NEWS FEATURE: Anglican bishop defends his `Godless Morality’ as `apostolic imperative’

c. 1999 Religion News Service DUNDEE, Scotland _ Bishop Richard Holloway of Edinburgh didn’t seem to mind that his latest controversial book,”Godless Morality,”was criticized by Archbishop George Carey at a meeting the bishop was hosting. Indeed, Holloway said, he sees the book, which prompted Carey’s criticism during his presidential address at the opening of the […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

DUNDEE, Scotland _ Bishop Richard Holloway of Edinburgh didn’t seem to mind that his latest controversial book,”Godless Morality,”was criticized by Archbishop George Carey at a meeting the bishop was hosting.

Indeed, Holloway said, he sees the book, which prompted Carey’s criticism during his presidential address at the opening of the 11th meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in Dundee, as an attempt to speak to”a whole church in exile out there.” Holloway’s views prompted one prelate, Archbishop Moses Tay of Singapore, to refuse to attend the meeting of 70 top lay and clergy leaders of the 70 million-member Anglican Communion. Holloway, as primus of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, is host for the meeting.


In an interview with RNS during the meeting, which ends Sept. 24, Holloway said he is convinced many good people had left Christianity”for bad reasons”and turned their backs on a church”which strained at gnats and swallowed camels and turned a blind eye to great evils.” Indeed, he added, he saw the book, despite Carey’s criticism of its”godlessness,”as”a kind of apostolic imperative”to try to reach these people.

Holloway, who had intended to run as a Labor Party candidate for the new Scottish Parliament elected earlier this year, abandoned the effort to stay in the church and fight the fight fanned into existence by last year’s once-a-decade Lambeth Conference of the world’s Anglican bishops. Had he been elected, he would have had to resign his post as bishop of Edinburgh and head of the Scottish church.

At Lambeth, bishops adopted resolutions restating conventional church stands on sexual morality and continued to insist that gays and lesbians could not be ordained to the priesthood.

Holloway, a longtime advocate of gay rights in both church and society, said it was not just what he called”the homophobia”of his fellow bishops that convinced him to stick with ecclesiastical rather than secular politics, but also what he said appears to be a centralizing tendency in Anglicanism _ efforts to establish not so much an Anglican papacy as an Anglican curia, the word used to describe the powerful, centralized Vatican bureaucracy.

Asked whether devoting so much attention in the new book to issues of sexual morality, including tolerance for young people”shagging”_ the term he uses for premarital sex _ might not detract from what he and the church in general have to say about such injustices as the burden of international debt, Holloway said that”when a bishop talks about sex it makes a news story, but if I talked about international debt I would be lucky to get one paragraph.” Holloway said he also thought injustice was”seamless.””We can do something about the systemic injustices in Christianity, because they are our own creation,”he said. At the same time, he said he remains passionately and vocally concerned about other major issues of injustice such as the way in which people everywhere are becoming increasingly powerless in the face of power wielded by multinational corporations.”Godless Morality,”he said, is an attempt to carve out the possibility of some kind of minimum agreed approach to questions of ethics that could unite people who believe in God and people who don’t.”Many unbelievers are good people and many believers are bad people,”he said. Meanwhile, the fundamental Christian ethic is God’s passion for the poor and marginalized _ an ethic that is also part of other religious traditions, he added.”I also think, actually, that it’s an ethic that is implicit even for humanists, on all sorts of grounds,”Holloway said.”All sorts of arguments can be developed: An unjust world is an unstable world, and another person’s grief diminishes me.”In a sense, the divine ethic is implicit in creation by virtue of our being created,”he said.

Holloway also defended his use of the criteria of consent and the avoidance of harm to others in sexual relations as a basis for making moral judgments. The criteria, he said, rules out not just rape and child abuse but also the abuse of power for sexual ends.”Speaking quite personally, it doesn’t much bother me what you do,”he said.”It would bother me if I heard that you were a serial rapist or a molester of children, but it doesn’t bother me if you do kinky things with black leather. I honestly do not think that in the great scheme of things it matters very much. But for a certain kind of Christian preoccupation it matters too much.” He said human beings were incurably self-deluded on these and other matters.”But I think that these sins of the weakness of the flesh _ if they are sins at all _ compared to the weightier matters of the world which we get less worked up about are hardly important at all,”he said.

DEA END NOWELL

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