Unity is a Christian gift that we've squandered
The Church has followed politics into factional in-fighting, writes George Pitcher, but it's not the gospel model
Unity is unfashionable – and I’m not talking about the Mitford sister. We used to aspire to unity. We used to think that unity of purpose and of will were good things.
Note, not uniformity, which is soulless and boring. But the kind of unity that affirmed that we’re all in this together, so that the greatest satisfaction wasn’t to impose our own convictions on others, but to invest valuable time in how we might work together for the common good.
By contrast, look around you and everywhere the message is that it’s my way or the highway. If you don’t like it, sling your hook. And if you’re not one of us, you’re the enemy.
Our mainstream political parties are the worst. Perhaps it’s because he was less elected than anointed, but Rishi Sunak’s promise as the new prime minister to bring unity is already turning to dust as the right-wing of his party turn on him over the Gordian knot of Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit position in Europe.
Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer feels enjoined to play the hard-bitten political gangster that he patently isn’t, turning on his opposition benches to tell them that left-wingers, who bear the mark of Cain that is the casually thoughtless jibe “Corbynistas”, have no place in his new, improved Labour Party.
“Echo chambers”
Social media, rightly or more probably wrongly, take much of the rap for this. We’re told that they have given us “echo-chambers” in which we only contemplate the validity of our own opinions, rather than those of others. I reckon it’s worse than that – social media are megaphones for shouting down those who oppose us. So much for the democracy that social media promised to enhance.
It’s why, if you voted for Brexit, you’re a racist Little Englander; if you’re a remainer (sorry, “remoaner”) then you’re part of a federal European conspiracy. Worried sick about climate change? You’re a Marxist wrecker of western capitalism.
Doubt the methodologies of climate campaigners? Then you’re a climate-denier (and note the contrived toxicity of “denialism” here). Believe in the Union of Britain? Then good riddance to Nicola Sturgeon – how dare she have aspired to self-determination for the Scottish people.
First among equals
And, pitifully, it’s the same with the Church. This week, the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans announced that 12 of its archbishops are “no longer able to recognise the present Archbishop of Canterbury as the first among equals leader of the global communion”, as a consequence of the Church of England’s Synodic decision to allow blessings of same-sex couples.
Cue a massive eye-roll. Here we go again. And here comes the Global South again. It was another gang of Global Southerners, supported by a bunch of renegade and ambitious Church of England bishops, who tried to overthrow the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at the 2008 Lambeth Conference.
I say “ambitious” because it was undoubtedly a power play. They saw the global Anglican communion as a post-imperial British relic and wanted that power transferred, principally to Africa. There’s an irony to this in the dissidents’ new statement, with the phrase “first among equals” – the Archbishop is indeed primus inter pares. There is no power to be transferred. But they want it anyway. The Global South doesn’t really do irony.
Common language
The current Archbishop and Williams’s successor, Justin Welby, started this month’s Synod, which opened the Church door to same-sex blessings, with an appeal for all parties to speak a common Christian language, for the sake of a scriptural unity that we have squandered. We may not agree, but we can disagree together. Otherwise we become a Church “turned in on itself, narcissistic, imposing unity through force.”
It was, naturally enough, a triumph of hope over expectation. The very narcissism to which he referred, which is a factional rather than sacramental unity, gives us the threat of a breakaway Global South – and the Archbishop in tears at the conclusion of Synod.
But Welby’s point essentially was a sound one and doctrinally durable. He didn’t say this, but there is nothing in the gospel that encourages the oxymoron that is factional unity. The unity that the Nazarene offers can only be unconditional and universal.
“Glutton and wine-bibber”
It’s why the Pharisees call him a “glutton and a wine-bibber” for dining with sinners; why he hangs out with unclean lepers, despised foreigners and adulterers; why he heals a Roman centurion’s servant and scolds Peter for drawing his sword on those who arrest him; why he stands silent in his defence in front of Pontius Pilate.
Because unity that is factional is no unity at all. This would be platitudinous were it not for the need in the public sphere for a better and more committed model for unity. And that model is Christian.
While politicians (and ambitious prelates) adopt megaphone diplomacies to win coercive, traduced versions of unity, the unalloyed version of Christian unity, by contrast, is never more required.
It is the unity that is the unconditional acceptance of the other. And, we might note at the start of Lent, it’s the kind of unity that is presented as the first of the seven words from the cross: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.