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REACTION: Sandi Toksvig's Secular Sermon to Archbishop Justin Welby || SLP446 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:04
SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome to the Speak Life Podcast.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: Today it's reaction time with Glenn Scrivener, engaging with news and culture from a Christian perspective.
0:13
SPEAKER_01: You can watch this reaction and more on our YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash speaklifemia.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: We're about to watch the most English showdown in the history of English showdowns.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: It's the actress and the bishop, so there's something of the carry-on to this, uh, but really it's the presenter of Great British Bake Off, Sandy Toxwig, having tea with the Vicar of Vickers, Justin Welby.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: If that isn't English enough, uh, they had to patiently wait for this tea time tete for six months.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing more English than waiting patiently.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: And then Sandy discusses the aftermath with British understatement while the Archbishop, uh the Archbishop, keeps his own council.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: It's peak Englishness.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh now I myself am an ordained minister in the Church of England, but I'm Australian, so I'm going to come in here and say, guys, to English, please disagree with each other and say what you mean, and then be okay with disagreement.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: That will be important.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh, let's have a look.
1:19
SPEAKER_02: Hello there.
1:20
SPEAKER_02: Well, yesterday I went to have coffee, uh tea, actually, with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
1:25
SPEAKER_02: Not a sentence I thought would ever come out of my mouth.
1:28
SPEAKER_02: We had agreed to such an unusual meeting following my public expression of distress last year, when Justin, the Archbishop, reaffirmed the validity of a 1998 declaration by the church that gay sex is a sin.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Lambeth is the conference of bishops from around the world every ten years, and the Anglican Communion is a global affair.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: 660 of about 880 of the world's Anglican bishops came to London in 2022.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: Some of the largest Anglican churches are in places like Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan, Kenya.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: The average Anglican in the Global Communion is a woman in her thirties living in Sub-Saharan Africa on less than$4 a day.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Bear that in mind as Sandy talks about the global Anglican Communion and its views.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Now, this global meeting of bishops back in August 2022 reaffirmed what they had said in 1998 about sex, that it belongs within marriage, and they affirmed that marriage is not gender neutral.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: Christians tend to think that people are not gender neutral.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: We are gendered all the way down, even to a cellular level, and our genders are not interchangeable.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: And we believe that marriages are not gender neutral, because sex and marriage go together in a Christian understanding.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, our sex, our gender, matters.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: The gender of a person is non-interchangeable, and the gender of a partner is non-interchangeable.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: Man and woman is a different thing to man and man, and that's a different thing to woman and woman.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: It's just a different thing.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: To swap the genders of one of the partners does not leave you with the same thing.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: Now there's nothing surprising from a global or historical context about saying that marriage is male-female.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: Around the world and down through history, that is what pretty much everyone has always thought, until a few Westerners very recently in human history.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: But that was the context.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: In August, a bunch of Anglicans reflected the overwhelmingly majority view of the world and of human history.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: And Sandy was very disappointed, and she wrote a public letter to Justin Welby.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: She said that Jesus never discussed sexuality.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: It's been two thousand years, we've moved on.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: She finished by saying, Call me, Justin, let's have coffee, let me talk you round.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: You never know, I might even forgive you.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: It was a brilliant piece of public address and rhetoric.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: But that's the background to the Sandy Justin cup of tea.
