This was reviewed in Church Times and being aware that Sam Allberry, as a Gay Man and a member of General Synod, currently has a significant influence on the thinking of the Church of England (through his advocacy of celibacy as the only proper Christian path for those that are, as he calls it, same-sex attracted) I wanted to take the opportunity to hear how he gets to that point of view.
I tried to come to this book with an open-mind – to consider Sam’s argument on its own merits – I think it is important to affirm that fact that Christianity is big enough to reach different conclusions from valid positions of integrity - and I am actually disappointed that I found it rather incoherent. I put my hand up, it is unlikely that I would ever come to agree with his conclusions but I could accept respecting them as reasonable alternatives.
Sam uses the age old rhetorical technical of first presenting a straw-man position and then successfully countering it with the presentation of his own position. If you want to win an argument it is generally easiest to set the terms of both sides of it.
He sets out a number of damaging expressions of sexuality – incest and paedophilia, rape and sexual abuse, the sexual commodification of people through porn and prostitution. It is not difficult to demonstrate that Sex that is driven by greed and selfish gratification, rather than any care for the other person, is destructive.
All of that I completely agree with – but the next step for Sam is to say that the only context where these destructive tendencies are avoided is mixed-sex marriage. Although this book is not particular thinking about same-sex relationships there is a clear sub-text in the way the argument is structured.
Firstly we get an idealised version of marriage – which is part of the conclusion that marital sex is inherently life affirming. Sam ignores any disconnect between what marriage “is meant to be” and what are often actually is. Never having been married I know nothing of the sunlit uplands of marital sex but I have had some wonderful life affirming sex, as well as some encounters I regret deeply, maybe I am lucky but from what I hear is good and bad sex are likely in equal measure within marriage as they are outside.
There is some worrying blurring of ideas of consent within marriage – although he states that “Paul would only countenance couples abstaining from sex by mutual consent, and the same is true of having sex too.” This doesn’t seem to be what the various quotes from Paul actually say, and it does not make sense – if you need mutual consent to abstain, then the logical conclusion is that you don’t need mutual consent to have sex. This seems to run significant risks of condoning marital rape. And these passages made me very uneasy.
He also seems to tie himself in a few knots by making marriage and sex primarily about procreation, in order to exclude same-sex couples from all the life-affirming things he says about it.
That marriage, at its best, is a great context to in which for children to grow up is a valid conclusion. However, to say that children conceived in any other context are disadvantaged doesn’t seem to stand up to scrutiny. But more importantly, to say that sex that is not open to the conception of children is somehow impaired raises so many questions that go unanswered – this would seem to align to the “traditional” Roman Catholic position and so I would have to infer that Sam Allberry would advocate against contraception.
Also starting with Adam and Eve (who we might conclude co-habited without any formal marriage ceremony) there is a narrative about the need for male and female to come together to make a successful relationship. This is expressed in terms of “equal but different” - that there is something distinctly different between any particular man and particular any women – and these two form a two part jigsaw that fit together as a whole. This also means you have to see an overwhelming commonality in the contributions that ever man and ever women can bring to a relationship, the jigsaw would seem to be endlessly interchangable? We could spin the wheel and have a different Husband and it would have not material impact on the quality of the relationship…
Among the other problems, despite being a single man himself, this position seems to make it hard to value singleness as a potentially valid and rich life. And leaves Sam stuck in the 1980s asking a gay male couple “who is the wife?” and lesbians “who takes the bins out?”.
And then he gets to the Woman at the Well, and I had to write in the margin “wow, he really is going there...” It you are trying to make the case for marriage being an unrelentingly positive experience it would probably be best to side step the case of a Women who has had 5 husbands, and in now in an relationship with a man who is not her husband. 5 times wonderful? Although I don’t think the text says how the 5 marriages ended, some of the husbands might have died, Sam is confident they all divorced her – in under the laws at the time husbands could divorce their wives but not vice versa. For 5 men to reject her, Sam sees a common factor - her, “she was also too much for them.”
Up until this point I had found it a weak and ineffective attempt to prop up outdated views, and in some ways been comforted that Sam didn’t seem to be able to access better arguments. But then this moment of victim shaming really pissed me off, and reminded me how toxic some who speak in the name of Christ are… My jaw dropped, I was angry, and I felt myself jumping up from my seat to get between San and the Woman to say “you shut up now” - if the situation was real would I be so bold?
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