Women can slay dragons, too

On feminist activist group WATCH’s new campaign to oust conservatives from Church of England

How about a break from all the tariff talk? I have a far more interesting topic for you: dragons! And more interesting yet: women! Put them together, and what do you get? No, not a cue for a Bernard Manning mother in law joke, but a saint who has been much on my mind of late. Namely, St Margaret of Antioch.

Before we begin, please take as read the usual apologetic opening words: forgive, hiatus, circumstances (excuses), etc.. I have left the employ of Rikkyo University after four interesting and energetic years, moved out of university digs into a traditional wooden Japanese house of my own, beautifully built by a temple architect, but am readying myself for a return to the Church of England and the parish in Iver Heath dedicated to none other than the aforementioned Antiochian dragon-slayer. Hence my preoccupation.

What a time to make that journey! Not because England is “going to the dogs under its new socialist overlords,” or some such secular reasoning, but because of the state of the Church of England, online much and often lambasted. Those who attend to such things might have noted that the church I am going to serve in, though in Oxford Diocese, is under the episcopal oversight of the Bishop of Oswestry. That is, it is a traditionalist, Anglo-Catholic church which on theological grounds does not accept the sacramental ministry of female clergy. Its members have chosen to stand with the majority of the Church throughout history and throughout the world even now in holding to the all-male ordained ministry. This is, today, the considered position of the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, global majority Anglican (GAFCON) and Reformed churches. But the majority position in the Church Catholic is a minority position in the Church of England itself - around 5% overall including 8% of bishops - and those who hold it face criticism and ostracism for their decision. I cannot help a certain sense of walking into the dragon’s maw.

Despite the widespread hostility towards traditional Catholic and Reformed perspectives on holy orders in the Church of England, all parties have so far officially agreed to differ and to get along. Hence, since the ordering of women bishops in 2014, the provisions for alternative episcopal oversight for those who demur from such innovation. However, now old wounds are reopening as the feminist campaign group Women and the Church, which exults in the ironically paternalistic vigilante moniker of WATCH, begins a renewed campaign for an end to that provision, called:

“Not Equal Yet”

From the outset, it is vital to recognise that WATCH does not represent the views of all or even most women in the church, not even of women clergy. Nor do I intend to make this article a diatribe of arguments already rehearsed. Rather, I maintain that WATCH is, contrary to its supposed mission, bad news for women in the church, and worse still for ordained women.

Those interested can read the rationale for their objections online here. In sum, WATCH argues that “legislation passed in 2014 to offer a continuing place in the Church of England to those who do not accept the full ministry of women, enshrines discrimination on the grounds of sex within the Church of England and is not balanced legislation,” unjustly benefitting from an exemption to the Equality Act 2010. The traditionalist position is no more than entrenched“discrimination and sexism,” which has“the worst impact on women who are also people of colour or disabled or from working class backgrounds or who are lesbian, bisexual or trans.” This is obliquely connected, without further elaboration, to the indisputable fact that “women and girls throughout our world suffer oppression and violence at horrific levels and at all stages of their lives.” The national church, they conclude, “is getting away with discriminating against women, limiting female leadership, at every level of the organisation.”

The Not Equal Yet conference. Surprisingly spritely for today’s C of E, in which the average age is Methuselean.

We might note that the campaign appeals solely to legalities and generic claims of discrimination, while appearing to avoid any kind of theological reasoning. This is not because such reasoning is impossible: I know many clergy and theologians, including ordained women, who are very capable of defending women’s ordination on theological grounds. WATCH chooses to push theological concerns to the fringe of its output. I have not made an editorial decision in my préecis above to exclude theological content: by all means search their website yourself, and see if you can find any on the front pages. You will need to probe into their conference materials and resources to find theological argument, which tends toward those more radically libertarian approaches to sex and gender which the average pew-sitting Anglican is less likely to swallow. See, e.g., the Archdeacon of Liverpool’s homily (the horror!) with this appealing title: “A feminist, rape culture, privilege and entitlement reading of the hagiography of St Margaret.”

