Product Description

Stephen Bates examines the issues behind the debate and exposes the power battles playing out in the name of the modern Church.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #558948 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 333 pages

Review
"...a compelling guide to the politics, feuds and embedded hatreds that now characterise our national church... tells this hilarious and depressing story with asperity and wit... relishes the plot and tells it with the immediacy of good journalism." -David Self, Times Educational Supplement (Book of the Week) "The book will raise new questions over the archbishop's role in one of the most divisive episodes in recent Church of England history... The book discloses the level of animosity shown towards homosexuals by religious opponents." Jonathan Petre - Daily Telegraph "...the ordination of gay clergy is still very much the hottest topic in the Anglican Communion...Bates' book puts the record straight." -Publishing News "The book throws new light on the appointments process itself..." The Door

Review
Stephen Bates has left us in debt with his gripping account of recant events in the Anglican Communion. It is a sorry tale, but is one that needs urgently to be told, and Bates tells it brilliantly. (Christopher Rowland, Dean Ireland’s Professor of t )

Racy and enjoyable (Sunday Telegraph )

The Guardian’s church affairs correspondent tells this hilarious and depressing story with asperity and wit. (Times Educational Supplement )

A brilliant overview of the current crisis engulfing the Church. (Observer )

What Bates’s book lays bare is that this is a dispute not about sex but power. (Independent )

In a Church at War Stephen Bates has given us a book that reads like a thriller and unfolds like a tragedy. (Richard Holloway, formerly Bishop of Edinburgh and )

The Independent
"What Bates's book lays bare is that this is a dispute not about sex but power...compulsive as well as comprehensive."

Customer Reviews

Well-researched, penetrating and bitchy
Stephen Bates is the recently retired religious correspondent for the Guardian. Even then he had a liberal bias. Here, able to write from a more personal viewpoint, he can let rip in a racy, somewhat bitchy, but ultimately penetrating account of Anglicanism's current favourite argument.
Since he no longer has to please potential interviewees, he fires off pretty freely. Thus, the bishop of Winchester Michael Scott-Joynt is 'an establishment figure of stately pomposity' (p180), just one of many pithy and elegantly dismissive phrases.
For example, when Dr David Hilborn, head of theology at the Evanglical Alliance describes Rowan Williams' writings on homosexuality as "both morally and hermeneutically flawed", Bates notes simply that this is "the assistant curate of St Mary's Acton saying that the Archbishop's writings are 'exegetically partial, theologically elliptical and ethically contentious'." and leaves it there.(p184)
And at times, these are genuinely revealing:
Greg Venables, while Archbishop of the Southern cone, and his predecessor preached the Gospel "so successfully that he ministers to a total congregation of 22,000 souls thinly spread across the vasts wastes of the Andes and the Pampas - rather less than many English deaneries..." (p163)
All this makes for an entertaining read, but the level of research, the number of interviews, and his plain grasp of the subject means this is a better work than just that of a waspish commentator. To take the example above, Bates must be right that Venables seems to be punching wildly above his weight, through his status as primate, when, say, the Archdeacon of West Lewisham ultimately has greater pastoral responsibilities.
By opening out his personal bias (when the congregation bursts into applause at Gene Robinson's consecration, "for the first time in my professional life at a meeting, I did the same"), Bates unlocks a new level of wisdom about the saga. Yes, of course, the reader needs to recognise where he is coming from, but it's not a covert agenda, and it's from a man who ultimately does care.
Eventually, you just get the sense that his revelations have the ring of truth:
"Akinola will not speak to Griswold but would trust (Drexel) Gomez, who in turn trusted Rowan Williams, who could speak to Griswold and so forth." (p282)
This may be a depressing way for a communion to run, but it sort of sounds about right.
His key thesis is that the homosexuality debate has been one targetted and brought about by conservative evangelicals and carefully prepared for. I am not sure I am as cynical as he is: hasn't it been precipitated more by societal change in the West wrongfooting the Church than by the desires of any one lobby group? At the same time, his is definitely a voice worth hearing.
As the Anglican Communion struggles forward to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, this book is definitely worth reading if you want to be informed about the debate.

