February 20, 2009

The March issues of The Atlantic and First Things arrived together. In The Atlantic, Paul Elie writes about Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The article, “The Velvet Reformation,” is billed on the cover as “God, Grace & Gay Sex.” You have to love marketing.

First Things has a January 1997 article by the late Richard John Neuhaus entitled “The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy.” The two articles need to be read together.

Elie writes: 

At a time when Christianity is twisted into a pretzel over the issue of homosexuality, Rowan Williams—alone among the top Christian leaders—is trying to carry on a conversation about it. His approach has been quixotic, at times baffling. But the long-term goal seems clear: to enable the church he leads to become fully open to gays and lesbians without breaking apart.

He points to “The Body’s Grace,” a lecture given by Williams in 1989 to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement as one of his finest hours. In it Elie notes that Williams argues, “Gay people, too, deserve to be wanted sexually—deserve the body’s grace.”

Of course, grace is by definition undeserved, but we will bypass that and go on his idea that we all “deserve to be wanted sexually.” For Williams, this is central. In his lecture, he stated, “So my desire, if it is going to be sustained and developed, must itself be perceived; and, if it is to develop as it naturally tends to, it must be perceived as desirable by the other—that is my arousal and desire must become the cause of someone else’s desire….” According to Williams, sexual desire demands satisfaction by another.

While he asserted that desire is best satisfied in committed relationships (including same-sex relationships), he went on to say:

Yet the realities of our experience in looking for such possibilities suggest pretty clearly that an absolute declaration that every sexual partnership must conform to the pattern of commitment or else have the nature of sin and nothing else is unreal and silly.

Note the justification for his opinion: “the realities of our experience.” If we feel it to be true, it is true. No other authority is necessary. Williams goes on to argue that even transitory, impersonal sex or hooking up can be an encounter with grace. Insisting on a higher standard is, according to Williams, “unreal and silly.”

In “The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy,” Fr. Neuhaus notes that Williams and others are not thoroughgoing relativist. They propound normative truths.