It may surprise some
of the readers of this blog that I’m very fond of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence.
Surprising because Powell’s twelve book sequence constructs an essentially
conservative, upper/upper-middle class representation of British (or more
specifically English) life between 1920 and 1970. Equally, stylistically, its
use of an observer ‘everyman’ figure, Nick Jenkins, who mediates every
relationship is hardly fashionable.
However, given that
the C of E and the wider church is, so often, rather behind the curve, I see in
Powell’s funny, sometimes supercilious and internecine representations of
upper-middle class life some telling remarks on current church issues.
The Dean of St Albans Jeffrey
John has gone public about his rejection as the next Bishop of Llandaff in the
Church in Wales. For those who forget, John is an out gay man in a celibate
civil partnership with another male priest. He has been in the running for
bishop posts on several occasions in the past fifteen or so years, including
the notorious incident when the protests of nine conservative bishops led to his not
taking the position of Bishop of Reading.
John has alleged that
he has been the victim of homophobia regarding the Bishop of Llandaff post; in
essence, he has been discounted from the process because he is likely to bring ‘unwelcome
and unsettling publicity’ to the diocese. It would seem that he has been discounted from a position for which he is arguably very suitable because he will be a bit
embarrassing for some.
It’s bewildering that
in our present culture that this might be adduced as sufficient evidence to
discount an obviously talented and called human being. Yet it reflects
something deeply problematic in our church culture.
Here Powell is
helpful. A Dance to the Music of Time
is not especially interested in the Church (though it has a significant subplot
about spirituality, the occult and destiny); it is concerned with class, art and
what it means to belong.
However, the sequence skilfully
indicates how privileged mid-20th century British culture negotiated
and ordered itself around tropes of what was considered outré and, more or
less, successfully reformed itself.
Powell indicates
something significant about upper middle-class culture at mid-20th
century that arguably hangs over into church culture at this late point: it
rather doesn’t matter what one gets up to as long as one is an ‘insider’ (as a
result of breeding, birth, artistic skill, recognition) and/or one doesn’t
cause too much scandal.
In Powell’s world, flouting many of the middle-middle and lower-middle class mores and self-representations
doesn’t prevent people from ‘getting on’ or being recognized as long as one isn’t
too obvious in one’s quirks and ‘deviations’. People have affairs, get divorced
and remarried, are gay and it’s no great issue. What matters is discretion or
belonging to right class group.
John clearly belongs - from the point of view of the traditional ideas about suitability for these sort of things - to the right kind of group to be considered bishop. He's a man. He studied at Oxford and
classics at that. He was Dean at Magdalen and so on. (That he is also Welsh might
reasonably be said to fit him to be a bishop in Wales.)
Yet, his sin is that
he has not hidden who is he is. He has not fit the strange mid-20th
century class overhang in the church that says that, to be a bishop and gay,
one must be discreet or even worse, in the closet. The Bishop of Grantham, Nicholas Chamberlain,
is also in a civil partnership, but kept very quiet about it until he felt under great pressure to come out. I’m often told,
by people better connected and informed than the bog-standard parish priest I am, that there are a goodly number of other bishops who are gay, bi etc. But
they have played the old game of discretion and secrecy. They have ‘chosen’ to
live in Powell’s world, perhaps because – at some level - they still think they’re
living in the old world of privilege and discretion.
Now I’m not suggesting
that, as long as one is discreet, anything goes in the church. However, the institution's seeming approval of 'closeting' as well as its ‘we all know that x is y, but no one talks about it’ pseudo-sophistication comes across as an anachronistic echo of Powell’s world where
the rich, privileged and the bohemian often acted in private with little
reference to their public personas and pronouncements.
Thankfully there is a
greater level of congruence in wider culture now. Closeting is not a healthy
place to be. The world where 'you can be LGBTI in the church and get on as long as you're discreet' needs to die. Yes, we all need to
negotiate distinctions between public and private, but a culture which rewards
those who keep their significant identities ‘discreet’ for the sake of form or
getting on while punishing those who are congruent is hardly healthy. This is
not the 1950s, no matter what some in the church might hope.
