Russian Orthodox Church embraces gays.

“IS OUTRAGE!” says Fr Vasili, I’m sure: not lamenting the sudden embrace, but rather the misleading headline. Be sure to read the AP story: essentially gay is still bad, but we oppose persecution of gays. This is a huge step in the right direction for a church that was totally silent whilst people with icons in Moscow spat on and kicked gay people in the streets a couple of years ago. This is a huge step in a world-wide denomination that has been totally silent in Uganda where the local hierarchy is either being misrepresented in the press or else supporting the anti0gay law that even forbids counselling gay people in Church.

But the Russian statement – still a huge step – isn’t all that: the UK’s “Pink News” provides a bit of historical context that puts the lie to His Holiness’ statement that “we have repeatedly spoken out against discriminating people for their nontraditional sexual orientation…”

Head of Russian Orthodox Church condemns discrimination against gays.

But it is the interfax article from Russia that presents the fullest version of the Patriarch’s recent statement on the topic.

Patriarch Kirill believes same sex relationship sinful, but speaks against antigay repressions.

“We accept any choice a persons makes, including in the field of sexual orientation. It’s a personal choice. However, it doesn’t change our position on the phenomenon,” the Patriarch said at his meeting with General Secretary of the Council of Europe in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow.

Patriarch Kirill reminded, “religious traditions of all nations confirm that homosexuality is a sin as well moral disorientation of a person.”

However, a person with homosexual inclinations “shouldn’t be punished, that’s why we’ve always spoken against any repressions and discrimination of people with different sexual orientation.”

“Considering homosexuality a sin, we are categorically against equaling homosexual relations to natural,” the Patriarch further said.

Hedging His Holiness’ bets a lot there… but “Shouldn’t be punished” is pretty clear, Uganda. Of course the Ugandan church is not a Russian plant.

“‘But the religious right failed. “

I don’t know a thing about the new Mayor’s politics. I tend to imagine she is at least as conservative as the usual dixiecrats ie: a full-on Republican in all but name. I may be wrong there – this story was not even on my radar. But, lo: if Houston, Texas, can withstand a smear campaign from the religious right and elect a partnered Lesbian as mayor, things can’t be all bad.

To be clear: I’m not saying I would have voted for her because she was gay. But I’m damn happy to see the defeat of those who didn’t vote for her for the same reason.

If we are not willing for the answer to be yes, they we just need to stop spending money, stop sending politicians to meetings and stop tying up the internet and the airwaves with our pro- or con- blathering.

If the answer is no – and I think that not even Al Gore is willing to give up his iPhone – then we might as well ride it out and STFU.

Advent continues… there is a real hope.

It was easy to hate the Other because there was a huge wall between us.

Now, with much of the American Right trying to recapture those days (using Muslims and Arabs, sad to say) we are stuck: those people live in “our” midst, among “us”. There is no wall between “good” and “evil”.

This different dynamic plays out in some sad, strange ways. I’m never sure if this difference, which leads to an omnipresent fear generated by “us”, is an accidental or on-purpose part of the current gov’t propaganda.

I liked it better with the wall: the “other” was safely contained. And I secretly wanted to travel there, with romantic ideas of spies and covert intelligence. When the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA spoke of celebrating Pascha with the Moscow Patriarch, I wanted very much to have been there: a church filled with spies! Russian winter! Dr. Zhivago!

Before the wall fell I saw the mirror: I knew that “good and evil” were interchangeable in the cold war context. Being a cold war spy would have been all about seeing the grey while the rest of us imagined black and white. I could enjoyably imagine being a spy for either side.

Today, being a spy is about imagining black and white when the rest of us only see grey.

OMG… and he’s “brown”.

It is a huge historical irony that this should come on the same day that the Roman church has succeeded in forcing her limited and archaic view of marriage on the people of Maine.

What we are seeing – in both cases, I think – is the most recent events in the on-going and inevitable betrayal of the Church by the state in a bargain she struck with the devil in 323 AD. Since that time the church has tried to kow-tow to Caesar in various ways. Every time the state runs afoul of ecclesial teachings the church cries out in anguish because she realises her new master is far more fickle than the God she used to trust.

In a sense, for much of European history, the church functioned exactly as the official churches did in the Soviet Union: serving as sort of a morality police where morality is equated with subservience to the state. Since the invention of guns and the panopticon of the Internet, Europe no longer needs the chains of hell and damnation to hold its peoples enslaved. The church, serving no purpose, has nothing to offer the state except claims of history. Every time Cardinal Bertone complains about some encroachment against the church, he effectively sings, “You don’t bring me flowers anymore”.

Likewise in Usonia, every time some jurisdiction runs afoul of the church she – the church – is forced to spend huge sums of money from her coffers to bandage up the loss. In the past no civil jurisdiction would dare cross the moral lines drawn by the Church. Today, most people are happier without such limits so the state does what it can until the church finds the need to throw her minions and her millions in the ecclesial equivalent of a hissy fit.

The state sees the institutional church for what she is: a useless moral agency that is no longer of service. As far as the state is concerned, the church sits on valuable lands, holding valuable art, occupying time and tax base. The hissy fits of the church become weaker and weaker in their effectiveness against the state (see abortion & divorce, intermarriage, child support…).

Another line of Cardinal Bertone’s song is important, now: Now, after loving me last night, it was good for you babe, and you’re feeling all right, but you just roll over and turn out the light… and echoes other, much older lines.

Plead with your mother, plead — for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband— that she put away her whoring from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts, or I will strip her naked and expose her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and turn her into a parched land, and kill her with thirst. Upon her children also I will have no pity, because they are children of whoredom. For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully. For she said, “I will go after my lovers; they give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.” Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns; and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths. She shall pursue her lovers, but not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them. Then she shall say, “I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better with me then than now.” She did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished upon her silver and gold that they used for Baal. Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season; and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness. Now I will uncover her shame in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand. I will put an end to all her mirth, her festivals, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her appointed festivals. I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, of which she said, “These are my pay, which my lovers have given me.” I will make them a forest, and the wild animals shall devour them. I will punish her for the festival days of the Baals, when she offered incense to them and decked herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the Lord.
- Hosea 2:2-13

We see the same thing over and over again in Church history: a viable movement of the spirit gets swallowed whole by the state, co-opted… most often by offers of “we’ll use our laws to make people act as you wish them to act…” And the church begins to treat that legal conformity as her right. It is, rather, her privileged for the state could just as easily placed another religion on the pedestal if that other path had the majority. The ottomans did it with Islam. The Tibetans with Buddhism. The English did it with Anglicanism and the Germans with Lutheranism (until they decided to use Nazism). Wherever the church has slept with Caesar, she has become as powerful as the whore she is.

We are seeing the death-throes of the Church State marriage in Europe. It won’t be pretty: but it may be for the better health of the church. The Day Italy takes back the independent country sitting on the heart of Rome and makes the Pope a citizen of the Italian Republic will be a day of liberation for Christians everywhere. In Usonia, we probably have a couple more decades, at least. But liberation will come here, too. One day the idea of “Tax exemption” will be as archaic as “State church”.

And we will thank God for it.