Photo Credit: Lucy Philip
by Gillian Philip
I’m old enough to remember the days when the Anglican Church was still considered “the Tory Party at prayer.” Even then – the 1980s – it was an outdated characterisation (it was far more likely to represent the then Liberal Party at prayer); today it’s far from the truth. Yet Googling the phrase for a glance at recent articles, it’s the go-to quote that refuses to die. Bishops may have been picking fights with Conservative governments for decades, but headline writers continue, with an air of startled bewilderment at such unforeseen rebellion, to resort to the cliche.
Bear with me when I say I think they’re right. There are close parallels in the Anglican path with that of the Conservative Party, though perhaps not the one journalists are thinking of. Both are institutions that have agonised for years about their histories, about some previous stances that did indeed leave them stranded on that notoriously unpredictable shore “the wrong side of history”.
There’s a lot that both institutions needed to regret, and they did. The Church’s condemnation of gay relationships, never mind marriage, was an error that took far too long to correct. St Paul very much took priority over Jesus Christ in all of the conversations I had on the subject in the 80s: arguments with priests over whether all gay men were in fact secret paedophiles, or with my own congregation when a vestry member demanded the Eucharist should now require compulsory intinction for all communicants, lest we all catch AIDS.
Like Tory politicians self-flagellating for their opposition to gay marriage, the Church of England — and other provinces of the Anglican Communion — have now for years been wildly overcompensating. That’s where the similarity lies. Theresa May, notoriously, was so eager to atone for Section 28 and the rest, she clutched at trans self-ID with all the desperation of a repentant sinner at Christ’s cloak.
The Labour Party’s three successive terms in government had plunged the Conservatives into existential angst, and David Cameron, taking over as leader in 2005, was determined the “nasty party” had to shake off its reputation. The scramble to liberalise on social issues culminated in May’s casual endorsement of GRA reform; not one of the Tories who cheerled for self-ID — from Maria Miller to Penny Mordaunt to, more recently, Alicia Kearns — appears to have given a thought to the implications for women’s rights, gay rights or child safeguarding.
The Church’s concerns were different, but their path was the same. Membership had been sliding for decades, its congregations aging, and not all the tambourines and banal liturgy rewrites in the world seemed able to stop the rot.
The leadership had grown more liberal, though, and like May, they welcomed the trans agenda as an uncomplicated civil rights issue that would be their salvation. I doubt the Church even glanced sideways at the reasonable objections: intact men in women’s prisons, the erosion of lesbian boundaries, the erasure of the very meaning of same-sex attraction. Not even the safeguarding of children — an issue on which ecclesiastical antennae should be particularly sensitive — gave them pause.
Like the Conservative Party, the Church of England (and other Anglican provinces) need to step away from the enticing but false temptation of cheap “social justice” Brownie points.
And so we ended up with the CofE’s consultation that closed at the end of July. Intended to fix the errors of its flawed guidance of 2014, “Valuing All God’s Children”, the new proposals for CofE schools were supposedly far more compliant with the recommendations of the Cass Review and DfE guidance.
If that was really their intention, they have failed on multiple fronts. The consultation, “Flourishing For All”, airily dodges the problems in VAGC, continuing to promote gender ideology and prioritising the affirmation of children in “trans” identities. It scaremongers, stating that “harm towards people who are transgender is increasing”, as though the truth that no human can change sex is hateful and harmful to children. It insists that children be “kept safe from polarised debates” — which would require that teachers in CofE schools quash gender critical beliefs; this in turn would perpetuate delusion and harm, uncontested, to some of the most vulnerable children imaginable.
The consultation speaks in the language of gender ideology, uncritically employing terms like “non-binary” and the offensive “cisgender”. Nowhere does it set out the gender critical position, or how that might be explained to children. It speaks of “gender” when it means “sex”, and demands that schools must challenge “derogatory” and “outdated” terms (the glossary declares that “homosexual” is a “medical term” that is “not preferred”). What’s more, the document is entirely insouciant about “pupils who have already socially transitioned at school”, when this genuinely harmful phenomenon was one particularly criticised by Cass.
Like the Conservative Party, the Church of England (and other Anglican provinces) need to step away from the enticing but false temptation of cheap “social justice” Brownie points. It needs to examine calmly the arguments of sex realists, and ignore the strawmen of what transactivists claim those arguments to be.
Most of all, it needs to scrap the “Flourishing For All” consultation, and start again.
About Gillian Philip
Q. What is your relationship with the Christian Church?
A. I’m a lapsed Anglican (my father was an Scottish Episcopalian priest) who has had a complex relationship with my faith for decades. I’m unable to convince myself to be an atheist (though God knows I’ve tried!) but I have never been comfortable with Churches as institutions.
Q. What prompted you to write for LGB Christians?
A. I have watched as, time after time, the Anglican Church in particular has struggled to maintain relevance and engage with a broader base, and it always ends in a (please forgive the phrase) circle-jerk of compromise, word salad and committees — I’ve served on some of those committees. The headlong rush to embrace trans ideology and Queer Theory strikes me as a dangerous overreaction to that tendency. My father’s politics were wildly to the left of mine, but he was an old fashioned class socialist who would have been aghast at the casual disregard of women, child safeguarding and gay rights.
Q. What’s your story?
A. I’m a cancelled former children’s writer who now works in haulage and distribution. My publishing contract was terminated in 2020 for supporting women’s rights and I was supported in an Employment Tribunal by the Free Speech Union. My books include Crossing the Line, Bad Faith, The Opposite of Amber, Click Bait and the Rebel Angels series – Firebrand, Bloodstone, Wolfsbane and Icefall, along with many educational titles.
I am also a feminist and believe that biological sex is real and important. I support trans rights and think everyone can and should express themselves as they wish. However I also believe that biological sex is immutable and cannot be changed by a statement or declaration.
My publishers HarperCollins and WorkingPartners terminated my contract after I added the hashtag “IStandwithJKRowling” to my Twitter account.
I am a mother of excellent adult twins, and live in the Highlands of Scotland with two cats and two miniature horses.