Response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s latest remarks have been swift and sharp. Archbishop Justin Welby was interviewed on LBC Radio on April 4. LBC is an independent news and talk format radio station in Britain. During the interview the archbishop was asked by an Anglican vicar who called in why the clergy should not be left to their own consciences to decide whether or not to bless gay marriages, which are now legal in Britain.
In his comments, which were not favorable to equal blessing, the Archbishop said that he had “stood by gravesides in Africa of a group of Christians who had been attacked because of something that had happened in America”. The incident took place in Nigeria, where 369 villagers were murdered by neighbors who claimed that “If we leave a Christian community here we will all be made to become homosexual, and so we will kill all the Christians.” Archbishop Welby uses the threat of violence to African Christians as a pretext for blockin the blessing of gay marriages in the rest of the Anglican Communion. In addition, the clear implication is that acceptance of marriage equality in the U.S. and Canada had at least an indirect connection with the murders in Nigeria.
Simon Sarmiento, in Thinking Anglicans, lists several of the negative reactions to the Archbishop’s remarks from around the Communion. British writer and activist Simon Hill rejects the logic of those who fear all Christians because some Christians are gay. “They show as much prejudice as those British people who assume that all British Muslims are comparable to the Taliban. The many LGBTI Christians in Africa need our support and solidarity. They don’t need the double curse of homophobia justified by racial, colonial assumptions.”
The website Ekklesia believes the killings were coming in any event, and the supposed gay connection is cynical. “It is quite possible that, even if Anglicans worldwide had been united in rejecting LGBT inclusion, those responsible for the massacre mentioned on LBC would have found some other excuse. Certainly the safety of Christians in majority communities across the world should be a matter of concern to Anglicans. It would best be served in the long term by reaffirming the theological case for human rights for all.”
Andrew Brown, in the Guardian newspaper, calls the Welby position moral blackmail. “Christians are called on to do what is right, and to trust that God will bring good out of it even if evil immediately follows. Failing to do what you believe is right is, in some lights, a kind of blasphemy.”
From the United States, The Rev. Susan Russell calls the Archbishop’s remarks pathetic. “The prophetic response to the tragedy in Nigeria would be refusal to allow those inflicting violence to frame the debate. Instead, we get from Canterbury this pathetic response, once again making LGBT people the sacrificial lambs on the altar of sectarian politics
But perhaps the most insightful response is from Bishop Marc Andrus from the Diocese of California. He sees colonial thinking at play: “this simplistic logic of the Archbishop only privileges the colonial power position Great Britain once held with respect to her now-vanished empire – that Africans pay close attention to everything the center of the empire thinks and does.”
Bishop Andrus also finds an analogy in American history:
Welby’s argument is parallel to saying that the segregation laws in the United States that obtained until the mid-60s and the disenfranchisement of women in the United States until the 20th Century should have both been continued if someone claimed that blacks and women in other countries would be endangered by moves towards greater justice here.
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