3:36
SPEAKER_02: Given the state of the world, I felt all the many bishops might have better things to talk about.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: There is a lot to be said for that.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: I I don't want to be talking about sex and sexuality.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Justin Welby definitely doesn't.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about the Christian message.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: It's the greatest story ever told.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: It's this story of the God who took flesh, plunged to the depths of human experience, died the death of a slave under the judgment of God.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: He plumbed an infinite depth of pain and curse.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: He rose up again and invited the world to a table where there are no lords except him, the servant king, and we are all brothers and sisters.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: It is an unimprovable story.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: Because you could not have a higher power plummet to a deeper pit to make a greater impact on more e more on more people forever.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: The impact has been cultural and historical as well.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: That resurrection was a big bang launching the largest, most diverse, most inclusive sociological phenomenon the world has ever seen, and it's built our world more than we can possibly know.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: I want to proclaim that story.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to talk about sex.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: So then one option is, well, let's just stick with what the whole world thought about sex until five minutes ago, and let's just devote ourselves to other more important things.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: Because for most of the 85 million Anglicans in the world, war on the other side of the continent and a cost of living crisis does not come close to describing the difficulty that they face.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: There are more important things to be talking about, sure.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: So we could just leave alone the issue of sex and just stick with the global historical consensus.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: But I get it, that feels wrong.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: We feel like we want to at least reflect on, if not reform, our views of sex and sexuality.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: We don't want a 1998 view of sex.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: We want to think carefully about sex in 2023.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's totally understandable.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: But at that point, I guess we've discovered that sex and sexuality are important after all, from one point of view, which is fine too, but either let's talk about sex because it's important, or let's not talk about it.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: But let's not start a conversation about how we need to overturn the way the vast majority of humans have ever thought of marriage, and then, as soon as the other person pipes up, accuse them of having sex on the brain.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't seem to work to me.
5:48
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, from our very calm and considered conversation yesterday, it is very clear that the state church of England and the society it purports to represent are not remotely in step.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's the heart of it.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: The church is not in step with the culture, but it never has been.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Old Testament views of sex and sexuality were wildly different from Assyrian and Egyptian views of sex and marriage.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: New Testament views of sex and sexuality were a world away from the Greco-Roman outlook.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: You know, in a world of state-sponsored brothels of ritualized sexual abuse that was celebrated as pederasty and was in fact child abuse, in a world of sex trafficking and slavery, it was the unquestioned right of every Roman man to unleash his sexual desires on his inferiors, be they men, women, or children.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: In that culture, the church was not in step, and thank God for that.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: The church was not in step.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: And Sandy is wrong that Jesus never talks about sex.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: Ground zero of the first century sexual revolution is Matthew 19, where Jesus says that the one flesh experience of sex belongs only in the one flesh union of marriage, and that marriage is between a man and a woman.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: It made every observant Jew around him say, Yikes, that's restrictive.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, Okay, I'll give you one other option then, chastity.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and chastity's better.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: But that's it.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Nothing about this is in step with the culture, and it's certainly not in step with the sexual desires of the men who heard Jesus.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: But that's the point.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: In the words of evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrik, the church with this teaching reached down and grabbed men by the testicles.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: It trained and restrained and severely restricted sexuality, especially male sexuality, and Joseph Henrik's book, The Weirdest People in the World, charts how that sexual revolution remade the world and brought untold prosperity and benefits.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: But it was not in step.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: And it is not in step with modern views of sex either.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: But the job of the church is not to be in step.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: If there's a God, it would be very surprising if his views matched the Britain of 2023.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: Imagine if we were the ones who finally got it right.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: Not those morons in 1998.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: 1998, that's the 1900s.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: Yuck, no.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: God has impeccably soft left liberal views from 2023, right?
8:08
SPEAKER_00: That that that's who God is, right?
8:09
SPEAKER_00: But we all know that's ridiculous.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: Because if that were the case, then everyone in every time and place in history would have been wrong.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: And suddenly we're right.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: I take it nobody actually thinks like that.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: We act like it all the time.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: But on some some level, we know that that's not right.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: But if God is not beholden to our tiny slice of of history and culture, then I guess his ways contradict our ways at some point or other.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: If God is God, and if the church has anything to do with God, then the church must contradict the culture.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: Must.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: And if you were a betting woman or a betting man and you had to guess one aspect of modern culture where we might have taken a wrong turning, is it possible that sex and sexuality might be, let's say, vulnerable to critique?
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Is that possible?
