Culture Friday: A rift over marriage

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s the 24th day of February 2023. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday!

Joining us now is John Stonestreet,president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: John, I want to draw on your knowledge of the Anglican Church. This week, I saw that 12 leading archbishops in the Anglican Communion issued a statement that they no longer consider the Archbishop of Canterbury their leader: Justin Welby.

That objectors’ group is primarily from the more conservative global south but also included the archbishop here in North America. And the issue that caused this break is the Church of England’s move this month to bless same-sex unions. Not to perform actual weddings, but to allow priests to bless civil marriages between same-sex couples.

Let’s listen to some audio from a conservative minister in the Church of England, Calvin Robinson, who appeared before the Oxford Union to debate this move of the Church of England. Have a listen:

ROBINSON: "The Church is imploding. The faithful masses have stopped turning up on Sundays. We are seeing the most rapid decline of Christianity in this country that we may have ever seen. Do not accelerate this with heresy.

“You do not have the authority to bless sin! When I hear the bishop of London on record saying these new prayers will mean priests can bless same-sex relationships, some of which will be sexual in nature, I hear the devil at work. Bishops are promoting the idea of sacramental sodomy. Let them be anathema! Repent!

“And to the rest of you. I have no doubt some of you will consider me a bigot, a homophobe. But I am neither of those things. I am simply a follower of Christ. A Christian. We are naturally counter-cultural, and if the so-called liberals were truly diverse and tolerant, they would embrace us just as they embrace everyone else. …

“But in the words of St. Athanasius of Alexandria:

‘If the world is against the truth, then I am against the world.’”

I’ll mention that Calvin Robinson is a WORLD Opinions columnist and I’ll link to his most recent piece in today’s transcript.

But John, this seems really significant. The Wall Street Journal has a respected religion writer who called this a historic rift, a watershed moment, that could—he wrote—“threaten the very sur­vival of the An­gli­can Com­mu­nion.”

Is he right?

STONESTREET: Well, yes, in terms of the Anglican Communion as it's always been, but that's the thing is the Anglican Communion is no longer centered on the Church of England in any sort of global sense. But even what you mentioned earlier that the Archbishop in North America sign this statement rejecting the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He's the archbishop of one aspect of the Anglican Communion here in America. The other is the Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Church had already kind of violated church policy, which has been really clear for a really long time. And the leadership out of Canterbury has done nothing to rein in bishops around the world, particularly in Western nations like the United States and Canada and New Zealand and other places who have been violating church policy for a really long time. Justin Welby had already lost his authority with the vast majority of Anglican bishops around the world, particularly those in the global south for that, for not being willing to do anything. That's why we have two so-called leaders of the Anglican Church in America. If somebody calls themself in America an Episcopalian, then it's very questionable whether they hold to any sort of Orthodox beliefs about Gospel, about Bible, or about sex, marriage and gender. If somebody calls themselves an Anglican in America, they are distinguishing themselves from the Episcopalians. There's already been bridges too far, long before this one. But this was another step because this was an official rejection of historic church policy and clearly a step in the wrong direction, as Father Robinson actually said, in his brilliant and courageous statements. The Anglican Communion, again, the gravity of it, the center of it is outside of the Church of England. There are more Anglicans meeting in Nigeria than in all of England and the United States and Canada combined. In other words, the communion just isn't what many people think it's going to be. So it'll survive in a form and it'll still be strong because these churches are strong. Their numbers are strong. The leadership by and large not flawless, but strong. And part of that has to do with being outside of the West. You're not postmodern if you've never really gone through modernism in the same way. And most of these global bishops are in parts of the world where what's at stake is who's going to win a conflict with radical Islam? What's at stake here, in these places, doesn't offer kind of the levity and the gravity to kind of rethink, oh, well, maybe men can be women and women can be men. So look, yes, this is going to create an even bigger rift—it already has—within the Anglican Communion. It's already been pronounced, it's already been significant. And that's because of two things. Number one, the global leadership of the Anglican Communion as represented by these bishops who wrote this letter, they're not going to move. They're not moving period. And this move by the Church of England is part of the trajectory they have away from orthodoxy, and away from Christianity in any sort of recognizable form. Essentially, much of the Episcopal Church in America had already become kind of a pseudo spiritual, NPR-ish sort of Buddhism where God is a force and maybe a woman and has no rules and just is in it for us, and we should all be good, tolerant progressives. Well, the Church of England has been on that same trajectory, just a step behind. And this just demonstrates where they're headed. So they're continuing to move further and further away from where most of the community actually is.

BROWN: John, the Supreme Court this week heard two cases related to big tech and its responsibility for content.

We don’t have time in this setting to get into the legal particulars. It seems as though the Court is edging toward deferring to Congress to set policy rather than the court’s making policy.

I’d like to hear where you come down on this issue. Do you think that big tech ought to be held liable—at least more so than it is now? But do you worry that increased liability could become a heavier weapon to shut down conservative or Christian speech?

STONESTREET: Well, look, you have to have, I think, some sort of accountability for this. And Big Tech kind of has been the wild wild west for so long and kind of playing by its own rules. So yes, I do think it ought to be held liable, and definitely more so than it is right now. I think that's particularly true when we talk about not just what's happening at the Supreme Court. But this proposal from Josh Hawley this week, which has a much more personal flavor than these court cases. But the idea is Hawley proposed social media platforms are bad for teenagers. We know that. Everything says this. No one's held them accountable. Suddenly the rules don't apply. And so it has proven to be so bad, especially for young women, that we need to set an age limit just like we do for tobacco or drinking or voting or driving or any other thing that kind of carries with it a level of responsibility. And there needs to be some sort of governance. And so Hawley proposed that. I struggle with that because the last thing I think we need is the government making more rules. What I think it actually tells us when the government has to make these kinds of rules is that we are a group of people that don't know how to govern ourselves. And it goes to what Chuck Colson talked about when he used this phrase: it's either the conscience or the constable. Either we are self-governing people or we have to be governed from the outside. The more government has to step in, the more that it reflects that we are not actually taking care of ourselves. That's absolutely true here. The fact of the matter is social media as a plague. Social media is bad. And that's what we've seen in that aspect of Big Tech, when it comes to social media companies. Instagram and Tiktok are just really, really bad for kids. It's really, really bad for teenage girls. And if parents don't govern, we need to have some sort of regulation come into the picture. But look, we have a government that every few years flips back and forth. And part of that flipping involves restricting in one way or another either Christian speech, Christian presence, Christian conviction, the rights of individuals to live according to their faith, because it's deemed to be not only wrong, it's deemed to be dangerous. And the limits of speech stop when there is danger. Well, if you can take a whole group of speech and put it under the label of dangerous whether that's true or not, then you can accomplish an awful lot. And that's what's happening with the progressive left. Without arguments on their side, there is a tendency to categorize entire groups of people and entire groups of speech as being dangerous, hateful, bigoted or something like that. So I guess you could say, in a sense, we're kind of in between a rock and a hard place. And we're not the kind of people who want to be governed and we have a schizophrenic government presence when it comes to Big Tech. And it's just going to get I think more and more confusing and difficult to navigate.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John!

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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