial, to have women in leadership. But that said, those who disagree with me on this are probably just as confident that their interpretation is correct. And it has to be said, given debates like this one are long-standing, and given that the Biblical texts are too low-resolution for any of us to be certain what God wants for His church regarding women in leadership, there is no external metric to which we can assent to find out which group of Christians have got this one right.

My possibly novel idea
With this in mind, I have an idea that’s a bit off the wall, but is probably worth a moment’s consideration. Maybe we can’t know which option is right, but maybe God wants us to make a choice, and maybe God doesn’t mind all that much what we choose about women in leadership (as long as we are kind and conduct ourselves with goodness) because our subjective preference in this matter is a dignity He has bestowed upon us. In other words, as long as churches stick to the fundamental Christian tenets, maybe it’s fine to celebrate the diversity of church styles and denominations consistent with individual consumer preferences.

The church is broad and diverse; some people like to be monks, some like to be nuns, some people are Christian missionaries, some are business pioneers, some people prefer dancing in Pentecostal churches, some prefer quiet contemplative church services, and so on. Maybe it’s possible that that’s how God feels about our preference for leadership; for those men and women who prefer to be led by men, God is fine with a church that sets itself up with only male leaders; and for the rest, who value women in leadership, there are many churches for them too. 

Don’t get me wrong, if we had access to God’s perfect knowledge, and knew all the facts ourselves, there may be a definitive set of right answers about women in leadership that would make everything clear with that degree of hindsight. But given that we are imperfect humans, trying to do our best with limited information and our best efforts at scriptural interpretations, it may well be that God is perfectly fine with our a la carte model of individual preferences, where male leadership churches are fine for people who prefer that, and mixed leadership churches are fine for everyone else.

 

Why Marriage Should Be Privatised

I believe in freedom of association as the best way of dealing with most social and industrial issues, not state intervention. What we choose to believe, speak, write down, who we associate with, and who we choose to trade with should be almost entirely a matter of personal liberty, not government authority. It’s unsurprising I think this way, as I believe the state should take a step back out of many things in which it involves itself, given its mass inefficiency and stultifying mechanisms.

With this in mind, I want to turn to the subject of marriage. My view is that the state should recognise that marriage is a Christian union, and Christians should recognise that many people want to have a union that is not Christian. Consequently, I think there ought to be two distinct formal unions: one, a Christian marriage and therefore formally recognised under Christian principles, and the other a civil partnership formally recognised under whichever non-Christian principles the participants happen to value.

I’m a Christian, and given that Christian marriage is a private triangular affair between God and two beloveds (and by extension, the beloveds’ loved ones, friends and church congregation), I think it would be highly appropriate and far more spiritually liberating if marriage became privatised and was no longer under the thrall of the state. As long as the marriage contract establishes property rights, and as long as the law still protects children, in that you can only be legally married at 16, and there are sufficient legal contracts in place to address matters concerning children, the state is an extraneous element of the marriage bond. Marriage is a Christian unity; the bureaucratic elements are invented by the establishment.

Think about what Christian marriage is; it is two beloveds who love each other, and who love God and want to put Him first, and promise before Him to be devoted and committed to each other for the rest of their lives. There is nothing the state can do to ratify a union that is ordained by God. What legitimises the love is the relationship, not the paperwork. There are lots of couples who have the paperwork but not the love and high quality of relationship, and there are lots of couples who have the love and high quality of relationship but not the paperwork. If a couple has the mutual devotion and promise each other to put one another first for the rest of their life, then there is no reason why marriage contracts can’t be private affairs that are drawn up by the beloveds (or on their behalf if they choose), and instituted in the church before God.

On a wider note, the great thing about individual liberty is that there is room for diversity. There is no pressure for us all to think the same way, and through trial and error we get to shape society according to complex revealed preferences. In a society where marriage is private, people would be free to sign marital contracts that best suit their individual beliefs. But given that Christian marriage is a unique Christian concept, the church would be able to apply its own articles to the contracts the beloveds create, and the beloveds would tailor those contracts to the authority of their chosen church – one that they declare to be sanctioned under God’s authority.

