A senior bishop has become the first openly to back gay marriage, provoking another row over an issue that has divided the Church of England.
Ruth Gledhill writes in The Times:
The Bishop of Salisbury, the Right Rev Nicholas Holtam, has told The Times he believes that there is no distinction between heterosexual and homosexual unions. Next week he will attend his first meeting of the General Synod, the Church’s parliament, where the contentious issue is due to be raised. The synod will also debate whether civil partnership ceremonies can be held in churches.
The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, recently spoke out against same-sex marriage, arguing that marriage was “a relationship between a man and a woman”. He and the Church hierarchy oppose David Cameron, a practising Anglican, who is in favour of gay marriage.
Bishop Holtam told The Times: “We are living in a different society. If there’s a gay couple in The Archers, if there’s that form of public recognition in popular soaps, we are dealing with something which has got common currency. All of us have friends, families, relatives, neighbours who are, or who know somebody, in same-sex partnerships.”
For a long time he believed that marriage could only be between heterosexual people. But he said: “I’m no longer convinced about that. I think same-sex couples that I know who have formed a partnership have in many respects a relationship which is similar to a marriage and which I now think of as marriage. And of course now you can’t really say that a marriage is defined by the possibility of having children. Contraception created a barrier in that line of argument. Would you say that an infertile couple who were knowingly infertile when they got married, weren’t in a proper marriage? No you wouldn’t.”
He said that in the Church marriage was defined by two people promising to love each other faithfully for life in the context of a sexual relationship, and that they might have children. But he believed that the Church was “moving towards” recognition of gay relationships. “Not all heterosexual marriages produce, or even have the potential for, children so that can’t be the single defining criteria setting them apart from same-sex partnerships.”
Ironically, this was the position once taken by the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams who, like Dr Sentamu, is opposed to gay marriage. In his 1989 essay The Body’s Grace, the future Archbishop said: “In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.”
Although the Archbishop is understood still to hold the same view, he has said that he does not consider he is entitled to promote it in a church that has not changed its mind. In church debates on the issue, he has consistently taken the conservative side, forcing his former friend Dr Jeffrey John, now Dean of St Albans, to stand down as Bishop of Reading after evangelicals objected to Dr John’s liberal teachings on sexuality.
Bishop Holtam said he did not think as a bishop that it would help if he were to “sublimate” his own views to the views of the Church. “Part of responsible leadership is having the vision, the sight, to see that’s where I want to go,” he told The Times.
His decision to speak out in support of gay marriage four months after his enthronement will confirm the fears of the Church’s conservative evangelical wing that he would offer unprecedented new leadership to the liberals. Before his appointment to Salisbury, Bishop Holtam was vicar of St Martin in the Fields, Central London, where the Queen was one of his parishioners and where gay couples who asked for prayers and blessings after their civil partnership ceremonies were offered them, even though there is no authorised liturgy for such services.