The bible knows nothing of homosexual orientations, says bishop gene robinson

October 30, 2007

By Nigel Collett

The man at the centre of the storm which is currently tearing apart the worldwide Anglican Communion, Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire – the world’s first openly gay bishop – made a surprise visit to Hong Kong last week. Nigel Collett reports.

This guest column was written by Nigel Collett for Hong Kong’s Civil Rights for Sexual Diversities (www.cr4sd.org), a NGO working for the rights of people who may be disadvantaged by the law, policies and social prejudices in Hong Kong because of their sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual expression. The column will be written by founding member Roddy Shaw and various writers. Bishop Gene Robinson’s election in 2003 set off the latest round in the struggles being waged inside the Anglican Church (also known widely as the Episcopalian Church) between a coalition of homophobic conservative and fundamentalist clergy and their liberal opponents. It led, in February this year, to an ultimatum being presented to the American province of the Church by the Anglican primates assembled in Tanzania, who called upon their American colleagues to stop appointing openly gay clergy and to cease allowing church blessings of same sex couples on penalty of expulsion from the communion. This lamentable piece of blackmail was committed largely at the urging of a few bigoted African archbishops who claim that homosexuality is a sin and threaten schism, a split in the church, if toleration is shown to it, and who will not even bring themselves to sit in the same room as fellow priests who are gay. The Bible, Bishop Gene Robinson said, “knew nothing of homosexual orientations,” which had only begun to be discussed 120 or so years ago, and so “can’t speak on that issue.” The bishop’s consecration threatens an Anglican schism led by conservative African Churches who oppose the gay bishop’s ordination. The fall out from this will doubtless cause further conflict at this year’s forthcoming meeting of all Anglican bishops at Lambeth, a gathering to which Bishop Gene Robinson has the sad distinction of being the only bishop in the Communion who has not been issued an invitation. So, in the present circumstances where the Anglican Communion is too riven to have yet established a workable approach to its gay clergy, most Anglicans are either chary of meeting Bishop Robinson or are directly opposed to what he stands for, and it is not surprising that his visit to Hong Kong was not an official one. But enough of a programme had been arranged for him to make a local mark. He had been invited by a group of liberal Christians (the Hong Kong Christian Institute, the Hong Kong Women’s Christian Council and the [interfaith] Spiritual Seekers Society) plus the Hong Kong University’s Faculty of Education, to bring his experiences of fighting homophobia and discrimination to Hong Kong and to meet some of the local gay Christians and hear their stories. Bishop Gene’s programme kicked off with a public lecture at the City University on Saturday, 20 October, and included a meeting with the congregation of the Blessed Minority Christian Fellowship (Hong Kong’s only church ministering specifically for LGBT people) on Oct 21. Later that day, he attended evensong in the Bethanie Chapel in Pok Fu Lam. Aside from this formal programme, it is also understood that Hong Kong’s new Anglican primate, Archbishop Paul Kwong, met Bishop Gene privately, in keeping with the Anglican Church’s policy of listening to the views of its LGBT clergy and laity. The flavour of the short visit became clear at the public lecture, which was introduced by a senior lecturer of the Hong Kong Baptist University’s Department of Religion, Dr Chan Sze-chi, and by an American Anglican priest resident in Hong Kong, Father Frank Alagna. The latter described Bishop Gene as “a lightning rod for some of the most violent and pathologically homophobic reactions” since his election, and said that as a result he was now “an icon for LGBT people around the world.” The Bishop recently made an appearance at number 15 on the top 40 heroes list in the Sept edition of US gay news magazine The Advocate. The 60-year-old proved to be remarkably steady under the pressure of both this introduction, of his turbulent life and the questions to which he was later exposed by his audience. He spoke movingly of his personal history as a gay man brought up in a conservative southern church, who had abandoned much of his fundamentalist past to become an Episcopalian priest, but had continued for decades to fight his sexuality. After two years in which he underwent psychotherapy twice a week, he had married a girl and gone on to father two daughters, but, after 13 years of marriage, he had found it impossible to deny his real sexuality and had amicably divorced. He had then, almost immediately, met the man who was to become the love of his life and his partner for twenty years until today. He affirmed himself as a ‘practising homosexual’ bishop and thanked God for his life. Robinson confessed that he had had no idea of the storm he would be raising by his election (which, it is interesting to note, was, in true American fashion, and unlike the rest of the Anglican church, a democratic one by all his fellow clergy and the ordinary people, the lay members of his diocese’s churches. These had come to know him in his 35 years of work in the diocese and had chosen him despite his open gay sexuality). He thought that the furor his election had caused was due to the fact that all churches were now at last having to come to terms with the way science was revealing that there was really no end to the diverse nature of sexuality, and that it really was no longer possible to view the world in terms of the male and female recognised by the Bible. The Bible, he said, “knew nothing of homosexual orientations,” which had only begun to be discussed 120 or so years ago, and so “can’t speak on that issue.” Complicating all the religious arguments, he regretted, was the politicisation of gay issues by the conservative right in the States, which was all too happy to collect votes from fundamentalists by playing the anti-gay card. The bishop was, despite all his current setbacks, serenely optimistic about the direction that things were heading. God’s last word, he was sure, had not been written when the Bible was completed and what science revealed could not be gone back upon. He felt that the Anglican Communion was involved now in a unique experiment in trying to work out how to live together with such radically different views among its members; they would, he believed, manage eventually to live together with ‘infinite respect.’ The difficulty with which such an outcome would be achieved was illustrated immediately the meeting was thrown open to the floor; among the audience, which numbered around a hundred, were quite a few whose religious persuasion was antithetical to the Bishop’s, and he was faced with what became, at times, some vituperative questioning of his own personal morality and lifestyle. He rose above this and even found it in him to offer God’s blessings to some of those who were in the process of spitting hatred at him, a living proof, and a much needed one, that compromise can be achieved by tolerance and mutual respect. At the root of his message was his belief in the absolute need for honesty, an issue, of course, which is of clear relevance to the largely closeted society of Hong Kong. “When someone will not acknowledge what I am, that hurts me,” he said. We had to work “to get to the place where we honour the choices other people make.” Justice would be finally achieved when all the civil rights, like marriage, that currently refer only to ‘man’ are held to apply equally to all, irrespective of their differences. And, in a parting shot, he pledged he would be going to the bishops’ conference at Lambeth, whether invited to participate or just to watch from the outside. Closing the session, Dr Chan Sze-chi made a plea that Hong Kong and China import no more dogmatism from the West. Communism and capitalism had been foreign implants and now there was a threat that ‘evangelical intransigence and intolerance’ would infect a Chinese world in which there had always been a tolerance for sexual divergence. He had seen signs of this in Hong Kong and Singapore, and hoped that China recognised this danger before it was too late. The Bishop’s visit was a welcome breath of liberal air in a country where the fundamentalists seem to make the greatest noise and where the moderate majority of the mainstream churches keep their heads below the parapet. Those who heard him with respect will wish him ‘God speed’ in his visit to Lambeth. Nigel Collett is an English biographer and businessman living in Hong Kong. Author of several books, including The Butcher of Amritsar, he has written for GMagazine and reviews for the Asian Review of Books. He is a moderator for the Hong Kong Man International Literary Festival.

Related Articles

US anglicans pledge to halt gay bishop ordinations

SE asia anglicans split from US church over gay bishop issue

first gay bishop for US anglicans

asian anglican leaders condemn appointment of openly gay bishop

Related Sites

Hong Kong’s Civil Rights for Sexual Diversities