Listen / Read
Catherine Pepinster is editor of the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, and she’s a regular contributor to various newspapers. She penned an article entitled “Let us rejoice Tony Blair’s conversion” in the Telegraph last December. She said “it must be a sign that Roman Catholicism really has come in from the cold in this country”. In fact, quite the opposite was the case for it was Tony Blair who was out in the cold after his premiership, and it was there in the tundra of post-relevance that he found the Catholic Church. Pepinster also said that the comment newly converted Catholics nearly always make is “I feel as if I have come home”. That can never have been more true than it was for our 21st century Crusader.
I suppose I was distracted into that sideswipe because the very first Thought for the Day I’ve taken it upon myself to blog about was all about religion. It wasn’t one of the ‘and that reminds me about Jesus’ ones, where the Rt Rev Someone Or Other starts talking about something topical, usually society’s ills, and then shoehorns Jesus in, typically with with a parable that illustrates the point. They’re my favourite. Catherine Pepinster has thrown me a bit. I should have started on Monday like I planned but I thought it would be a shame not to start on the 1st of the month, being as that’s when I had the idea to do this.
No matter. What I’d really like a Christian to say on Thought for the Day about the issue of homosexuals and homosexual clergy is: ‘Listen fuckers, sometimes people like penis on penis or vag on vag action, and Jesus didn’t say shit about that, okay, so just get over it and stop being bigots’. But, in their own pious and less obscene way, I suppose that’s exactly what many Anglicans in the West have been doing (though plenty are still happy to be bigots).
It’s all thanks to the Old Testament that most African and some British and American Anglicans are able to say homosexuality is a sin and an abomination and all fags are going to hell because God hates them. They too couch their opinions in more pious language, so they might not put it quite that way, but I’m not far off from what they say and I’m spot on with what they think. And that’s what’s really intolerable. That we give such hatred the time of day and pussy-foot around loathsome homophobes, their Bibles held up as a shield against the same standards we hold everyone else to. Christianity still provides these people with a sort of religious immunity, and if our Anglicans are stopped from making progress here, churches will remain one of the last refuges of the bigot.
Many have commented that it was the early Church’s decision to include the Old Testament within in the canon that has caused so many problems throughout the history of Christianity. The nature of the Trinity has actually been at the centre of most splits (which is understandable, as it makes fuck all sense – and Catholics with their Mary and the Saints have the odds stacked well against them when it comes to true spiritual awareness), but the Old Testament does throw things out of kilter for so many Christians. The wrathful, vengeful God of old who stands in such stark contrast against the Son of God, who was a fully-on hippy. Have you seen Jesus Christ Superstar?
But if the Jews can handle homosexuality, and the Old Testament is actually theirs, what’s the problem Jesus lovers? The difference is that when Paul came along and said ‘all yous fucks gots to be Christians now’, this little Jewish offshoot almost destroyed Judaism. Jews who perhaps saw Jesus as a prophet started thinking maybe Paul’s right, maybe Jesus was the Lord Himself, maybe he can save us all. Christians started knocking about in synagogues, converting Jews all over the place, all the pagans and the Mithraists started getting on board, all with the promise of eternal life in paradise. Tempting shit, has to be said.
So the Jews who still didn’t agree with Paul about Jesus being the Lord, rejected him entirely and had to figure out how to save their religious tradition. They completely reinterpreted it, having to work out how you practice a temple-based religion when your temple has been razed to the ground for the umpteenth time. In reinterpreting their sacred text, they set a precedent which allowed them to take a look at their holy scripture and apply it to the circumstances in which they lived. Christianity’s ability to do this has always been severely restricted to quite constrained theological discourse, as Pepinster mentioned. Hence all the anally retentive scripturalism some Christians use to justify their being loathsome bigots.
So Paul, the archetypal misogynist, primed Christianity for bigger and better things. He included the Old Testament not just because it helped convert Jews but because it appealed to antiquity, gave this new sect some authority. He waived some of the dietary and bodily requirements (but not the misogyny or the homophobia) so that everyone was welcome, even if they reight liked pork and reight didn’t want their foreskin chopping off. He paved the way for the great marriage of the Christian Church and the Roman Empire with Constantine’s conversion. We have Paul to thank for lots of things today and making his bigoted views gospel is one of them.
So Pepinster has been quite clever here, comparing Paul to the progressive Anglicans, wanting to make Christianity appeal to the world as a whole, because it’s Paul who many of the African bishops are looking to to bolster their case against homosexual clergy. What Paul did was hijack Judaism, taking the parts he wanted and discarding the parts he didn’t, and sold it to the world. What Christianity as a whole should do today is take the best part of Judaism, the rabbinical tradition of scriptural interpretation, and learn to live today as Jesus would live today.
If Jesus were alive today, he’d be the last surviving hippy. And he’d still be a Jew. Reform, I’m guessing. And he’d probably be gay. At least a bit bi.