On the rare occasions that WATCH make theological statements about their opponents rather than merely slandering them as sexists, they are full of error. Take this example:

Traditional Anglo-Catholics do not consider that the Church of England has the authority to decide to ordain women unless the Roman Catholic Church has made a decision to allow this. Sacraments and church order are very important to this group and they will not receive communion from a woman, nor will they receive communion from a bishop who has ordained a woman.

The first half of the first sentence almost succeeds in representing up that rarest of birds, the Anglo-Papalist position, but is hardly representative of the majority tradition; the second half of that sentence is quite misguided, as no traditional Anglo-Catholic of any theological nous would accept that even Rome has the authority to override the Apostolic faith. That “sacraments and church order” are important to these hierarchical obscurantists suggests that WATCH is less concerned about such things, and that sensible people should not be, either. They fudge the issue around receiving “communion from a woman,” as though those who do not consider sacraments consecrated by women ministers to be valid might not receive the chalice from a female lay assistant. I do not know where WATCH has got the ideas that Anglo-Catholics do not receive sacraments from male bishops who ordain women: this is nowhere even suggested by Forward in Faith or the Society of St Wilfred and St Hilda. Whether these claims are made out of ignorance or sleight of hand it is hard to divine. Like all polemicists, WATCH make use of half-truths to buttress the convictions of those who already agree with them.

Beware the Anglo-Catholic menace to the National Church!

The traditionalist response has been measured in public, vexed in private. On the measured and open side, the Director of Forward in Faith UK, Tom Middleton, issued an online response to the effect that his party is not so much “against” women’s ordination as “for” the received tradition of the Church:

We place a high value on apostolic tradition and the practices of the great churches of the West and of the East. Our position is based on a deep respect for, and an understanding of, the sacramental foundations of those churches, and even more fundamentally a recognition that such practices stem from what we confess to be the divinely inspired Universal Church.

He allows that other perspectives are “part and parcel of life,” but qualifies this with the observation that “simply to dismiss two millennia of Christian witness just because some of its aspects do not sit comfortably with contemporary Western society raises serious questions as to the nature of the Church and its history.”

The notable difference in timbre between WATCH’s campaign and Forward in Faith’s response is in the use of theological language and categories. Middleton cites St Vincent of Lerins and the gospel of St John while WATCH makes comments about the Tate brothers, and their President proclaims the historic theological perspective “an act of violence.” I suspect that the relative paucity of WATCH’s scriptural reference is because to many of their members, God’s Word is part of the problem.

So much for the serene outer countenance of traditionalism. Behind the screen of WhatsApp and Facebook conversations the traditionalist world is rocked with anger and frustration, as it faces what many of its members see as yet another assault by liberals on the ancient faith they hold dear. They know that there are many fine women ministers (“some of my best friends” might be pushing it, but several whom I know, like and respect) who are able to disagree with us without resorting to legalism and critical theory to demand their expulsion from the church - which is, in effect, what they are calling for. Traditionalists are tired of their considered theological position being derided as outdated, unsophisticated, bigoted and misogynistic.

So be it. But I, for one, welcome WATCH’s campaign. This is the perfect moment for the question they are raising to be raised, just at the point it is being raised among Anglicans in the US at the moment. The difference is that over the Atlantic, it is being raised by the conservative side.

Why now?

One might well ask.

Perhaps WATCH can see that beyond the parochial confines of their national church, this who hold to the historic majority position on the necessity of an all-male priesthood are in the ascendant, as growing numbers of young people gravitate towards Orthodoxy and traditional Catholicism. They may also be unnerved by the recent flourishing of traditionalist Anglo-Catholics at home, particularly under the Bishop of Oswestry, who flies the traditionalist flag proudly. Perhaps WATCH think that now or never is the moment to stem the tide.

+Paul Oswestry in Pusey House. More grey in the congregation’s tweed than in their hair. No pink hair visible. Could be hidden under hats, though.