It’s time that Christianity wrestled back control of its own institution and reclaimed it as a purely Christian spiritual union between beloveds before God. You see, the question must be asked; in the case of the majority of unbelievers - why would they even want to get married in a church? When the Christian church performs a wedding for couples who do not share the central beliefs of Christianity, they are engaging in ceremonies for couples for whom the central tenets have no intrinsic religious value (it seems these numbers are increasing all the time too). Of course, non-religious couples shouldn’t be legally prohibited from getting married in a church if the church consents – but that’s not the point. I can only wonder why those couples would want to if they don't have any beliefs that would naturally affiliate them to the church's ethos. That people still do is, I should imagine, a mere historical legacy of habit that is slowly dying in out in Britain as we gradually become more secular, and the Church of England gradually erodes into an even tinier minority.

If my beloved and I didn't believe in the central Christian tenets, there is no reason why we should have any desire to get married in a church, mosque or wherever - just as if we were vegetarians we'd have no desire to go to a steak house for our evening meal. In changing long-standing traditions and not seeking refuge in the unreliable legacy of the status quo, we are likely to have a society in which people choose things because those things match their views and beliefs, not because history dictates that ‘This is how it has always been done’.

 

When gay people or unbelievers seek to defend people’s right to not be discriminated against by any sectarian faction of the church, I think they are right to do so. But I think they are arguing in the wrong direction. They act like vegetarians trying to defend the vegetarians’ right to go into butchers’ shops, when what they would be better doing is trying to convince more vegetarians to give up butchers’ shops altogether and seek food stores that better cater their tastes. I think that numerous people are still getting married in churches simply because 'marriage' in a church happens to be the oldest ceremonial legacy in this country, or because society says a church wedding is somehow more exalted than a civil ceremony, or because of pressure from family, and other similar reasons. Why would they want to unless they have emotional, spiritual or analytical affiliation to the church's ethos? Realising this probably is the best the best way to forward the debate and culturally progress too.

Society needn't be so polarised anymore, and it will be much less like it in the future; just as we now have supermarkets in which meat-eaters and vegetarians can happily shop together choosing only the products that match their tastes, we probably will eventually evolve a cultural system in which people pick their ceremonial rites of passage in accordance with their views and beliefs. I understand non-religious funerals are rising in numbers; in 150 years (maybe sooner) they probably will outnumber church funerals. Fast forward 150 years and my guess is you'll find church weddings being almost exclusively chosen by Christians, and the majority of other lifetime commitments being non-religious civil commitments. We will probably escape the historical legacies of anti-church discord and well-worn religious clichés, and live in a society in which chosen rites of passage match people’s tastes and beliefs, and where those unions are a private affair and not under the authority of the state.

What The Pope Doesn't Get

I wasn't going to write a Blog post on the Pope's latest perorations - but a few people have asked for my views on it, so I had a quick look at his thoughts. Where he’s going wrong can be summed up in one of his most strident statements:

“The idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology  is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.”

Oh dear – alas, the head of an institution as grand and powerful as the Catholic Church ought to be much better informed on the basics of economics. The Pope’s argument would be okay if the predicates were correct (ditto every other anti-progress person who continually spouts green-bytes). That is, if the free market system was based on the error that we rely on an infinite supply of the earth’s resources, and that to run out of certain resources is going to put us all to hell in a hand cart, then yes the Pope’s encyclical would be right on the mark.

But the truth is, Pope Francis starts with an assumption that turns reality upside down, so his analysis is frivolous. People who understand economics don’t of course think that the earth’s goods we consume are based on an infinite supply of resources. Quite the contrary - the subject of economics is built on the reality that in a supply and demand market, resources are finite and need allocating in the most efficient way.

Because of the limitation of the earth’s resources, supply-side initiatives in the free market engender innovation, which creates value, but also brings about a change in the way we use the earth’s resources. For example, we used to burn a lot more coal than we do now. Currently the technology for electricity, gas, and solar energy has weaned us off coal dependency, which means we use less of it.

Another example is paper. We used to use a lot more paper. Currently the technology for digital interfaces (laptops, mobile phones, iPads) has weaned us off much of our paper dependency (with much more still to come), which means….. you guessed it…. we use less of it.

So when we see economic growth, and increased prosperity, as well as people continually being lifted out of poverty because of it - that growth is not defined as a calibration of any single resource we consume - it is the value created consistent with how the market most efficiently allocates the ever-changing use of varying resources.

Pope Francis has lots of good qualities – it’s such a shame his understanding of the basics of economics and human progress is meagre, and his pontificating so lacklustre here.