8:57
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9:01
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9:05
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9:12
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9:17
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10:09
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10:14
SPEAKER_00: You know, our Anglican brothers and sisters from Sub-Saharan Africa look over and see things like, I don't know, in the news this week, a male rapist claiming to be trans and then placed in a women's prison.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: And and they, from their point of view, they might wonder have the liberal elites in the West lost their ever-loving minds?
10:35
SPEAKER_00: And and they might think, should they be lecturing us, as Westerners love to do, about how the poor Africans are wrong again and how the white people have it right?
10:44
SPEAKER_00: You can understand how this looks, right?
10:47
SPEAKER_00: Is it possible that our culture has serious problems when it comes to sex and sexuality?
10:52
SPEAKER_00: Is it possible that God might disagree with us?
10:54
SPEAKER_00: And is it allowable for the church to say, no, we are not in step with 2023?
11:00
SPEAKER_00: 1998 is fine with us and the 19th century's prior.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: Now, that does not mean that the church is always right at all.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: God stands above the church, too, not just the culture, and sometimes we have been abominably homophobic, for which we owe huge apologies.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: I was glad to see those apologies in a res in a recent bishop's statement.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: Some things I was very unhappy to see, but repentance for hatred and homophobia, that is owed, and it must be followed through on.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: But it is not homophobic to have a doctrine of sex and marriage.
11:35
SPEAKER_00: Any more than it's carnival phobic for a Buddhist to be vegetarian.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: A Buddhist is free to think that meat is murder.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: He is free to have a vision for life that means butchery is a sin.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that he hates you as you munch on your burger.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: He might find it deeply uncomfortable, he might passionately disagree with you, he might wish for a world where meat eating is a relic of the past, he might try to convert you from your meat-eating ways, but he is not a meat bigot.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: That is not carnophobia.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: And we don't need to sit down a Buddhist monk for a cup of tea and lecture him about how butchers are really great and abattoir workers can be some of the most Buddhisty people you've ever met.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: You can have a different view to the Buddhist monk, and they can have a different view to you, and you can respect that difference, can't you?
12:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, does love mean that we have to agree?
12:26
SPEAKER_00: Does love mean uniformity?
12:28
SPEAKER_00: How much do we believe in diversity and inclusion?
12:31
SPEAKER_00: Can we include diverse views on this?
12:35
SPEAKER_00: That's a question for Sandy, I think.
12:37
SPEAKER_02: Justin was keen for me to see that they are moving forward, but conceded that any progress as I would see it, if it happens at all, will be glacial.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: It was very clear that opposing factions of the worldwide Anglican Communion are being in part held together at the expense of the human rights of the LGBT plus community.
12:58
SPEAKER_02: It's not okay.
12:59
SPEAKER_02: And I said so.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: Be aware, she means largely the global south, who are pointing to the historic inheritance of the church over two millennia, and that global and historic perspective is at odds with largely white Western views that have been around for a decade or two.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: It's worth noting.
13:20
SPEAKER_02: I asked Justin if he could just come out.
13:23
SPEAKER_02: I don't mean make a surprise announcement about his sexuality, but come out as a gay ally.
13:29
SPEAKER_02: Basically, to come out for love.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: This is a fascinating role reversal.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: The actress is talking to the bishop, but the actress is preaching to the bishop.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: We I mean we don't have Justin's side of this, and we won't, but very much the dynamic here is of a cultural spokesperson, an influencer, you might say, speaking to an archbishop, but who is the moraliser here?
13:51
SPEAKER_00: Forty years ago, some other comedians appeared on a programme with the Bishop of Southwark, and it's become emblematic of the counterculture rising up against the stuffy elites.
14:01
SPEAKER_03: Well that I have been anyway sort of being pompous.
14:04
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I have been bishop of South London now for over 20 years.
14:09
SPEAKER_03: You keep making the basic assumption that we are ridiculing Christ and Christ's teaching, and I say that we are not.
14:17
SPEAKER_03: You'll get your thirty pieces of silver.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: I'm not quite sure.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: But this is what's fascinating.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: Nowadays, the cultural elite is Sandy Toxvig, and she is the one preaching to the bishop.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: A bishop she considers to be far too countercultural.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: The bishop needs to get with the program, and she is the elite there with her social media and celebrity clout, moralizing to the bishop.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: How things have changed.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: And her message is let's call it it's thin, okay?
