Mark Chater interviews author Michael Arditti. They discuss his spiritual development, books and gender critical stance. Michael was an early, prominent Founding Supporter of LGB Christians. He commented: “At a time when the debate over sexual identity has grown increasingly divisive and opponents of ‘gender ideology’ face threats to their livelihoods and even their lives, LGB Christians can be relied upon to offer a ‘still, small voice of calm’.”
Interview
Mark: I’m speaking with Michael Arditti, the celebrated novelist and supporter of LGB Christians. I’m Mark Chater, also a supporter of LGB Christians, and we are going to discuss various aspects of Michael’s work and his support for LGB Christians. Michael, thank you very much first of all for agreeing to speak to us: may I ask you the first question, which is about your fiction? There is a presence of Christian theology and church pastoral issues, particularly a strong passion theme; and several characters who are mainly Church of England. It feels like a world with which you are very familiar. Would you like to say a bit about your interest in it, and your familiarity with that religious world, how that originated, and how it informs your writing?
Michael: Yes, sure. Any writer who chooses a subject has his or her major themes; at the same time, the themes choose him or her. I’ve always been fascinated by matters theological, spiritual, and religious: in part because I had a divided religious background myself, and so automatically question things. I went to a Methodist public school even though neither of my parents was Methodist. In the late 60s and 70s we had Chapel twice a day and it very much informed who we were, why we were there, and how we responded to each other. And so I always asked myself these questions: who we are, why we’re here, and how do we lead a moral life. For many people, morality doesn’t depend on belief. I remember a priest once telling me that there were people in his congregation who wouldn’t get through the door of a golf club, because of the way they behaved: so going to church, believing in Christianity or whatever, does not necessarily make one a good person. Although, in my view, it can certainly help. Such issues have always intrigued me.
As a novelist, I’ve also found that those big questions inform my characters. Whether they are believers or non-believers is just as important, certainly to my fiction, as whether they are on the left or the right of politics, whether they come from the working or the upper classes, whether they are gay or straight. To me, it’s how many people define themselves. And of course in English fiction, from Sterne’s Parson Yorick, Fielding’s Parson Adams and Austen’s Mr Elton, through Eliot’s Rectors Casaubon and Cadwallader, to Trollope’s Reverend Harding and Bishop Proudie, there’s always been a colourful array of clerical characters. Then again, for a novelist, the discrepancy between what people believe and how they behave is a very rich vein to delve into. So for all those reasons I’ve worked on it and I hope it has worked for me.
Mark: You imbibed Methodism at boarding school – and after that? At university and as a young adult? What happened religiously then?
Michael: Well I was boringly straight down the middle C of E and have been ever since! My own church, or rather the church I go to, is an Anglo-Catholic church. At first, this was a topographical convenience because it’s close to where I live; but it became a deliberate choice: the former Vicar, Tom Devonshire-Jones, who is sadly no longer with us, was enormously welcoming. When I moved here in 1986, I was unsure how some church people would respond to my gayness. But I’m lucky to live in a very liberal area of London, and there’s never been any problem at all. Tom was very helpful when I was planning my first novel, The Celibate. The protagonist was a young ordinand, and Tom arranged for me to stay at St Stephen’s House, a theological college in Oxford. There was some dissension among the ordinands as to whether I should be allowed in. But I remain friendly with a couple of them to this day. I doubt that I would have been able to write the novel – certainly in its final form – if I hadn’t had that experience. So, after school, where I actually worshipped in an Anglican church on a Sunday, I went through College chapels and to the parish church in the Hertfordshire village where I lived with my mother after university, to the church I attend now. Allowing for some wavering, that’s been my own religious journey.
Mark: Thank you. And there is something about the act of narration which facilitates exposing this gap between what people believe or profess and how they behave, which you mentioned as being very much part of your story-telling, which lends itself to your themes particularly, I guess.
Michael: Well it’s particularly the case in my novel Easter which, as you may know, takes place over Holy Week. The form of the novel is based on a mediaeval triptych. The first and third parts take place entirely within religious services, with the central part a first-person narrative for a modern-day Christ figure. Although I never re-read any of my novels, I do remember their architecture. In Easter, the services formed a backdrop to people’s thoughts and recollections. That definitely exposed the gap between belief and behaviour. Again, in my most recently published novel, The Choice, one central character is a celebrated religious painter, whose private and domestic life certainly doesn’t bear witness to his professed belief. Another is a woman priest who is struggling with church organisation and regulation on issues which may not be the same as her conscience. So you always have this conflict, and it is the stuff of drama. Drama to me is part of fiction.
