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 By his very existence, the Reverend Gene Robinson – the openly gay Anglican bishop of New Hampshire – is an agent for change in his church, and society at large. He spoke with Peter Hackney.
He is friendly, mild-mannered and avuncular.
He doesn’t seem like someone who’d tear an entire church apart.
Yet Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the history of the Anglican Church, has been accused of doing just that.
So controversial is he that at the recent Lambeth Conference, the decennial conference of Anglican bishops from across the globe, more than 200 of the 800 invited bishops refused to attend. They didn’t boycott the event because Gene Robinson was invited – he wasn’t.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Anglican Church, didn’t invite him.
They shunned Lambeth because some of the bishops who consecrated Robinson would be there. Apparently, it was bad enough to even be in close proximity to Robinson’s supporters.
But the world’s first openly gay Anglican bishop (indeed, the first in all of mainstream Christendom) won’t let recalcitrant reverends curb his life’s work.
Despite the lack of a welcome mat at Lambeth, Robinson fronted up anyway.
“I took a vow, as did all bishops, to participate in the councils of my church to the best of my abilities,” he tells SX by phone from Canterbury, shortly after Lambeth’s conclusion.
“And that’s what I came here to do.”
So, while the ecclesiastical talkfest was underway, Robinson could be found “on the margins” in Canterbury, holding discussion forums of his own, preaching a message of inclusiveness for queer people in the Anglican church.
“I shifted my focus from being a part of the conference to other work, around LGBT issues instead,” he says. “And I’m not happy about that. I mean, I’m not unhappy working around those issues, but I don’t like being cast into the role of a single issue person.”
For, like all gay people (and indeed all heterosexuals) there is much more to Gene Robinson than his sexuality. His recent book, In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Centre by God, is the work of a man concerned with social justice generally. His ministry seems especially concerned with those traditionally on the margins of his church: women, young people, prisoners, and yes – gay and lesbian people too.
Yet the world at large has reduced his life to the glib tag of “the gay bishop”.
But Robinson has come to an understanding: “I’ve made peace with the fact that this just happens to be an accident of history. In earlier times, an openly gay man could not have been a bishop. In the future, I believe, there will be many openly gay bishops. So rather than bemoaning my lot, I just want to be a good steward of this opportunity, at this juncture in history.”
First and foremost, that stewardship involves reaching out to gay and lesbian people who have been “damaged” by the church, and inviting them back into the fold.
“Gay people have been abused, really, by the church, and just mindlessly suggesting that they go back is like telling an abused spouse to go back to her husband,” he contends. “But what I say is that God and the church aren’t the same thing. The church has gotten this and many other things wrong. God hasn’t gotten it wrong.
“Moreover, the church that you left may not be the church that’s there now. There has been a lot of change. It doesn’t mean that every church is safe, but there are enough safe places that gay and lesbian people can find a place that will really welcome them.”
A case in point is Robinson’s own experience in the Diocese of New Hampshire.
Robinson, who was ordained a priest in 1973, ‘came out’ in the mid 1980s, after his first marriage ended. (He is still close friends with ex-wife Isabella “Boo” McDaniel, and has two daughters with her.)
In 1987, he met his male partner, Mark Andrew, while holidaying on the Caribbean island of St Croix; they moved in together eighteen months later.
In 2003, Robinson was elected Bishop of New Hampshire, and in June this year Robinson and Andrew ‘tied the knot’ in a civil ceremony, followed by a religious ceremony at a church within the diocese.
“The one place where I am not ‘the gay bishop’ is in my own diocese,” Robinson reports. “I tell people that if you want to see what the church is going to be like when we finish obsessing about sex, come to New Hampshire. There I’m just the bishop. I spend ninety per cent of my time in the diocese doing the things that a bishop does, and my sexuality is rarely mentioned. [It’s only] when I leave the diocese that I become this other thing.”
He becomes “this other thing” because, at this point, New Hampshire is still an aberration. More typical of the Anglican Communion is the Diocese of Sydney, which is not so affirming of gay people.
The Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, was one of the bishops who refused to attend Lambeth this year. Instead, Jensen attended an alternative event in Jerusalem called the Global Anglican Future Conference.
SX was unable to arrange an audience with Jensen, however his senior media advisor, Russell Powell, agreed to relay several questions to the archbishop, which were answered by email.
Asked why he did not attend Lambeth this year, Jensen replied: “The reasons for not attending Lambeth involved matters of conscience and pastoral concern, matters which the Archbishop of Canterbury said he fully understood and appreciated. In a sense, the attendance or non-attendance of Gene Robinson was beside the point. The problem was the attendance of those who had consecrated him.”
He added: “The consecration of an actively homosexual bishop was a presenting issue, but the reasons for the current crisis go much deeper … The fabric of the communion has been torn by the actions of the North American church.”
Tellingly, Jensen did not reply to the question: ‘Do you believe that gay and lesbian people have any place in the Anglican Church – and if so, can you describe what that place might be?’
For his part, Robinson says: “It is ironic that the Sydney Diocese, taking in one of the great gay cities of the world, is also among the most bigoted.”
While the Diocese of Sydney is not atypical, it would be a mistake to see Robinson as a pigeon among the cats – to invert a cliché – whenever he steps outside his New Hampshire ‘safety zone’.
Influential figures within the church, such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town, strongly support Robinson. Tutu even penned the foreword in Robinson’s book.
“Apartheid, crassly racist, sought to penalise people for something about which they could do nothing,” he wrote. “I could not stand by while people were being penalised again for something about which they could do nothing – their sexual orientation … Gene Robinson is a wonderful person and I am proud to belong to the same church as he.”
Robinson also enjoys powerful support in the wider community. While the Archbishop of Canterbury has only acceded to one meeting with him – and then under such secrecy that he was told the venue at the last possible moment – Robinson has already had three one-on-one meetings with US presidential candidate Barack Obama, the man many believe will be the next President of the United States.
What people like Obama and Tutu realise, says Robinson, is that far from being dependent on texts from thousands of years ago for God’s word, the human relationship with God is a living, breathing, ever-evolving one.
“The beauty of Anglicanism is that we are not a church that believes God stopped revealing himself at the end of the first century, when the canon of scripture was closed,” Robinson says.
“God did not reveal everything about himself with the end of the life of Jesus, but promised that the Holy Spirit would lead us all into the truth.”
“I believe that’s what happened with slavery, and the church’s treatment of people of colour, and it’s happening with the treatment of women, and now it’s happening again with sexual minorities.
“For a long time, we’ve had a church that’s believed you can’t put ‘gay’ and ‘Christian’ in the same sentence. I believe those days are coming to an end.”
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Eye of the storm
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