14:45
SPEAKER_00: Come out for love.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: What do we mean by love?
14:47
SPEAKER_00: Is Justin not loving?
14:48
SPEAKER_00: If people had watched this conversation, would they have noticed flecks of spit coming from the Archbishop veins bulging on his temples?
14:54
SPEAKER_00: Tables thumped.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: I I doubt it.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: So how is Justin not being loving?
15:00
SPEAKER_00: Well he's not embracing and celebrating a novel Western elite view of sex and sexuality.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: And he's not bringing the Church of England into lockstep with Sandy and her allies, and that is being declared unloving.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: But here's the thought.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: Can we love people and disagree?
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Can a vegetarian say meat is murder and I love butchers nevertheless?
15:26
SPEAKER_00: Can she even campaign to end the meat industry and to convert all meat eaters to plant-based diets and still be called loving?
15:33
SPEAKER_00: I think so.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Do you think so?
15:36
SPEAKER_00: But that's the heart of it.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: Like, what is love?
15:39
SPEAKER_00: And what does a truly diverse and inclusive culture look like?
15:44
SPEAKER_02: Love for all, without exceptions, and not the current Orwellian position where it would seem we are all created equal, but some are more equal than others.
15:55
SPEAKER_02: I hope that will happen.
15:56
SPEAKER_02: But I do not intend to wait upon the church.
16:00
SPEAKER_02: In the next few weeks, I will be reaching out to the LGBT plus community and all our allies to see what can be done.
16:07
SPEAKER_02: The present position is untenable.
16:10
SPEAKER_02: In the meantime, please.
16:12
SPEAKER_02: Let's all come out for love.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, come out for love.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: And again, I just repeat, we need to have a better definition of love because love does not mean uniformity.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: It does not always mean agreements.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: And if we truly believe in inclusivity and diversity, then it must mean a love that goes across barriers, across distinctions.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: Is it possible that we can be different and love nonetheless?
16:36
SPEAKER_00: That's my challenge to Sandy Toxvick.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: My challenge to Justin Welby and to the Church of England is do not give up the crown jewels of this vision for sex and sexuality.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: It has built the modern world, be different.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: The Christian Church has built the modern world by being different, by not being in lockstep with the culture.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: That's what happened in the first century sexual revolution.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: And nowadays, as the 1960s sexual revolution has utterly shaped the culture, it is time to be countercultural.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: And it is time to be countercultural on this issue.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: There is a world out there that is realizing people are not gender neutral.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: We're just not.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: Genders are not interchangeable.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: Human bodies are not like pieces of Lego that can be refit together.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Sex is significant.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: Bodies are like temples, they're not like playgrounds.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: And when sex goes wrong, it it's hell.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: That's because sex is so significant and marriage is good and constraining sexuality, especially male sexuality, is a good thing.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: All these things, people are recognizing all these things because in the sexual revolution they're seeing the photonegative.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: They're seeing the photo negative of the sexual revolution that really built the world.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: Jesus' sexual revolution.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: Church of England and Christians more broadly, do not give up the crown jewels.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: Being different is our MO.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: That's how we roll.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: And we will just have to find ways of loving across the differences.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: And that will not please the Sandy Tox figs of this world.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: But I'm not sure what would please the Sandy Tox figs of this world.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: We need to be less into pleasing the world and more into serving the world by being different.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: Be weird, is what I'm saying.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: Jesus has given us a revolution to live out.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: Let's be different.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: Let's come out for that kind of diverse and inclusive love that is not afraid to be different, but that loves nonetheless.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's my reaction to Sandy Toxfig.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: As the actress said to the bishop, what do you think?
18:44
SPEAKER_00: You can let us know in the comments.
18:46
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18:51
SPEAKER_00: We'd love to see you again.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: God bless you.