If so they are making a grave strategic error. The Five Guiding Principles which allow the traditional minority of Anglo-Catholics and larger caucus of conservative Evangelicals to remain in the Church of England has prevented a schism like that of the North American Anglicans. The result of that schism has been a rapid diminution of the liberal churches, to the extent of near extinction in Canada, and simultaneous growth of conservative Anglican churches worldwide. From those younger churches are now coming some of the strongest and best articulated calls that the Anglican world has seen to turn back the clock and to end the ordination of women. Opponents of women’s ordination are better theological resourced than ever, with the additional benefit of the decades’ worth of empirical evidence of liberal church decline in their favour. My readers include women clergy, so I say with respect for them and certainly no spirit of triumphalism that WATCH, by overplaying its hand, risks not only schism, but the end within our lifetime of those Anglican churches which ordain women.

The comparative theological paucity of WATCH’s call to arms is what makes it so very welcome. With every clause of their argument, they make it ever clearer that it is measured not by recourse to Sacred Scripture or the tradition of Holy Church, which they despise, but to late twentieth century Marxian critical theory. The fact that they choose to speak in such terms now, when that theory is so discredited and despised, shows how out of touch they are not only with the majority of Christians, but with the majority, full stop. WATCH are certainly no friends to women clergy who have even the slightest doubts about the new rainbow orthodoxy on sexual differentiation. I doubt that Germaine Greer would be welcome in their ranks.

It is tempting to say that the best thing traditionalists could pray for is that WATCH speaks longer and louder, and leave them hoist with their own petard. But this, I think, is not enough. WATCH are offering traditionalists a wide-mouthed gift horse at just the moment when we should not only admire its gleaming molars but clamber inside and go Trojan. They are inviting us right into the paper-thin walls of their new religion. In a somewhat bizarre and bestial shift of metaphor, we need to ride that gift-horse into the mouth of the dragon. Which, I confess obtusely, brings us back to St Margaret.

Woman can be dragon-slayers

As preparation for my move to the church blessed with her patronage, I have spent some time with the Mediaeval Lives of St Margaret of Antioch. In a country where our patron dragon-slayer is a man, St George, how refreshing it is to find a tale of a woman doing the same job. But not, I think, how the WATCHers would like it done.¹

St Margaret enjoyed popular devotion in thirteenth-century England, blessing several contemporary churches with her name. Quite why the new Victorian daughter church of Iver opted for her patronage as yet escapes me. I can only suppose that it was part of the general infatuation of the period for things mediaeval. Her hagiography hardly conforms to modern expectations. The boring dictionary entry of the modernist is one of those which begins sceptically, “about whom very little is known,” by way of discounting her legend before recounting it. She is supposed to have died in 304, but is not mentioned in any surviving works until the 1000s. Hence, those who suffer from a lack of spiritual imagination think she can be safely ignored.

But safety is not part of St Margaret’s story. Daughter of a pagan lord, baptised in secret by her nanny, as a teenager she gets preyed on by a perverse Roman prefect as she tended her sheep. Refusing his advances, she clings instead to Christ and to His purity. Outraged, the pagan prefect throws her in gaol until she is ready to worship the demon gods he serves. After several episodes of graphically related torture (one thing, at last, to which WATCH’s concerns may be genuinely apposite), Margaret’s story culminates in the answer to her prayer: that she may see her true enemy. Thereupon the fallen cherub who tempted Eve of old appears. Bold with the spirit, she plunges into the Devil’s open maw, cutting her way out of his belly with the cross she was wont to carry. Having defeated mankind’s spiritual enemy, death at the hands of his earthly minion means nothing to her. On the 20th of July, she was beheaded, but in her new life thereafter she became a powerful protector of women, especially those pregnant. St Joan of Arc notably saw St Margaret as one of her chief spiritual mentors. Whatever doubts one has about her historic struggles, her heavenly influence verifies their spiritual truth.

For the likes of WATCH, St Margaret is likely the wrong kind of woman. She shows no signs of aspiration to the priesthood, or to leadership of any earthly kind - albeit these are two very different things which WATCH conflates, as though the argument for the ordination of women should follow the same lines as promotion of women to corporate management roles. She is at first passive, receiving baptism as an infant at another’s hand, and suffering as the result of one man’s nefarious and her father’s weakness in combatting them. She is concerned with sexual purity, that shibboleth so despised by progressives.