Mark: And The Choice also deals with safeguarding as a very central theme, of course highly topical in the Church of England. The dramas which you mentioned could be described as passion; I do notice how central passion, and the passion, are in a lot of your work.
Michael: Yes. I think that like many people I have quite a lot of – quarrels would be putting it too strongly – difficulties with Church doctrine. But the figure of Christ always remains deeply moving, because of His teaching, his simplicity of expression – I know it contains contradictions – and of course his suffering. I have written – in different ways, in both Easter and The Choice – that I don’t believe that Christ came to redeem us so much as to express solidarity with us. He acknowledges our suffering, rather than suffering for us. The figure of Christ has great spiritual weight – understandably, when, as a Christian, I believe Him to be the Son of God. There are passages in the Gospels that I have known all my life and still find deeply affecting, both emotionally and intellectually. But I have great difficulties in church when the reader holds up the Bible and says ‘This is the Word of the Lord’. To my mind, ‘this is the word inspired by the Lord’.
Mark: There are always small matters of doctrine at which we might demur, but the larger picture of the Gospels, and the presence of Christ – the weight of Christ, as you describe it – for you and for the whole world – looked at as a big picture, is very significant. We could move on, if that is OK, to the more immediate topic of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Christians. How did you come to your gender-critical stance as part of your support for LGB Christians? And as a follow-up, to what extent does your theology play a part in that?
Michael: To a large extent, it is quite simply common sense. People’s biology is fundamental to who they are. There have always, throughout history and in different cultures, been people who do not fit into their gender role. There have also always been a small number of people who have what is nowadays called gender dysphoria. In the past seventy years or so, there have been medical interventions which can make life much easier, happier and more fulfilling, for that small number of people. I’m totally supportive – not that they need my support – of people who have that issue and wish for it to be resolved. But that said, it’s important to acknowledge that such people differ from those who are biologically male or female. They haven’t gone through the first sixteen, eighteen or however many years of their life in that other gender role. And it’s particularly acute for people transitioning from male to female, because of the more dramatic changes women experience when they reach puberty. So, in the matter of individual choice for that small number of people, I couldn’t be more supportive.
But the current movement to say that biological sex is less significant than gender choice is something I consider an absurdity. I have to acknowledge that I don’t know many trans people. But those I’ve met don’t seem to be part of that movement. They have made their decision, often a very painful one for themselves and their families, and want to be able to live their lives in peace. They don’t want to be part of this movement that says ‘biology is not relevant, we can create ourselves’. We can’t create ourselves, we are all created. Famously, in words written about three thousand years ago, ‘Male and female created He them.’ Of course, in his autobiography, Quentin Crisp wittily retorted ‘male and female created He me’. But he didn’t add that he wanted to change sex. He was expressing the richness of his personality. I find it dispiriting to receive emails that give the writer’s pronouns, whether ‘she/her’ or ‘he/him’ or ‘they/them’. As I said to a young friend who accused me of being a ‘Terf’ (Trans-exclusionary radical feminist), ‘Look at Walt Whitman: that famous line, “I contain multitudes”. You can be any sort of woman you wish to be, just as I can be any sort of man.’ Restricting yourself, and then building a philosophy on something that I think is a spurious choice, is very wrong. So that’s how I’ve come to my position. It is not so much a matter of theology. God creates us all with individual feelings, and we should be allowed to express that individuality in any way we wish. But to try to define the whole of humanity by a particular anomaly and then bully people to accept it strikes me as utterly wrong. As an older writer, I have been able to express that view in relative freedom, but if I were younger and a woman, I know I would have been harassed. We all know people who have been cancelled or no-platformed, which is a scandal.
Mark: Making a connection between this belief and your theology – Christ became incarnate, it is part of the Nicene creed, and He heals us, humanity, through his incarnation. He becomes embodied, and our own bodies are part of Him; so being embodied is a rather important part of Christian theology. We are who we are, physically. Would it also be part of your objection to gender ideology that it tends to over-ride or ignore our embodied state?
