Queer Holiness, by Charlie Bell

Author: Charlie Bell. Review by David Wilson.

Unlike many who hold forth on the topic of LGBT+ people and the church, Charlie Bell is eminently qualified to talk about it. He is a consultant psychiatrist and academic, and also a curate at a south London Anglican church.

For those outside gay-affirming churches like the Society of Friends, this will be a radical book. Bell assesses the extent to which LGBT+ people occupy an uneasy position within their denominations. He concludes that the most honest approach is that of the three-legged stool of scripture, tradition and reason. And for him, the heart of scripture is contained in the fundamental idea that Jesus himself is ‘embodied love – loving both God and neighbour in unity’. Acknowledging the role of reason in biblical interpretation also involves recognising the crucial place of experience. Scientific knowledge has given us insights into the innateness of sexual orientation in recent decades, and Bell berates churches for not engaging in serious dialogue with such insights. He highlights how vulnerable LGBT+ people are, whether ordained or lay, within church structures. And he emphasises the importance of human flourishing in the gospel.

Bell outlines how Christian communities might foster healthy expressions of LGBT+ sexuality rather than continue to collude in various forms of toxic repression. He rightly identifies LGBT+ people as having been created and loved by God as equally as their straight siblings, with a right to have their marriages equally recognised, celebrated and affirmed.

Underlying the thesis of this book is the notion that many Christian churches are following one of two trajectories. In the first they are becoming increasingly exclusionist and so increasingly less relevant and unheeded. The second trajectory, taken by Friends, is that the church becomes more inclusively loving and understanding of LGBT+ people, acknowledging that they have been given as a gift to Christian communities which are badly in need of reform.

Bell’s book is timely. Quakers made the decision to campaign for the right of same-sex couples to marry in 2009, and younger generations in other churches are finding it difficult to understand their churches’ refusals to bless gay marriages. Bell’s call for cultural change may eventually correct some of these flaws. Such cultural change takes time, however, and needs to be addressed not just in churches but societies all over the world. This will take, at the very least, a generation or two.

Charlie Bell has courageously and persuasively argued that change in this area is desperately needed. While not rejecting the church, he nevertheless recognises that God, the Holy Spirit, may be working in the world and when the church comes into conflict with the world, we may reasonably pause to consider if God is trying to tell his church something of value.

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