The chap with the beard and the mitre told us on Tuesday what a marvellous job Her Majesty had been doing for 60 years. But had she had a younger brother, her own beardlessness would have meant that she could almost certainly never have become Queen.
Even so that would have been nothing like as total a proscription as the one covering the Archbishop himself. Because, no matter what a woman’s virtue, piety or ability, she couldn’t and still can’t be as much as a bishop in Church of England, let alone the big A of C. If there is a church Elizabeth Windsor, then the bushel is expressly designed to hide her light.
Perhaps it’s none of my business — I’m not a member of the Church, much though I admire it. And in the long ago days when we believed that religion (or “faith” as it’s now known) was on the way out, I might have declined comment on something that was the concern of a sort of private club. It’s evident, though, that “faith” plays a heftier part in the modern world than people such as me were expecting. And therefore what religions do and how they do them matters to everybody.
So to women bishops. In fact there was some expectation that next month — nearly 20 years after the decision to let women become priests — the C of E would at last agree to them taking the episcopal purple. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the bishops produced some suggested amendments, apparently agreed with Rowan Williams, designed to allow those Anglicans who don’t want women bishops to subvert any who might be appointed. In essence these women bishops would be forced to delegate many of their duties to men for the purposes of satisfying those objecting “on the grounds of theological conviction about women’s ordained ministry”.
Let’s call this what it is. Women can be bishops, but they may well be second-class bishops. And I see no proposals for allowing church members to ask for a male bishop to delegate functions to a woman. As the prominent Anglican Lindsay Southern has written, this idea “cripples the ministry of women ... [and] fosters division and discrimination”.
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2012. In the 60th year of the Queen’s reign. And if David Cameron carries out his promise, even the younger brother nonsense will be rectified by 2015, as will the prohibition on the monarch being married to a Roman Catholic. But still the Church cannot embrace fully the reality of a woman bishop, because she is a woman. Because she’s XX and not XY, because she has breasts and periods and not seminiferous tubules and a prostate, she is a compromised religious being.
No one, naturally, argues the case for excluding women from church or religious authority on the grounds of biology or even innate intelligence. There’s always something else. Objection in the Anglican church usually boils down to these essential propositions: first, we are part of a bigger Christendom and can’t just alter stuff like this on our own. In any case, second, we don’t want to because Jesus was a bloke in the image of God (also a bloke) and his word was passed on to the Apostles who were all blokes. This was no accident — it was deliberate on the part of God. He could have chosen women and didn’t. Third, even if you want to argue about that, we’ve done it this way for 2,000 years and the very fact that we’ve done it this way for so long suggests that this what God wants. If he hadn’t, he would have moved us to change it.
And that, plus a few quotations from St Paul about how women shouldn’t talk in church, is what the argument amounts to. There’ll be letters after this column suggesting other abstruse doctrinal reasons. Ignore them. Jesus was a chap. Since him we haven’t had women bishops. Therefore God doesn’t want women bishops.
Behind this distilled argument is another impulse altogether. It was rather well put by the petition against women bishops signed by 2,200 women Anglicans and submitted the other week. “Dear Bishops,” it began, “As loyal Anglican women, we, the undersigned, rejoice in the fact that men and women are inherently equal, reflecting the image of God [and] recognise that we all prosper when there is male oversight and headship in the family and the Church.”
Before you recover from this epic non sequitur, the petition goes on to argue that, “the desire for a male bishop is not sexist — rather it reflects a Biblical desire to see men take ultimate responsibility in the church family as well as the domestic family, just as some other vital roles in both Church and family are reserved for women.” In other words, the desire for a male bishop precisely IS sexist because it’s based on the belief that, by reason of biology alone, women are unsuited for positions of authority.
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There is a word for this. It is “backward”. It belongs in the realm of beating children at school, imprisoning homosexuals, arguing that “blacks” are like infants or that masturbation makes you blind. Indeed, we can almost precisely measure progress in a society generally by the rights accorded in it to half its population: women and girls. The biggest single factor in reducing child mortality, for example, is female education. It’s the biggest factor too in reducing family size and central to improving nutrition and health.
In an advanced country such as Britain, in just a few decades, we have gone from woman professionals being a rarity to educating more woman postgraduates than men. That means any institution discriminating against women automatically cuts itself off from the majority of the best-educated people in society. What stupidity.
Religions differ in the roles they allow women. In Islam and Orthodox Judaism, women such as Amina Wadud and Sara Hurwitz argue and struggle bravely for recognition against those who are still affected by Stone Age male fears about women’s menstruation and gene-threatening sexuality. Some other religions have permitted female equality for years, though may have been slow to practise it. Like business and politics, then.
But we abide in the land of Elizabeth and the Vicar of Dibley, and it is increasingly incomprehensible that a girl should not be thought as good as a boy. Or that the capacity to grow a long white beard should be a prior qualification for being able to bless a Queen.