At Axis of Episcopal
Split, an Anti-Gay Nigerian
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Chris Greenberg/Associated Press
Virginia church representatives at a Dec. 17 meeting
on their split from the Episcopal Church included Richard Crocker,
left, of Truro Church. |
By LYDIA POLGREEN and
LAURIE GOODSTEIN, NYTimes on the Web, December 27, 2006
ABUJA, Nigeria, Dec. 20 — The
way he tells the story, the first and only time Archbishop Peter J. Akinola
knowingly shook a gay person’s hand, he sprang backward the moment he realized
what he had done.
Archbishop Akinola, the conservative leader of Nigeria’s Anglican Church who has
emerged at the center of a schism over homosexuality in the global Anglican
Communion, re-enacted the scene from behind his desk Tuesday, shaking his head
in wonder and horror.
“This man came up to me after a service, in New York I think, and said, ‘Oh,
good to see you bishop, this is my partner of many years,’ ” he recalled.
“I said, ‘Oh!’ I jumped back.”
Archbishop Akinola, a man whose international reputation has largely been built
on his tough stance against homosexuality, has become the spiritual head of 21
conservative churches in the United States. They opted to leave the
Episcopal Church over its decision to consecrate an openly gay bishop and allow
churches to bless same-sex unions. Among the eight Virginia churches to
announce they had joined the archbishop’s fold last week are The Falls Church
and Truro Church, two large, historic and wealthy parishes.
In a move attacked by some church leaders as a violation of geographical
boundaries, Archbishop Akinola has created an offshoot of his Nigerian church in
North America for the discontented Americans. In doing so, he has made
himself the kingpin of a remarkable alliance between theological conservatives
in North America and the developing world that could tip the power to
conservatives in the Anglican Communion, a 77-million member confederation of
national churches that trace their roots to the Church of England and the
Archbishop of Canterbury.
“He sees himself as the spokesperson for a new Anglicanism, and thus is a direct
challenge to the historic authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury,” said the
Rev. Dr. Ian T. Douglas of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass.
The 62-year-old son of an illiterate widow, Archbishop Akinola now heads not
only Nigeria — the most populous province, or region, in the Anglican Communion,
with at least 17 million members — but also the organizations representing the
leaders of Anglican provinces in Africa and the developing world. He has
also become the most visible advocate for a literal interpretation of Scripture,
challenging the traditional Anglican approach of embracing diverse theological
viewpoints.
“Why didn’t God make a lion to be a man’s companion?” Archbishop Akinola said at
his office here in Abuja. “Why didn’t he make a tree to be a man’s
companion? Or better still, why didn’t he make another man to be man’s
companion? So even from the creation story, you can see that the mind of
God, God’s intention, is for man and woman to be together.”
Archbishop Akinola’s views on homosexuality — that it is an abomination akin to
bestiality and pedophilia — are fairly mainstream here. Nigeria is a
deeply religious country, evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, and
attitudes toward homosexuality, women’s rights and marriage are dictated largely
by scripture and enforced by deep social taboos.
Archbishop Akinola spoke forcefully about his unswerving convictions against
homosexuality, the ordination of women and the rise of what he called “the
liberal agenda,” which he said had “infiltrated our seminaries” in the Anglican
Communion.
This view emanating from the developing world is hardly unique to the Anglican
church. More and more, churches of many denominations in what many
Christian leaders call the “global south,” encompassing Latin America, Africa
and parts of Asia, which share these views, are surging as church attendance
lags in developed countries.
Bishop Martyn Minns, the rector of Truro Church in Fairfax, Va., who was
consecrated by Archbishop Akinola this year to serve as his missionary bishop in
North America, said Archbishop Akinola was motivated by a conviction that the
Anglican Communion must change its colonial-era leadership structure and
mentality.
“He doesn’t want to be the man; he just no longer wants to be the boy,” Bishop
Minns said. “He wants to be treated as an equal leader, with equal
respect.”