And yet, by the grace of God given in humble prayer, St Margaret becomes a warrior to rival St Michael or St George. Her vocation is not exclusive to her sex. All Christians, women and men, are called to spiritual warfare against the demonic forces which assault the world. All are called to bravery. As part of our ascetic struggle, all of us are called to sexual purity, whatever social conventions might expect, and whatever the cost. Men and women can equally exercise this calling whether they be CEO, head of state, educator, soldier, shop worker, refuse collector, full-time carer for the young or old or disabled, or even jobless and destitute. Catholic tradition does not dispute the capacity of men or women to fulfil these roles, whether society judges them high or low. All that matters in the end is the extent to which one puts whatever it is one does to the test in spiritual combat and to the service of the Lord of Hosts. We are called to sainthood and to witness.

Women in the Church vs Women And The CHurch

The ordination of women to the priesthood, and even more so to the episcopate, requires a liberal approach to the reading of Scripture and considerable scepticism of received tradition. It is therefore hard to deny that the more women bishops there are, the more liberal the church must become. Evidence certainly suggests as much. Our Lord’s decision to entrust the Eucharist and the Church formed around it to twelve Apostles and seventy elders was not arbitrary. He drew on the ancestral religious tradition of His people, revealed to them by God. Given that the gospels portray Him as scandalously close to women, and that He is God Incarnate, it is strange to suppose that He was somehow cowed by merely human patriarchal mores into choosing only men for these roles. Strange, too, to suggest that the men He so trusted might have deliberately misinterpreted His will in order to exclude women from “leadership.”

But at a deeper level, the great tapestry of scriptural symbolism starts to unravel when one dissolves the relationship between men and women we find established in the Bible’s very first pages. It has only recently become fashionable to assert that there is nothing women can do that men cannot. The abstraction of childbirth from what it is to be a woman is the culmination of an utterly counter-scriptural liberationist agenda, made possible only by technological means.

WATCH’s campaign seems tired and out of step with much contemporary conversation on the relationship between men and women, and the challenges which women face today. Anecdotal evidence to this effect is supplied by one their key speakers, Sharon Jagger, who as recently as 2017 seems unable to dredge up much support for her arguments from sources outside the 1960s and 70s, with Mary Douglas and Rosemary Radford Ruether at the sharpest point of her cutting edge. One will look in vain to WATCH for any suggestion that, perhaps, the contraceptive pill of 1960 “liberated” women into commercial drudgery and removed powerful protective taboos against their sexual exploitation by men; that it now takes two incomes to afford such luxuries as one’s own home when one used to suffice; that reproductive technologies have turned poor women into endangered surrogate incubators for exploitation by wealthy foreigners; that the adulation of same-sex relationships and promotion of self-sterilisation under the aegis of gender fluidity contributes to a society in which motherhood is regarded more as a burden than a joy, girls opt out of marriage or even out of becoming women, and so fewer children are born and reared; that the pornography and prostitution enabled by reproductive technology and abortion endanger girls, with the side-effect of infertility and ovarian cancer in many women who avail themselves of such means; that children might actually need their mothers to be available in their earliest years having lived with them for nine months in the womb; that, in short, the church’s conservatism towards families was in certain ways better for both women and men than the world “equalised” by technology and capital. Progress is simply best by default, and awkward questions are silenced by insult or recourse to law.

Rather, like so many progressive activist groups, WATCH sees the institution it purports to serve decline ever more sharply the more progressive policies are put in place, and discerns that the solution is even more of the same. Liberal churches are in decline while conservatives prosper, so let’s get rid of the conservatives: this is not a recipe for flourishing of any kind. WATCH, unwittingly and ironically, is working to accelarate the death of one of the few remaining churches where women can serve in ordained ministry. It is driven not by the desire to serve, but the desire to conquer, and its motivations are ideological. Again, with some irony given their political leanings, they ground their case on the establishment of the “national church,” maintaining with straight faces that as such, it should mirror and emulate the society it serves. One need only look to Canada to see where that leads: liberal readings of Scripture first yield ground on divorce, then women’s ordination, followed by same sex marriage, abortion, transgenderism, and the rest of the usual litany which culminates in euthanasia. We know already that the majority of infants aborted in the world are so because they are female; we will see what statistics the death pods produce in time; my hunch is that the latter will be no better news for women than the former.