Let's Have Social Beneficence With A Big “S” & State With A Small ‘s’

Oh ah, a day after my blog post on the recent issues surrounding charity, the church and the State, we have The Guardian’s Zoe Williams perpetuating the leftist complaints that food banks are supplied by the Trussell Trust charity and not by a State agency.

Consequently, I feel compelled to add a tiny bit more to this debate, because we have lots of hard-right-leaning folk lamenting food banks as emblematic of a culture of welfare-dependent decadence, and lots of hard-left-leaning folk calling their very existence a national disgrace and emblematic of a failing State. Underpinning this is the hard-right view that welfare-dependent people are mostly useless wasters, and the hard-left view that the State should automatically be the custodians of everyone's skills, wages, vocations and social well-being. To me, both sides clearly are wide of the mark.

The State has a responsibility to its citizens, and should apply it better to our welfare needs, particularly those not in work. For me, finding the right balance is about seeing that both the State and we as individuals have a role. It's easy to delegate responsibility to the State to such an extent that we absolve ourselves of our responsibility to each other. In fact, I'd argue that we have been so accustomed to the State's role in our lives that we've forgotten just how much of our past, present and future relies on our own social beneficence (let's call it social beneficence for simplicity's sake). By 'social beneficence' I mean our necessity to help one another, show love, grace and kindness, and to generally demonstrate mindfulness for each other's well-being. We already do this all the time, of course - for friends, family, neighbours, work colleagues and people in our social groups - but the Christian message is that everyone is to be included in that mandate. 

As studies in evolutionary biology in the past few decades have shown, this mindfulness of our fellow humans in implicit in our mental hardware - and was an instinctive part of our evolution long before we developed sovereign States and trading. That is to say, we couldn't have arrived at those progressions without an up and running mindfulness of our fellow humans and developing empathy towards their needs. So while the Smithian notion of a free market of self-serving interested parties demonstrably engenders major social and cultural progress, the financial economy is obviously not the be all and end all of our social well-being - our social beneficence underpins a great deal of it.

It's strange to hear so many people automatically deferring problems to either the State or the market, without recourse to the most powerful of all human qualities - the freedom and ability to be socially beneficent to one another. The work of the Trussell Trust Christian charity represents the best of social beneficence, and serves to remind us of how much better society would be with even more beneficence on top of that. Yes of course the State needs to sort out its own bureaucratic house and ensure that people's welfare entitlements are paid, but I fancy that many modern humans of today may have become so accustomed to the State sovereignty and its involvement in our affairs that they've been habitually primed to give too little regard to our own individual responsibilities to each other. If you recall, the Christ-influenced acts of grace, love and kindness that spread through the societies in the New Testament portion of history were not bootstrapped by a benevolent, democratically elected sovereign State - they occurred in a society oppressed under a Roman dictatorship, with no welfare state or global free market. The solution, I think, is to have Social Beneficence with a big “S”, to enable us to have State with a small ‘s’.

Why Don't Christians Pay Atheists To Attend Church?

In economics it's always worth looking out for anomalies in society, because one of the fundamentals in economics is that 'people respond to incentives'. Therefore, when there is behaviour that seems to contradict beliefs, radars are alerted, particularly when there isn't much of a market force surrounding it.

So, in the case I'm going to talk about, we have something interesting going on. Christian believers hold a belief that the most important thing in life is attaining salvation. In other words, what they believe is that this life is the prelude, and the heavenly life the real disquisition - the ultimate destination and purpose of the creation story.

So the Christian 'incentive' should be (and often is) the desire to help people get saved. Christians do all sorts of things to help people to salvation, often at great time and expense to themselves - they go on missionary trips, they design leaflets, they go door to door, they organise Alpha nights, meals, and so forth. The desire that underpins all these things is the desire to invite people to church with an open mind.

But what's strange about this little equation is that the thing that has proven time and time again to incentivise people more than anything else - money - is never offered to incentivise people to come to church. At first glance, the idea of being paid to come to church seems ludicrous. Off the top of my head I can think of several reasons why it should strike us as absurd. Here are four quickies:

1) The church should not be about money, it should be about love.

2) Salvation issues are not about unbelievers making a profit.

3) People must come in because of a desire to explore, not because of financial incentives

4) How could you pay some people and not others when the demand for church seats outweighs the church's finances?

