The Gospel according to Richard Coles
by Andrew Symes:
Another book by a C of E minister, another round of interviews; here is the latest instalment of the relentless campaign using secular media to engage public opinion and pressurize the church to accept and celebrate same sex relationships. But here is also a clearer picture of an alternative ‘Gospel’…
The distinctive sound of the 80’s electro-pop band The Communards featured catchy and insistent keyboard riffs, drum machine and the soaring falsetto voice of Jimmy Somerville. I never owned one of their records (for younger readers this is how music was consumed in those days!) but I was aware that the musician of the duo was Richard Coles, geeky, bespectacled, hunched over his synthesisers in performance on Top of the Pops and other hit shows. Fast forward twenty years and I had heard that Coles had been ordained as an Anglican priest in later life, and was also becoming well known as a radio presenter and occasional TV personality.
The openly gay Coles became vicar of a parish in Northamptonshire in 2011, and his civil partner with whom he shared his vicarage home was appointed as curate in a neighbouring church. In reply to polite questioning by the Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship, the Bishop’s Office said at the time that Coles was to be valued and encouraged as a high profile media personality with a colourful past who now spoke of God and the Church. As to his domestic arrangements, assurances had been given about living according to the church’s teaching, so that was the end of the matter. So they thought.
In last week’s Saturday Times Magazine, and then this week in the Independent and other outlets, Coles features in extensive interviews, which coincide with the launch of an autobiography entitled “Fathomless Riches”. The interviews succeed in contrasting Coles’ current roles as media ‘national treasure’ and vicar of a sleepy English village with the sordid excess of his pop star past – yet somehow bringing them together in Coles’ personality and in his journey into faith. The fame and fortune that resulted from the hit records, the parties, the drugs and sex, the fears about AIDS left an emptiness and a hunger for something more.
But this is not an evangelical testimony. Coles does not speak of repentance from the past, turning away from sin and finding Christ. Rather, it was in anonymous sexual encounters after spiritual awakening that he found liberation, and he attributes this to God: “In the love of Jesus Christ I discovered I was not so loathsome …as I thought I was.”The promiscuous behaviour, it seems, was not seen as sin leading to lostness from which he needed salvation, but a positive part of Coles’ spiritual journey, affirming him as a good and attractive person, from where he felt able to move towards God to satisfy the hunger in his soul. He says this:
“Do I think it was consistent with a Christian calling? No. We are called upon to be faithful. But it was extremely healing for me. Would I repudiate it? No…I can’t.” What he did repent of though was pretending that he was HIV positive at a time in the 90’s when many friends died.
The term “faithful” does not appear to refer to faithfulness to Christ or Scripture. In the context of the interview, carried out in the vicarage study while Coles’ partner interrupts bringing tea and then is visible in the garden bringing in the laundry off the line, moving as a gay man from promiscuity to settled monogamy is the “faithfulness” of which Coles speaks. The conversation turns to the debate about sexuality raging in the Church of England, and how it impacts this particular couple. “If they marry they would be disobeying their Bishops and risk losing their jobs”, we’re told. Coles says of their “celibate life”: “we can sleep in the same bed but we can’t have sex”, and gives some more detail of what they can and can’t officially do. Of course these ‘rules’ are presented as absurd and unfair, but the longsuffering Coles retains “hope that the church will eventually catch up with the notion of same sex relationships”. He believes that its better to fight for full ‘rights’ for same sex couples from inside the “homophobic” institution rather than outside.
Of all that he is quoted as saying, this statement may cause alarm even among his supporters: “Growing up realising you were gay in 1970s Britain was like being a paedophile now – it was a life that seemed to offer only disgrace and that was very wounding for me.” Perhaps Coles needs to be asked: if people with a natural sexual orientation to children are today feeling wounded by the sense of disgrace and shame they are made to feel by society, should we not as Christians be working towards their acceptance and inclusion as we have done with gay people?
Coles may or may not face a backlash from shocked parishioners or a mild reprimand from his Bishop for the public soul-baring. The main issue of course is not Coles’ personal sexual orientation, although his portrayal of celibate partnership is confusing at best as a witness to Christian teaching on marriage. A much more serious problem is the ‘Gospel’ he is promoting, whereby sexual excess liberates the soul and affirms the believer in his or her identity and self worth, leading to closer encounter with God and eventual settling into domestic “faithfulness”. Some are no doubt thinking that this Gospel could become popular and even arrest the decline of the C of E, asking why we haven’t thought of it before. Will Church leaders, ‘faithful’ in the true sense of the word, dare to speak and act against what is an ancient and destructive heresy?
Read also: A confession too far! Radio 4’s favourite vicar – who inspired TV’s Rev – tells how he enjoyed open-air sex with strangers and drug binges by Richard Pendlebury, Mailonline
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