Would I Lie to You?

 Church in Wales bishops Joanna, Cherry (elect) and June                     Original source: BBC/Twitter

Readers may be familiar with the popular BBC comedy panel show Would I Lie to You? where contestants have to bluff about their deepest secrets while the opposing team have to find out which ones are true.

A massive bluff has been disclosed as a lie by one of the pioneers of 'gender theory'. He has admitted that he and his colleagues "basically just made it up". 

From the Coalition for Marriage:

"In an article in online magazine Quillette, former gender historian Christopher Dummitt explains how he and his fellow academics simply ignored the innate differences between men and women. In this way they 'proved' that 'sex was wholly a social construct'.

"What's worse, everyone was at it. 'Everyone was (and is) making it up. That's how the gender-studies field works', he confesses. Over the past 30 years, whole university departments have been taken over by subjects like 'gender history' and 'gender studies', which perpetuate the fiction that sex is not a 'biological reality'.

"Disagreeing with this nonsense is increasingly being regarded by our society as 'tantamount to hate speech'. It’s also being used to push all kinds of dangerous ideas to school children.

"The peer review process, far from providing a check on this groupthink, only made it worse. It was no better than a 'form of ideological in-group screening'.

"Dr Dummitt says that 'critics of the social constructionists are right to raise their eyebrows at the so-called proof presented by alleged experts'.

Parts of the Anglican Church were quick to pick up on the opportunity presented by gender theory to promote a non-biblical lifestyle as if somehow endorsed by references in the Bible to love, compressing its many forms into one. Their distortions have been used to accuse people who disagree with them as prejudiced homophobes and bigots simply for holding contrary opinions.

Despite constant claims of LGBT persecution in the Church, Archbishop Barry Morgan said way back in 2008: "There are a huge number of gay clergy and gay partnered clergy. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be bishops and they will be. We’re not arguing about if, we’re just arguing about when." He also said that he would be willing to consecrate Britain’s first openly gay bishop despite fears that such a move would further split the Anglican Communion.

Today there is a plethora of gender study courses even at some of the most prestigious universities. They are predominantly attended by women suggesting perhaps that either some women are more gullible or that they saw an opportunity to beat the Church into submission by making her more relevant to society.

The 'madness' began in the United States.

In his book The Crockford's File William Oddie wrote about the suicide of Dr Garry Bennett in December 1987 after he anonymously wrote the Preface to the 1987 Edition of Crockford's Clerical Directory: "The problems of modern Anglicanism are highlighted by the case of the Episcopal Church in the United States"(ECUSA).

Oddie writes
"Their intention was to make the Church more relevant to society's perceived needs so that more and more Americans would find those needs answered within the Episcopal Church.

"The Episcopal Church had been in decline for over 20 years. In 1968 ECUSA had 3,588,435 members. By 1989 this had dropped to 2,420,000. This decline had taken place against a steady increase in churchgoing in the American population as a whole, an increase which has been going on steadily since the1950s. During the same period, the classification of ECUSA by the Library of Congress in Washington has changed: it has now been demoted from the status of a 'denomination' to that of a 'sect'."

The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan
 with The Right Reverend Gene Robinson
 Photo: John Robertson. Source: Telegraph

 Gene Robinson was elected bishop coadjutor in 2003 then diocesan bishop, the first priest in an openly gay relationship to be consecrated a bishop in a major Christian denomination believing in the historic episcopate. This was followed in 2009 by the election of Mary Glasspool as a suffragan bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. She is an openly gay woman living with her partner.

Amazingly the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, adopted the ECUSA experiment as his model for advancing a programme of regularising homosexuality in the Church in Wales.

The retirement of Barry Morgan presented the ideal opportunity to right Morgan's wrongs. Instead the bench of bishops under their new archbishop, John Davies, chose "more of the same" - but faster.

The Dean of Salisbury addresses Gay Pride
 marchers. Source: Facebook

A seasoned LGBT campaigner the Dean of Salisbury, June Osborne, whose advance in the Church of England had, like other imports from England, come to an abrupt halt, was elevated to bishop of Llandaff . She joined another LGBT campaigner on the bench who had been fanfared as the first woman bishop in the Church in Wales, Joanna Penberthy. She had been appointed under  Barry Morgan's presidency in what many believe was the first of three episcopal stitch ups.