Perhaps those objections do carry more weight than the felicity of tendering to humankind's financial incentives. But admit it, when you first saw the headline "Why Don't Christians Pay Atheists To Attend Church?" - it probably grabbed your attention more than most Christian articles you've read in a long while. What's headline-grabbing about it is that it is unusual, as well as being a severe departure from orthodoxy and socio-cultural norms to which you may ordinarily subscribe. But more than that, what else attracts about it is that there just might be something in it. It's a preposterous idea - but just as many 'obviously true' ideas turn out to false when you examine them closely, there are some "obviously false" ideas that turn out to have some mileage when examined more closely. And paying atheists to attend church might be one of them.

As per my opening gambit, there is a discontinuity going on between the goals of the church and ways to achieve those goals: the square peg shape of money being a proven human incentive is not fitting into the round hole of salvation being Christians' primary goal for unbelievers. So all we're asking is: is there a market mechanism that can help the church achieve its goal, and help untapped enquirers find their way towards fulfilling those enquiries? Given that the free market uses prices to near-maximally efficiently match supply to demand, there is, in theory, no reason why the church can't expedite its endeavours by offering straight-out financial incentives to get people into church. In fact, given that the church is full of believers who hold the view that unbelievers are going to hell (although not all of us are so sure about that), giving them the gift of money to try to save from hell doesn't just seem like a sensible thing to do - it may even be quite immoral not to do so.

Of course, it's obvious that simply offering to pay sums of money to everyone who comes to your church is not going to work. But if the process was undertaken prudently it could serve as a useful social experiment as well as possibly bearing fruit too. If your initial reaction is that financial enticements should not be part of the church's mission to bring people to Christ, you need to be made aware that they already are. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything you see the church doing already costs money: the building, the upkeep, the minister's and staff's wages, events, food, drink, but perhaps most hidden, the time taken up by volunteers. The cost of volunteering is not primarily borne in cash, it is borne in time. If it takes six volunteers two hours every week to volunteer to help on a twelve week Alpha course, and their average salary is £15 per hour, the hidden cost of their volunteering is £2160. Add to that the cost of electricity, food and drink, and cleaning up time after each evening, and it's probably closer to £3000.

So costs are already borne by the church in order to help people to salvation, it's just that they are not the kind talked about in the way that the financial incentives we are talking about here are being considered. A church that considered transferring their current costs into a more explicitly incentivising cost that paid people to attend church might be doing a wise thing. Of course, it may not be a transfer of costs - it may be extra costs on top of the already good things the church does. Another thing in its favour is that such a headline-grabbing initiative would create lots of media attention, and demonstrate a profound confidence in the message the church has to convey - a kind 'Putting our money where our mouth is" declaration.

In economics a good indication that something is useful or desired in society is if someone is willing to pay you to do it. Churches that were willing to pay people to attend the services would send the message that attending church has benefits that are worth the cost of paying people to come. Clearly, if the result is eternal salvation and a relationship with God then the congregation must already feel convinced that the benefits astronomically outweigh the costs.

When an employer wishes to buy labour from prospective employees, he (or she) conducts interviews and gives the job to the most suitable candidate(s). The relationship is symbiotic - the employers want to part with cash for labour, and the employee wants to sell their labour for cash. If the model of paying unbelievers to come to church could work, it would need a similar symbiosis. The people being paid couldn't be opportunists in it purely for their own financial gain, they would have to be people who had applied for the job and shown an open-mindedness and honest predilection for rational enquiry.

Suppose you're in a church that consists of 250 regular attendees, with 200 of them regularly supporting the church through tithing or ad hoc donations. Here's what you could propose. Ask 200 volunteers to give an extra £2 a week to a new "Payment for church attendance" initiative, in which potential candidates are solicited to be paid to attend church and engage with the issues central to the Christian faith. After interviews conducted by a discerning panel, or perhaps a less formal discussion with prospective new attendees, the church could offer to pay 16 new people £25 each to attend church for an agreed period of time (adjust the variables according to your own congregation size, spare space, etc).

If the church believes that there are enough open-minded, rational enquirers out there for whom church attendance would bring about eternally enriching benefits, then it sounds like money well spent. But there are further positive externalities too. Under the "Payment for church attendance" initiative, preachers would have extra incentive to improve their sermons to ensure that a good impact was made on the new attendees, and that their message was engaging and thought-provoking. Furthermore, the congregation would be more compelled to improve their hospitality too.