Even among Anglican conservatives, Archbishop Akinola is not universally
beloved. In November 2005, he published a letter purporting to be from the
leaders, known as primates, of provinces in the global south. It called
Europe a “spiritual desert” and criticized the Church of England. Three of
the bishops who supposedly signed it later denied adding their names. Some
bishops in southern Africa have also challenged his fixation with homosexuality,
when AIDS and poverty are a crisis for the continent.
He has been chastised more recently for creating a missionary branch of the
Nigerian church in the United States, called the Convocation of Anglicans in
North America, despite Anglican rules and traditions prohibiting bishops from
taking control of churches or priests not in their territory.
“There are primates who are very, very concerned about it,” said Archbishop
Drexel Gomez, the primate of the West Indies, because “it introduces more
fragmentation.”
Other conservative American churches that have split from the Episcopal Church,
the American branch of the Anglican Communion, have aligned themselves with
other archbishops, in Rwanda, Uganda and several provinces in Latin America —
often because they already had ties to these provinces through mission work.
Archbishop Gomez said he understood Archbishop Akinola’s actions because the
American conservatives felt an urgent need to leave the Episcopal Church and
were unwilling to wait for a new covenant being written for the Anglican
Communion. The new covenant is a lengthy and uncertain process led by
Archbishop Gomez that some conservatives hope will eventually end the impasse
over homosexuality.
One of Archbishop Akinola’s principal arguments, often heard from other
conservatives as well, is that Christianity in Nigeria, a country where
religious violence has killed tens of thousands in the past decade, must guard
its flank lest Islam overtake it. “The church is in the midst of Islam,”
he said. “Should the church in this country begin to teach that it is
appropriate, that it is right to have same sex unions and all that, the church
will simply die.”
He supports a bill in Nigeria’s legislature that would make homosexual sex and
any public expression of homosexual identity a crime punishable by five years in
prison.
The bill ostensibly aims to ban gay marriage, but it includes measures so
extreme that the State Department warned that they would violate basic human
rights. Strictly interpreted, the bill would ban two gay people from going
out to dinner or seeing a movie together.
It could also lead to the arrest and imprisonment of members of organizations
providing all manner of services, particularly those helping people with AIDS.
“They are very loose, those provisions,” said Dorothy Aken ’Ova of the
International Center for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, a charity that works
with rape victims, AIDS patients and gay rights groups. “It could target
just about anyone, based on any form of perception from anybody.”
Archbishop Akinola said he supported any law that limited marriage to
heterosexuals, but declined to say whether he supported the specific provisions
criminalizing gay associations. “No bishop in this church will go out and
say, ‘This man is gay, put him in jail,’ ” the archbishop said. But, he
added, Nigeria has the right to pass such a law if it reflects the country’s
values.
“Does Nigeria tell America what laws to make?” he said. “Does Nigeria tell
England what laws to make? This arrogance, this imperial tendency, should
stop for God’s sake.”
Though he insisted that he was not seeking power or influence, he is clearly
relishing the curious role reversal of African archbishops sending missionaries
to a Western society he sees as increasingly godless.
Asked whether his installing a bishop in the United States violated the church’s
longstanding rules, he responded heatedly that he was simply doing what Western
churches had done for centuries, sending a bishop to serve Anglicans where there
is no church to provide one.
Archbishop Akinola argues that the Convocation, his group in the United States,
was established last year to serve Nigerian Anglicans unhappy with the direction
of the Episcopal Church, and eventually began to attract non-Nigerians who
shared their views. Other church officials and experts say Archbishop
Akinola’s intention for the Convocation was to attract Americans and become a
rival to the Episcopal Church.
“Self-seeking, self-glory, that is not me,” he said. “No. Many
people say I embarrass them with my humility.”
Anyone who criticizes him as power-seeking is simply trying to undermine his
message, he said. “The more they demonize, the stronger the works of God,”
he said. (Emphasis Added)
Lydia Polgreen reported from Abuja, and Laurie Goodstein from
New York.
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