Challenging the church hierarchy

By GABRIELLE RISH

09apr06 THE knives are well and truly out in Australia's Anglican community. And right now they're pointed squarely at church laywoman and author Muriel Porter.

Porter's clinical dissection of the rich and powerful Sydney diocese reveals the bitterness of decades of fighting for female ordination (a battle won in 1992) and now the appointment of women as bishops in a situation where Sydney's vehemently patriarchal agenda has got the upper hand.

Porter is an Anglican insider, an ex-Sydneysider married to a Melbourne Anglican priest, and she cares passionately about these issues.

Others might ask whether it really matters that a church which attracts only 170,000 regular worshippers in this country is convulsing with the same sort of factionalism that characterises the ALP.

What matters, Porter suggests, is that the Sydney agenda, led by Archbishop Peter Jensen and his brother Phillip, the Dean of Sydney, is remarkably similar to the Howard Government's so-called values-driven policy inflections.

She says she has written the book out of "deep sorrow".

"Sorrow for the Anglican women who have been called by God into the ordained ministry, only to be prevented by determined ideologues.

"Sorrow for the broader cause of women in Australian society, which is under increasing threat from politicians, Church leaders and others who want to turn the clock back."

Porter suggests that both the Sydney diocese and elements in the Federal Government share a kinship with fundamentalist agendas of all complexions, be they Anglican, Catholic, Pentecostal or Muslim: they are all highly conservative, anti-feminist, anti-homosexual and deeply committed to putting the man back at the helm of family, faith and society.

In one particularly scathing section of the book, Porter looks at the Sydney diocese women's group, Equal but Different.

This group, run by Archbishop Jensen's wife Christine and Dean Phillip Jensen's wife Helen, among others, affirms in its vision statement its [who] serve each other in relationships of loving male leadership and intelligent, willing female submission in the family and the church."

As Porter queries, what on earth is intelligent, willing submission? It sounds positively kinky.

The New Puritans starts with a fascinating description of Sydney's theological position.

The term "puritan" is not being loosely bandied about here. She says the Sydney diocese, influenced by the former head of its theological college, Broughton Knox, frowns on anything in its ceremonies that might appeal to the senses rather than the intellect.

"Religious art and symbols, colour, music and fragrance (such as incense)

and bodily posture and movement -- let alone the beauty of nature or any form of Christian meditation or mysticism -- are at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous to true Christian worship," Porter writes of the Sydney position.

The other distinct aspect of Sydney theology is its insistence on what it calls the "plain reading" of the Scriptures, which would suggest that there is only one possible interpretation of the often contradictory and muddied pronouncements contained in the Bible.

This argument over interpretation is not just a matter of splitting hairs -- it goes to the very heart of how people practise Christianity -- and what attitude they have to those who don't think or act as they do.

Porter says Archbishop Jensen and his followers believe that "anyone who does not accept the Christian Gospel on their very specific terms is not really Christian".

She says Archbishop Jensen argues against the possibility of any continued revelation from God since the Gospel was set down.

This means that any aspects of the Gospel that relate to cultural attitudes and customs in Judea 2000 years ago must be adhered to, despite the fact that since then Western society has abolished slavery, women have acquired legal rights and we no longer stone adulterers and sodomites to death.

Porter devotes a whole chapter to the "gay debate", in which Sydney is at the forefront of the stand against gay churchmen and women, along with the African churches, where half the world's Anglicans worship.

She concurs with author Stephen Bates' assessment that homosexuality is the "line in the sand" for conservative evangelicals.

"They see it as uniting their constituency in opposition to the shifting sands of belief and secular culture," Bates says.

Porter adds: "It might just as easily have been women's ordination or even divorce. There was not, however, the same degree of evangelical unity on those subjects and, in any case, there are too many women and too many divorcees, both in the Church and in the wider community, for either issue to gain the necessary traction."

The Sydney diocese has responded to Porter's book with scorn.

Pages of the Sydney Anglican website's forums section are devoted to the topic "What is it with this Muriel Porter woman?", with almost all contributors suggesting that she butt out of Sydney's affairs.

The Bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forysth, writing a response to the book in The Age, said Porter has represented the Sydney position as extreme when it was her own views that were extreme.

"On the more substantial debates in the contemporary church about homosexuality, the ordination of women or even the special place of Jesus Christ, Sydney Diocese simply continues to hold the classic historic Christian positions it has always held," Bishop Forsyth said.

The New Puritans: The Rise of Fundamentalism in the Anglican Church by Muriel Porter, Melbourne University Press, paperback, $29.95

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