Osborne's influence led to the first transgender priest in Wales, since elevated to Canon of Llandaff Cathedral, presumably for her work in promoting transgenderism, followed recently by the appointment of the first bishop in a same sex relationship as bishop-elect of Monmouth.

Given the decline of ECUSA (now TEC), the slavish adherence of the Church in Wales and, indeed, of the Church of England, to the United States model remains a puzzle to orthodox, mainly cradle, Anglicans who have been abandoned by the liberal-minded new Anglicans.

The most charitable explanation is that gender studies motivated people to press for the Church to make a stand for the equality of women in the workplace. The consequences have been intolerance and exclusion despite promising that there would be no victimisation of those who in conscience could not accept the ordination of women and all the liberal theology that has followed it.

Many bishops would have you believe that gender studies (feminism, gender, politics and queer studies) make the church more relevant to society.

It's a lie!

Misogyny, repression and stigmatisation

Source: Church in Wales Diocesan press releases

  One of the less important casualties of the severe weather was the launch of a new book under the category Gender Studies in Wales. 

Due to be launched at that bastion of inclusiveness, St Asaph Cathedral, it claims to offer "significant and original insights into women, Welsh identity and religion":

"Women, Identity and Religion in Wales by Manon Ceridwen James, a Canon at the Cathedral, is the first comprehensive study of its kind from a present-day perspective. At the heart of the book are conversations with thirteen women whose lives and experiences reveal how women facing misogyny, repression and stigmatisation are able to respond with resilience and humour." [My emphasis - Ed.]

I have not read the book and at £24.99 for a paperback copy which, from the reviews, trots out the usual gender studies cliches, I have no intention of doing so. From the abstract of the author's University of Birmingham Ph.D. thesis:

"The thesis is structured as a theological ‘critical conversation’. Dialogue partners include Western feminist theologians and their claim that women find it difficult to assert an authentic self and also sociological and historical texts looking at religion, women and identity in Wales. Christianity has played a significant part in Welsh identity construction, particularly in creating a repressive self-image for Welsh women for political reasons."

Putting such claims in the context of my own grandmothers, mother, wife, mother-in-law, daughters to granddaughters, a period getting on for one and a half centuries, over half of which I have personal experience, nothing could be further from the truth. Quite the contrary which later generations are happy to confirm. It is all politics.

One reviewer described the book as a "valuable and challenging contribution to our understanding of womanhood". What she means is those women who have used religion to further their careers in a so-called equality campaign.

Equality of opportunity in the workplace is to be applauded but the church is not the workplace. Vicars are not employed by the church. They are 'employed by God'.

Blind to the reality that surrounds them, feminists are stuck in the past. They speak for themselves advancing their own cause regardless of the cost to others. If other women become casualties, falling by the wayside in the name of equality, hard luck.

As the Archdeacon of Llandaff candidly explained before she was imported from the Church of England to execute Barry Morgan's disastrous plans for the Church in Wales "new individuals with conscientious difficulties over women’s ministry will simply have to make personal decisions and individual choices, to find accommodation as best they can". With resilience and humour?

Many faithful women have been ousted from their church. I know from experience how it has hurt them to be abandoned but many more women suffer physical hurt and hardship through FGM, human trafficking and slavery. The inferior status of women according to different cultures in our midst is a scandal. To help them requires genuine service, not self advancement while supposedly fighting for social equality so real injustice continues.

Claiming misogyny, repression and stigmatisation is part of the feminist strategy. It has reached the highest levels in the church. We have witnessed two women bishops appointed in Wales followed by one in Scotland in addition to those in England and numerous female clerics repeating the same allegations of discrimination.

Mud sticks. There is plenty of it bringing the church into disrepute. The consequences are all too clear. Christianity in Great Britain is waning fast. When pressed the so-called abuse amounts to no more than a difference of opinion.

When secular values are applied to the church repression and discrimination are alleged. It is not misogyny to take a traditional, theological view on the ordination of women, in fact many more Christian women fervently believe that a woman's place is not at the altar. That is not repression. It is their deeply held faith.

Secularisation of Anglicanism has been a disaster resulting in decline, not growth, but still the alleged 'victims' peddle their untruths to gain advantage. That people outside the church are taken in is hardly surprising when clerics in the church complain it is so. The result is further opportunities to attack the church and our Christian values.