Irreconcilable Differences

First, a disclaimer: I know comparatively little about the Anglican Church or its formal system of governance, so I'm not a qualified commentator on the nuances of its controversy over homosexuality and church authority. That said, I do try to keep my eye on the current events in the Anglican Communion, principally if and whether the Episcopal Church (USA) will be compelled to comply with the Communion's insistence that homosexuality is unbiblical and immoral. The Episcopal Church (USA) is under direct pressure from African churches to submit to their authority and that of the majority and disavow any approval of same-sex love as compatible with biblical teaching. Beyond the psychic and spiritual impact that the outcome of this struggle will have on millions of gay Anglicans, the controversy is important because it is a barometer of the shifting balance of power in global Christianity from Europe and the US to the developing world.

Most of the things I read about the subject are written by American Episcopalians, so it was really nice to see that First Things has a substantive essay by Henry Luke Orombi (photo above), the Anglican archbishop of Uganda. The essay is about what it means to be Anglican from the Ugandan perspective.

The article is clear. Orombi writes about Ugandan Anglicanism as a personal, experiential, revivalist, biblical, and order-loving tradition. It's a good (though sliding into reductive) characterization of what is clearly a vital faith community.

But what to make of passages in the essay like this one, in which Orombi writes, almost canonically, about an episode of martyrdom that he deems critical to Ugandan Anglicanism?:

Less than a year later, on June 3, 1886, the king of Buganda ordered the killing of twenty-six of his court pages because they refused his homosexual advances and would not recant their belief in King Jesus. They cut and carried the reeds that were then wrapped around them and set on fire in an execution pit. As the flames engulfed them, these young martyrs sang songs of praise. Far from eliminating Christianity, the martyrdoms had the opposite effect: If the faith of these martyrs was worth dying for, then it must also be something worth living for. Christianity began to spread like wildfire.

If this indeed is how the episode happened (which is always, sadly, a questionable proposition when it comes to tales of martyrdom), it's clearly tragic. But to cast the tribal pagan king as a predatory homosexual plays into the worst stereotypes of homosexuals as sexual deviants. It's a grossly unfair characterization of homosexuality-reminiscent of how the late Jerry Falwell and other American evangelicals have consistently tried to cast regular human beings who happen to be gay as demons and predators. And to make the assertion that this story is foundational for the faith of Ugandan Anglicanism? It strikes me a bit like claiming that the Puritan faith in America was built on the blood of innocent Christian women and children who were raped and killed by red-skinned savages. Certainly, such tragedies happened... but they don't tell the whole story of how Puritanism developed in America and they grossly mis-characterize the nature of the conflict. I'm quite sure that there is more complexity to the story of Ugandan Anglicanism than the triumph of Christians over randy and tyrannical gay tribal kings.

And then there's this quote, a paraphrase of which I hear a lot from American Christian opponents of homosexuality:

The gospel exists to challenge the worldview of all—even Anglicans—who do not see the joy and beauty of a life lived with confidence in a great and dynamic God who can and does intervene in the affairs of human beings.

The gospel exists to "challenge the worldview of all"-as though homosexuality were merely a cultural anomaly, prevalent only in the "secular West" that needs to be challenged and, one supposes, shown to be false. This is a throw-away line that could just as easily be turned around and directed at Orombi and the African churches: why could we not presume that, as God has done countless times throughout history and is documented in the evolution of faith in the scriptures themselves, that God is doing a "new thing" by adding homosexuality to the list of formerly prohibited activities (like divorce) that are now understood as fully consistent with a faithful life? Perhaps it's the homophobic worldview that the gospel is now standing up to challenge?

The essay left me no doubt as to why the controversy in the Anglican Communion continues: if Orombi is characteristic of African bishops, they are intellectual, faithful, passionate, and sadly, talking around the issues that homosexual Christians raise, not directly to them.

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Here are two items on the current human rights environment for homosexuals in Uganda. Both are a few years old, but they give American readers better insight into Orombi's local context.
From Amnesty International
From a blog called Black Looks