There would also be further positive reverberations, not just in new friendships developed, or in the planting of initial seeds, but in the many people who decided to carry on attending after the agreed period of payment time. Also, in the case of many who hadn't engaged with Christianity before, knowing that there are financial opportunities for new church attendees with open minds, the initiative probably would incentivise many others to explore the potential benefits of having a more open mind.

If the church believes that its message has the power to attract, transform, sustain and enrich anybody that comes into its stead (and all the evidence is that it does believe this), then it must believe that initial financial investment made in people will bear longer term fruit for those that are paid to hear the message and engage with it, particularly when one bears in mind that the church already makes heavy investments of a similar nature, just not with direct offers to incentivise.

Clearly, there would be more specific details to negotiate, but as a general idea, the "Payment for church attendance" initiative could have some mileage in it, and if successful, would simply be just another example of how the free market of supply and demand generates prices that involve mutually beneficial transactions between buyers and sellers. Evidence demonstrates that the whole church is based on the shared feeling that there is something life transforming worth buying. That it could find the generosity to give people the money to buy some committed enquiry time may be quite a good idea after all.

There is perhaps one compelling reason, though, why payment for church attendance could be inadvisable. In some activities payment does not always lead to better results. I'm sure that if your boss stopped paying you, you would stop working for him or her and look for another job. Everyone needs to live, and most people don't like their work so much that they'd do it for free. But in some cases the incentive of money actually diminishes the quality of the work or activity undertaken, because the financial incentive robs the partaker of the qualities of doing something because it is good to do it, or because it is noble or inspiring.

Clearly there are kind and generous acts we perform for others for which payment would be inimical not just to civility but to duty too. If suddenly there were compulsory payments introduced for every time we did something nice for someone else, or every time we tried to further our own qualities, the world would be a worse place, not better. We can't underestimate the extent to which people do noble things for the sake of the good qualities intrinsic to those things - and that may be one possible reason why payment for church attendance could be counselled against. That is to say, the commendable thing in investigating the Christian faith is in having the courage to self-examine one's own character, as well as having the curiosity to explore a potentially better reality than one currently knows - and these things have a power that would, in all likelihood, only be diminished if financial payment was involved. And if these things are better than any possible financial rewards we might offer to prospective church attendees, it just goes to show that when minds are engaged, enriching things can happen, even in the investigative stage.

Of course, the other analogue to Christianity is the relationship element, where having a relationship with Christ is compared to marriage to a beloved (John 3:29, Revelation 19:7-9). Just as we would decimate the power of romantic love by using financial incentives in the context of good deeds within a marriage, the same would be true in the pursuit of love in a church context. One might suggest that someone coming to church to explore what's on offer can be compared to someone looking (however subliminally) to fall in love - and as all who understand even a little bit of what searching for, or being in, love is like - money does not add to its intrinsic power or delight. 

* Photo courtesy of CNN

Women Bishops: Why The Church of England Has Messed Up Here

The general synod of the Church of England has voted against the appointment of women as bishops. Three things are evident; firstly, it won’t be too much longer before the balance is tipped; secondly this vote doesn’t reflect the views of the majority of Christians in the UK; thirdly, many have asserted that this compounds the view that we live in a patriarchy, which obviously isn't true. I will address all three points. 

Let me start by repudiating the hasty assumption so many people make, that we live in some kind of oppressive patriarchy. People who peddle the patriarchy-narrative are confused about how complex the world is, how multifaceted and diverse human behaviour is, and how to properly analyse an epistemologically intractable social environment. To cherry pick a few isolated examples of where men have the edge in society, and ignore all the contra-indicators and declare 'patriarchy', is a bit like surveying people in their 40s inside a job centre and claiming that most of the people in their 40s in the UK are unemployed. Most people in their 40s in the UK are not unemployed, but if you cherry pick that sample group from only inside a job centre, it's going to look like they are.

 

The UK may look like a patriarchy if you only look at the Catholic and Anglican churches, or if you only look at male CEOs, or if you only sample garage mechanics, or if you fall for the bogus 'unfair gender pay gap' canard (by the way, on this one: men and women earn equal pay for equal work - it's illegal for employers to contravene this - and the statistics you often see that proclaim women earn less than men are based on statistical averages, which does not point to unfair discrimination).

