by Martin Davie
Introduction
On 2 March I published on my blog an initial response to Professor Helen King’s PMM:
‘That this Synod affirm that there are no fundamental objections to being in a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship, and that such a relationship can be entirely compatible with Christian discipleship.’
Now the motion has been scheduled for debate in General Synod in July, I offer this more detailed piece, based on chapter 6 of my book Glorify God in your Body which was commended by CEEC as a resource for the LLF project,[1] as further explanation of why I believe that faithful Christians cannot vote for this motion as it stands.
1. Everyone is doing it
Everyone is having sex with everyone else, inside and outside of marriage, almost all of the time – or so it would appear from the media today. The notion of abstaining from sexual activity is not on our society’s radar. Relationship education in schools assumes that all young people will be sexually active and that what they need is protection from any psychological or physical harm that may result. When celibacy is mentioned, it is almost always viewed negatively. As Ed Shaw observes,
‘The basic premise of Hollywood comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and 40 Days and 40 Nights demonstrates this – this first chronicles a man’s increasingly desperate attempts to have sex for the first time; in the second another younger man struggles to last just forty days and nights without it. In the world around us, celibacy is a bad thing, to be avoided at all costs.’[2]
What is more, the Church often colludes with the culture. Although many churches take a traditional Christian view of sexual ethics and still teach that people should abstain from sex outside marriage, neither they, nor other more liberal churches, tend to teach that people might choose to abstain altogether and follow the path of singleness instead. As Shaw has found, ‘When tackled, singleness is usually spoken of as a temporary problem happily solved by marriage. You’re taught how to survive until your wedding day – not how to thrive as a single person until your dying day. Again, celibacy is a bad thing to be avoided at almost any cost.’[3]
Today’s approach is similar to the cultural attitudes surrounding the Early Church. Contrary to the late Philp Larkin in his poem Annus Mirabilis, sexual intercourse did not begin in 1963.[4]