Michael. Yes. You put it more clearly than I would have been able to. As St Paul says in Corinthians, the Church is the body of Christ. That body has, obviously, many members. I find it helpful to think of the Trinity in terms of God the Father being creativity, God the Son as love or compassion, and God the Holy Spirit being moral discrimination. Those are the three most significant attributes of God, and the most significant qualities to which we can aspire. We must be creative in our lives, loving and compassionate to our fellows, but we also need to be morally discriminating and object to things that are patently absurd, and threaten the natural order. So when I was asked if I would like to be part of LGB Christians, I was happy to agree. I have no wish to denigrate any other group of people, but it is important to stand up for what I believe to be the truth.
Mark: Michael, would you like to say a bit about the reactions or responses you’ve had to your gender-critical stance, either from Christians or from elsewhere? Are those responses fertile ground for you in your forthcoming writing?
Michael: I haven’t had very many. I’ve got a number of women writer friends who are strongly gender-critical. They are very vocal on social media, where I have a low profile. In a world that is increasingly stressful and distressing, I try to focus on my own writing and my own circle. If I had a garden, I’d follow Voltaire’s advice and cultivate it! I have been accused by a few younger friends and the children of friends of being a Terf. There is a problem in publishing where many of those in junior roles are calling the shots and attacking people with gender-critical views. This hasn’t happened to me. For one thing I’m not prominent enough. And for another, I’ve just moved from the huge conglomerate, Hachette, to Salt, an independent publisher, where individual views aren’t just respected but celebrated.
Salt will bring out my second collection of short stories, The Mellow Madam, in August. My first collection, Good Clean Fun, was about various forms of gay experience. The Mellow Madam is entirely about women. No doubt some people will accuse me of cultural appropriation, but I refer them to Walt Whitman: ‘I contain multitudes’. Then in March 2026, Salt will bring out The Tribe, an epic novel inspired by my grandmother’s Sephardic family that moves from Salonica in 1910 through France during the Nazi Occupation to Brazil, Israel and Greece in the 1960s.
Mark: Intriguing. I’m sure many of us will look forward to reading them. I certainly agree with you about the capture of the publishing world and the public sector, universities and businesses, by gender ideology. The Guardian has shut out all gender-critical views until very recently, because it is afraid of the reaction of its staff.
Michael: It must be losing some of its readers.
Mark: Yes. The revelation over the weekend, which was published in The Observer, that the government had been failing to gather data on biological sex, because they were so obsessed with gender, is an absolutely astonishing failure of the civil service, which is being corrected now, but not before time. It shows that the idea is very widespread, and has a strong grip.
Michael: Although I’m not a dedicated follower of party politics, it seems to me that Wes Streeting is on the same wavelength as his Conservative predecessors in terms of not allowing it to dominate the health service. That at least is reassuring.
Mark: Final question, slightly more light-hearted: if you could brief the next Archbishop of Canterbury on his or her role, and how to handle these particular issues, what advice would you offer?
Michael: I was hoping you would ask ‘if you could be the next Archbishop of Canterbury’! I have a theory that no one, in charge of any organisation, be it religious or secular, large or small, wants to leave that organisation smaller than when he or she took it over. Even if that leaves it stronger, it’s the numbers that count. But I would say to the Archbishop, be bold, don’t be afraid that by taking a particular line – my preference, of course, would be the liberal line – you might lose parts of the African church or whatever. Follow your conscience! Stick to your guns! On individual issues, I would of course like to see him permitting same-sex couples to marry in church. But generally, don’t pussyfoot around, because that actually makes people despise all leaders. Be honourable, be honest! Above all, follow the spirit of Christ rather than the letter of the Bible! But I doubt he’ll listen to me.
Mark: Why do you assume that it would have to be a man?
Michael: I would assume that, given how recently women have become priests and bishops, that it’s too soon for it to be a woman. It would certainly be a problem in some of the African countries. We are always told that in countries like Nigeria, if the Anglican communion goes further in support of gay rights, then that will make it harder for Christians in Nigeria vis a vis their Muslim compatriots. If that is so, then, to my mind, we should very gently part company. Rather than a larger, weaker, more amorphous church, better to be smaller, stronger and more Christlike.
Mark: A lovely point on which to conclude. Michael, thank you very much for this discussion.
Visit Michael’s website to learn more. His most recently published book is The Choice (Arcadia Books, 2023) ISBN-978-1529425758
Read Mark Chater’s biography (scroll to the end) and other writings on the LGB Christians website.