 

But the UK doesn't look very much like a patriarchy if you only sample primary school teachers, or if you look at the number of male suicides compared to females, or if you look at the ratio of men to women who have died fighting in wars or doing risky jobs.

Society as a whole is not accurately represented when seen through cherry-picked data analyses that are sought to corroborate the bogus arguments of people trying to prove a point. Society is much more complex than that, and the reality is, there are many ways in which men have the comparative advantage over women, many ways in which women have the comparative advantage over men, but where in most cases of human living, men and women cooperate together to work, to survive, to love, to have friendships, to pay their taxes, to bring up children, to run a house together, to fight against nature's hardships, and to make each other's lives better (either directly or indirectly).

The church probably is, in several ways, too patriarchal in its ethos - failing to capitalise on the immense benefits and diverse duality of perspective within the two sexes. But to claim the whole of society is an oppressive patriarch is to be guilty of misrepresenting the reality of how men and women really operate in a relationship symbiosis, in mutually beneficial synergies, and in reciprocal encouragement against the vicissitudes of nature's hardships and challenges.

Let me say why I do favour women bishops, and why I think the C of E has got it wrong. I have two reasons; one is to do with a well known principle in moral philosophy, and the other is to do a well known principle in economics. The moral philosophy principle is this; I strongly support women’s rights to be ordained in ministry and leadership – be they vicars, chaplains, or bishops, or any other position, based primarily on a fixed view I have about humans not discriminating against other humans based on race, creed, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or any other congenital component of being human. 

The economic principle is to do with utilisation of skills, and this is an area that both the feminists and the overly-masculine influences in the church have got entirely wrong.  This is not an immutable rule, but for maximum efficiency you are best to optimise the specialised skills people bring to the table.  In a partnership, if two people have similar skills there is less to be gained from sharing them – all you’re doing is reassigning jobs from one equally suitable person to another.  For maximum efficiency, if two people have similar skills concerning task A, then you’re best to separate roles, where one does task A and the other does task B.  But if two partners have very different skills it is best to share both task A and task B because both sets of specialist skills can be brought into both tasks. 

For example, suppose we have a town planning project - I don’t think are many people who would deny that an economist and a building surveyor partnership would be a more efficient partnership than two economists or two building surveyors. Suppose we have a committee assigned to draw up a document that maximises good parenting; I don’t think there are many people who would deny that a group of five men and five women would be more efficient than a group of ten women or ten men.  And I cannot imagine there are many people who would deny that a partnership consisting of a livestock specialist and an agronomy specialist would make a better farming partnership than two livestock specialists or two agronomy specialists.

This is where the feminists and the overly-masculine influences in the church do not understand maximum efficiency.  Feminists, in trying to make women and men as similar as possible, say that task A should be shared equally.  That’s wrong – if they are similar they would achieve maximum efficiency by specialising.  Overly-masculine church men, in trying to make men and women as different as possible, say that women should specialise in task A and men in task B.  That’s also wrong – if they are different they would achieve maximum efficiency by sharing and bringing to bear both sets of specialties and talents.

Now let me make one thing quite clear; there are situations in which this sort of logic would not be maximally beneficial.  For example, in a marriage, there are all sorts of good reasons why housework, driving, entertaining, gardening, etc are better shared (respect, closeness, togetherness, kindness, consideration, relationship equality, to name but five) – but this issue is about women bishops, and hence on grounds of moral philosophy and economic principles the church is making a mistake in not appointing women bishops. 

In both cases, appointing women bishops is the right thing to do.  Given that women are equal in every sense of rights and respect, both women and men should be allowed to be bishops on grounds that sex discrimination is ugly. And conversely, given that women have very different skills to men (as well as many similar skills), both women and men should be allowed to be bishops on grounds that church leadership (be they vicars, chaplains, or bishops) will benefit from both sets of specialised skills being brought to bear on the running of the church.  Whichever way you cut the cloth, the church is throwing away one of its golden pearls by failing to maximise the talents of both men and women.

 

 

 

 
 

On Gay Marriage: It's Time To Wise Up

Gay rights group Stonewall has awarded Catholic Cardinal Keith O'Brien the 'Bigot of the Year' prize after he made some impudent words against gay people. That's a bit like Burger King Executives creating a 'Most Unhealthy Junk Food' category and awarding it to McDonald's.  Now, one disclaimer; even if you had an electron microscope you couldn't detect my feelings of credibility for any of Stonewall's awards.  But something needs to be said about the quid pro quo lack of tolerance, because I hear that politician Ruth Davidson was subjected to jeers and boos at the ceremony after she suggested that awards like 'Bigot of the Year' hardly sound any more tolerant than the people they seek to indict, and that "The case for equality is far better made by demonstrating the sort of generosity, tolerance and love we would wish to see more of in this world."  Quite why she would give two hoots about receiving an award from Stonewall is beyond me (she won Politician of the Year) - but well said anyway. 