Sobering but also unputdownable
It's a bit of a surprise to discover that a book which discusses some of the splits and controversies within the Anglican Church is unputdownable, but "A Church At War" was indeed that. What made the book so good was, firstly, the excellent writing style of Stephen Bates, whose book "God's Own Country" about American Christianity is also fascinating. Bates identifies himself as a Catholic married to a Charismatic Evangelical and his writing shows that he is very familiar with and at home in the world of Anglicanism.

This book is not just about the homosexual debate within Anglicanism. It looks more widely, describing some of the political machinations behind many of the events including Lambeth Conferences, the Appointment of Canon Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading, the US Episcopal Church's Gene Robinson situation and the contribution made to events by the ever-strengthening Evangelical section of the church. The underlying theme is that the divisions over homosexuality are more of a power struggle with the evangelical wing of the Church identifying this issue as one over which they could make a stand and wrest power from the liberals. This includes conservative American Christians bankrolling the African Anglican churches in their campaigns against the loosening of the church's stance on gay people, and many of the machinations such as this are shown taking place behind the Lambeth conferences and other meetings while the Archbishops of Canterbury make statements about listening to and learning from each other in a spirit of love. Parts of this book make for very uncomfortable reading, rather akin to watching children having a punch-up in a playground.

Bates speaks firmly from the side of those who believe that gay people have their part to play in the life of the church. He doesn't spend much time considering the Biblical references to homosexuality, just enough to show that there are scholarly reasons that mean it isn't a cut and dried issue, whether or not people find the arguments convincing themselves. This book isn't an impartial discussion but instead is a gripping read with caricatures of many players in the story, amusing asides and yet an overall sobering message. Bates reminds the reader many times of the inconsistencies in some of the arguments used against homosexuals (for example that divorce and remarriage are now allowed, although Jesus forbade that) and it's hard to know whether he has chosen some of the worst of the quotes from the Evangelical wing to contrast with the humble and godly statements of the gay people in his pages. Most of the evangelicals campaigning against changes in the church's acceptance of homosexuals come across very badly, with particular focus on many of the African church leaders and their own double-standards (as Bates points out, the Nigerian church vilified homosexual acceptance within the church but doesn't do anything about the polygamy, child sacrifice and the stoning of adulterous women within their own church).

This book isn't an easy read. It's hard to read of the strife and arguing between people who are supposedly in mission together. It's appalling to hear of some of the abuse and discrimination that gay people within the church have suffered. It's also frightening to believe, if his overall thesis is right, that those in control of the section of the church with growing authority chose to make a stand on this subject in order to wrest power from other traditions within Anglicanism, apparently unconcerned about the human despair and devastation that would follow. This isn't an impartial book but it's an important book for people from all sides of Anglicanism to read as it acts as a mirror to those within the church and can help them to see how the outside world may see them and their squabbles.

Fundamentalist evangelicalism ruthlessly exposed
Bates provides a brilliant exposé of how a small cabal of conservative Evangelicals, a minority even within the Evangelical tradition in Anglicanism, have made homosexuality the definining issue in the Anglican Communion today. Bates ruthlessly exposes the media spin, American big money backers, unbalanced extremists and double standards behind the anti-gay camp in Anglicanism. Bates traces the growth of conservative Evangelicalism within Anglicanism in contrast to an increasingly pluralist and tolerant social stimmung in Britain and Ireland, relating how the sense of being backed into a corner makes the extremist wing of the Church more dangerous. He also casts a caustic eye over the double standards that make male-male sex a defining issue of orthodoxy for conservative Evangelicals while they ignore issues like polygamy and Christian involvement in the Rwanda genocide.

This book is disturbing. After reading it, moderate, Catholic and open Evangelical Anglicans will be in no doubt that we are engaged in a war for the soul of the church. In his final chapter, Bates looks at some of the casualties of that War. For the sake of those broken people, it is a war we must win.