You may disagree, wildly, with the implications of the last paragraph. You may prefer a church something like that which WATCH envisions than the conservative safeguard against such innovations which traditionalists think necessary. So be it: my point is more pragmatic than that. First, the WATCH church simply has no long-term future, and will take women’s ordination with it when it dies. Second, the WATCH church so closely resembles secular progressive society that its existence is pointless. And third, without traditionalist and conservatives to rein in the beast, those in the Church of England who support only such relatively moderate progressive aims as the ordination of women will not be able to stop there. WATCH’s demands will inevitably tend to endless reform. If you think that women’s ordination is theologically justified but, say, abortion or euthanasia are not, you will in the end face the same treatment as the traditionalists: insult aiming at delegitimisation, chased up with legal action when the time is deemed right.

Thankfully, I think the time is absolutely wrong for WATCH, and therefore right for its opponents. But I can take no pleasure that those in the middle will be caught in the crossfire.

It may sag at the bottom, but we still need it.

The Last Dragons

Battling cloned secularists in sacred garb is not something I particularly relish. I would sooner stick with the spiritual. However, the spiritual has material consequences, and these work themselves out in such political wrangles as we see in the church and world today. Sometimes they must be challenged. Let me therefore attempt to finish on a fittingly apocalyptic note.

The fight with dragons is ultimately between order and chaos. Biblically speaking, it is a contest between the hosts of heaven, led by Christ, with such seraphim as St Michael as lieutenants. A seraph is, literally interpreted, a flaming snake. These are the good dragons. The enemy are the fallen angels, led by another seraph whom we various call the Satan, Devil and Adversary, among other names. Among their legions are such demons as Moloch, who provokes infant sacrifice, and Mammon, champion of greed. The good dragons, or angels, associated with the sky, are those whose wills are harmoniously ordered with the will of God and who mediate that divine will in the order of the cosmos. The evil dragons, associated with whirling void and waters, are those who seek to disrupt that order. The disruption of the proper order between men and women, sexual mutilation and the killing of unborn children is part of the work of Moloch, aided amply by Mammon, and all part of their master’s works. Disruption of the family and the atomisation of society into discrete economic units feeds into the anarchy they seek. This is opposed by the hierarchy, ever so delicately balanced, of the Church, which stands not by unmediated decree of the divine will, but is in harmony with the ordering of the cosmos.

The questions that WATCH raises need to be asked. They go far beyond the merely political and legal level, based on assumptions of equality of rights and inalienable individuality, that they evince on the surface. They are metaphysical questions, and need more serious consideration than the law court or the social science classroom can afford. I do not (!!!) mean to suggest that the good work of women in all kinds of Christian ministry, including ordained ministry, is the Devil’s work - that would be a scandalous misrepresentation of many women’s faithful, loyal and legitimate service. Indeed, I have no doubt that women can be excellent Protestant ministers, nor that women participate in the priesthood of all believers. But WATCH’s campaign raises questions which they scrupulously avoid: not about “leadership,” but about the divine dispensation of the sacrificing Catholic priesthood and its metaphysical place in the ecclesiastical and celestial hierarchy.

It is not a question which I purport to answer here, though I have after many years of consideration chosen to side with what is indisputably Apostolic tradition. But it is a question too deep to be answered by the cosmetic appeals made by WATCH. My intention here is to warn of the potential stakes of this question, the risks of getting it wrong, and the frame in which it needs to be addressed: not legalistic and polemical, but theological and metaphysical.

1. A feminist, rape culture, privilege and entitlement reading of the hagiography of St Margaret by WATCH apparatchik the Ven Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool, who claimed in Synod that “the church has not taught consistently for 2000 years that all sex outside of marriage is a sin.” This is what WATCH thinks will bring people flocking into the Church.