The Most Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, has given a most revealing interview to the Houston Chronicle in which she says that Anglican churches in Africa have polygamous members and, um, that’s basically OK. I mean, not ideal, but a man can keep his wives if he wants to, though not add to his collection.
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Well, I suppose her Church was founded by a man with six wives…
Here's the Q&A from the Houston Chronicle:
Q: How does that play in more conservative parts of the world? Do you follow one set of beliefs here, and other cultural values in other parts of the world?
A: That's really the name of the game with Anglicans. One of our primary issues during the Reformation was that worship had to be in a language the people could understand. We take context really seriously, because we take incarnation, the presence of God in the flesh, very seriously. He appears to us in different ways in places. I'll give you a contrasting example. In the 1980s, the Anglican community started to wrestle with the issue of polygamy in Africa. Polygamy is not an issue here, except in very small pockets of Utah and Arizona, and the church has taken a very different position. We said no. In Africa, the church doesn't officially recognize polygamy. They certainly have polygamous members of their churches. In some places, they say the man can't take additional wives once he becomes a Christian, but he isn't forced to divorce the wives he already has. The children generally are recognized as full members if they want to be baptized.
In some instances, there was good reason for permitting married, male converts to Christianity to keep the wives they already had. Had the wives and children been abandoned, many of them would have been viewed as outcasts in their societies, women with no status, left without protection.
Obviously, Thompson doesn't do nuance well. Thompson is Roman Catholic. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
