On Virtue

When twenty years ago I participated in a training of trainers workshop on critical social analysis, which was becoming an important tool in the field of development education in which I was then working, one of the facilitators urged us to make certain we read the reflections of those with whom we profoundly disagree. He insisted it was important for us to know exactly what the political, economic and religious opposition were saying. Although I still find this an uncomfortable pursuit, I try to maintain it because I’ve learnt the value of discerning where those with whom I am at odds are coming from.

So one of the websites I visit from time to time is VirtueOnline, run by a man with the intriguing name of David Virtue. The site claims to be ‘The Voice of Global Orthodox Anglicanism’ and to be read by more than a million people each year. Its style is deliberately confrontational. It doesn’t want to engage in reasonable dialogue with anyone, but convinced that the views it promotes are both ‘Anglican’ and ‘True’ takes to task is an unrestrained and abusive way, those with whom Virtue disagrees principally Episcopal Church bishops whom he characterises as frauds and liars.

VirtueOnline is obsessed with homosexuality, which raises questions about the psychological disposition of those who subscribe to its extremist views on this and other subjects. According to Stephen Bates in his book A Church at War, it was Virtue who bombastically announced at the Episcopal Convention in the process of confirming Gene Robinson’s election as Bishop of New Hampshire, that he had found the ‘smoking gun’ that would guarantee Robinson’s defeat. This was an allegation that Robinson was associated with an Internet gay porn site, something which after due investigation turned out to be false. Of course there has been no apology for this, or any other false claim that has appeared on Virtue’s website which seems incapable of admitting that it can get things wrong.

This week the website took on the Church in Wales, of which I am a member, and in particular Archbishop Barry Morgan’s presidential address to a recent meeting of the Church’s Governing Body. Under the headline ‘Archbishop Launches Attack on Anglican Church’ Virtue claims that Archbishop Barry ‘launched a shocking condemnation of his own Church’. Virtue also noted the dreaded ‘h’ word in the Archbishop’s address, claiming that the Archbishop ‘used the opportunity to turn the focus of the Anglican Church once again on the issue of homosexuality’.

VirtueOnline in fact gives a completely distorted view of the contents of the Archbishop’s address. To begin with, the first half of the address is devoted to discussion of the ‘make poverty history’ campaign and the need to seriously address poverty both at home and abroad. But poverty is not something that appears high on VirtueOnline’s hierarchy of virtues or vices and thus attracts no mention.

When later in the document the Archbishop addresses the issue of sexuality, he records that in February he participated both in the meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, and in the Anglican Primates’ meeting in Ireland. He devotes time to outlining the studious, dialogical, and consensus-building way that the WCC has proceeded with the task of engaging in study of human sexuality mandated at its 1998 Assembly. There is an implied critique here of the way by contrast that the Anglican Primates have approached discussion of the issue, which, he says, has been more of ‘a verbal slanging match’. The WCC process was marked with ‘openness and became encounters with sacred humanness’ because, as the Archbishop puts it, ‘people felt able to speak openly and honestly because they were listened to with respect and understanding’.

So what he advocates as essential within the Anglican Communion debate ‘is not a theological rant or a throwing of verbal grenades at people who happen to disagree at our own particular positions, but a reasoned, balanced discourse of some of the issues involved and the giving of space and time to every kind of viewpoint . . . . If the Church of God can’t conduct a debate in a civilised way when it claims to be a reconciled and reconciling community – what message does that give to the world? We cannot as a Church call for compassion, peace and justice in our nation and in our world if we as Christians do not exemplify those virtues in our own lives and in our dealings with one another’.

Amen to all that! And Amen too to Archbishop Barry’s taking to heart the Lambeth and Primates’ concern that we ‘listen to the experience of homosexual people, be committed to their pastoral support and see their victimisation or diminishment as abhorrent’ and initiating a process in the Church in Wales which honours those undertakings. Would that more bishops, particularly those in the so-called ‘south’ – the churches of Africa, Asia and Latin America - were willing to treat the possibility of dialogue this seriously. Unfortunately their rampant homophobia does not allow them to meet with lesbian and gay Christians, even were they able to identify them. Many of the African Bishops I know maintain, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that homosexuality is a ‘disease’ brought by white colonists to an Africa which had no history of it. The dialogue which Archbishop Morgan pursues in faithfulness to the Gospel, sadly remains an impossibility for most of the so-called ‘orthodox’ churches of the South as well as for VirtueOnline.