But here, I think, is the important point; there are good and bad people in the Catholic Church and in Stonewall, and they are being let down by the mudslingers who do no real good, and help very little in furthering the progression of debates like these. Evidently this debate about gay marriage is not going to be helped by intolerance from either side, and it isn't going to be resolved without bringing some intelligent suggestions to the table - ones that are accompanied by acceptance, tolerance, compassion, generosity and kindness.  The first thing that is clear to me is that liberty of free expression is vital, so I defend anyone's right to hold whatever views they like about gays, about the church, or whatever (providing they are held or expressed with acceptance, tolerance, compassion, generosity and kindness).  For that reason, we must be careful not to discriminate against any group (which is really collections of individuals) that holds views different to ours.  Let me try to suggest a solution that cuts out all the mudslinging. 

It seems to me that something obvious is being missed in the continuing debate about whether gay couples should or should not be allowed to get married in church.  You see, the question must be asked; in the case of the majority of people affected by this (the majority being unbelievers), why would they want to get married in a church?  One might even ask the same question of atheists too.  Let me explain; I have absolutely no objection to any couple being together, gay or straight – their business is none of my business, and I think it unfortunate that so many people in the church wish to make it their business.  But here’s what I think is being missed. When the Christian church performs a wedding for couples who do not share the central beliefs of Christianity they are engaging in ceremonies for couples for whom the central tenets have no intrinsic religious value (it seems these numbers are increasing all the time too).  Of course, non-religious couples should be allowed to get married in a church – but that’s not the point.  The point is, I can only wonder why they would want to if they don't have any beliefs that would naturally affiliate them to the church's ethos.  That people still do is, I should imagine, a mere historical legacy of habit that is slowly dying in out in Britain as we gradually become more secular, and the Church of England gradually erodes into an even tinier minority.

This might be somewhat too prescient for today, but fast forward to, say, 150 years henceforward, and my guess is you'll find church weddings being almost exclusively chosen by Christians, and the majority of other lifetime commitments being non-religious civil commitments.  The point is, this moves the debate away from issues about which group is the most discriminated against, or whose rules are the most reasonable, onto a much more enriching enquiry about how we can escape the historical legacies of anti-church discord and well-worn religious clichés, and live in a society in which chosen rites of passage match people’s tastes and beliefs.

If my girlfriend and I didn't believe in the central Christian tenets, there is no reason why we should have any desire to get married in a church, mosque or wherever - just as if we were vegetarians we'd have no desire to go to a butcher's shop for our evening meal.  In changing long-standing traditions and not seeking refuge in the unreliable legacy of the status quo, we are likely to have a society in which people choose things because those things match their views and beliefs, not because history dictates that ‘This is always how it has been done’.  When gay people or unbelievers seek to defend people’s right to not be discriminated against by any sectarian faction of the church, I think they are right to do so.  But I think they are arguing in the wrong direction.  They act like vegetarians trying to defend the vegetarians’ right to go into butchers’ shops, when what they would be better doing is trying to convince more vegetarians to give up butchers’ shops altogether and seek food stores that better cater their tastes.  Society needn't be so polarised anymore, and it will be much less like it in the future; just as we now have supermarkets in which meat-eaters and vegetarians can happily shop together choosing only the products that match their tastes, we probably will eventually evolve a cultural system in which people pick their ceremonial rites of passage in accordance with their views and beliefs.  I understand non-religious funerals are rising in numbers; in 150 years (maybe sooner) they probably will outnumber church funerals. 

I think that numerous people are still getting married in churches simply because 'marriage' in a church happens to be the oldest ceremonial legacy in this country, or because society says a church wedding is somehow more exalted than a civil ceremony, or because of pressure from family, and other similar reasons. My point is not that they shouldn't. It is; why would they want to unless they have emotional, spiritual or analytical affiliation to the church's ethos?  Realising this probably is the best the best way to forward the debate and culturally progress too.