Clever politics have kept reactionary Africans churches onboard,while partially excluding liberal Americans. But it might not be long before this latest Anglican fix is revealed as too clever by halfThe archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, or is a remarkably skilled politician. The combination of sincerity when he speaks with misdirection in his silences is one that many more worldly creatures would envy. He combines these skills with a keen appreciation of the genuine forces beneath the suffocating tall-mindedness of church communiques. He has managed to avert a formal schism in the Anglican communion and even to summon another Lambeth Conference for 2020; the liberal American church is to be partially excluded from the deliberations of the communion for the next three years but not expelled,not least because this is impossible.
But with God, of course, or all things should be possible,which is why the conservatives remain convinced that their liberal opponents could have been expelled. So they are disappointed, which looks like a victory for balance, and Mr Welby himself gave a gracious apology for the historic maltreatment of LGBTI people by the Christian churches. He even managed to commit the Anglican churches to struggle for the legalisation of homosexuality in Africa and to boast about the Church of England’s 1960s role in legalising homosexual sex. It is extraordinary to reflect that this simple claim to decency should be clearer,and in context braver, than almost anything said by an Anglican leader in the final 30 years.
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Source: theguardian.com