God and Mrs Thatcher (33 page)

All the hot air over single motherhood revealed the secularisation
rather than the moralisation of the debate about the family in Thatcher’s Britain. Whereas once the preoccupation had been on the moral implications of pregnancy out of wedlock, it was now on its economic cost. The perceived ‘failure’ of these women was not that they had engaged in immoral behaviour but that they demonstrated the ultimate act of irresponsibility by seeking support from the state for their child. Wayward fathers were also to be targeted, tracked down by the Child Support Agency (established under John Major) and sold to the electorate on the potent rationale that the taxpayer should not pay for the father’s wilful irresponsibility. The Conservative government may not have been authoritarian in its regulation of sexual morality, but it was increasingly prepared to police the breakdown of the family when it came at a cost to the state. A comment from Adrian Rogers, of the pressure group the Conservative Family Campaign, was telling of this new economic focus: ‘Moral problems are political problems because of the amount of money we spend on them.’
36

The minister often wheeled out to push the case for traditional morality was ‘Thatcher’s Rottweiler’ Norman Tebbit. In a speech to the Conservative Political Centre in 1985 on the ‘permissive society’, Tebbit made clear that at its source was ‘the economic failure and personal irresponsibility engendered by the socialist state’.
37
An assortment of associated progressive ideas – secularism, collectivism, feminism, the rise of the professional class – were also blamed in a right-wing analysis which was characterised by lazy historical generalisations about a pre-1960s golden era of the family and exaggerations about its contemporary decline. As
Daily Mail
journalist Mary Kenny countered: ‘The individual and the libertarian values are in conflict with the family much more than those of a socialist ethic.’
38
Ironically, the expansion of choice and freedom in the economic sphere had the effect of accelerating these values in the social and moral sphere. With a society orientated towards consumption, so greater sexual liberation and the loosening of traditional societal associations was an inevitable
by-product. As historian Mark Garnett has surmised: ‘A context was developing in which Conservative supporters … could enjoy the benefits of the permissive society, while blaming their political opponents for its perceived success.’
39

As much as the ‘permissive’ tag was used to tarnish the Labour Party and the SDP Alliance, it was even more effective as a line of attack against the Established Church. ‘When the authority of those institutions [the churches] is undermined because they haven’t been forthright, it is then that people turn too much to the State,’ so said Margaret Thatcher in 1987 in a speech which seemed to place the blame for a dependency culture on the moral laxity of the Church.
40
The
Daily Mail
editorial the next morning praised the Prime Minister’s moral leadership, which it contrasted with the Church’s supposed ‘pussy-footing’ over AIDS.
41
For MP John Gummer, the answer was simple, the Church needed to rediscover ‘the theology of judgement’.
42
The following year Home Secretary Douglas Hurd delivered this message to the General Synod, in which he entreated the Church to preach individual responsibility as an effective bulwark against crime and social breakdown. Archbishop Habgood was unimpressed, though: ‘I doubt whether young people are led into crime because they haven’t heard enough sermons about morality from bishops.’
43

Needless to say, the bishops did not welcome ministers telling them what role the Church should perform in society and yet Tory protestations about the Church’s ambiguous moral leadership posed a legitimate question. Should the Church, as traditionalists advocated, adhere to a strict and uncompromising line and risk upsetting its liberal members and being ignored by the general populace, or should it, as liberals proposed, attempt to offer a Christian perspective on contemporary morality, in all its complexity, but be accused of compromising the Gospel? As is the Anglican way, the Church tied itself up in knots as it tried to carve out a middle line. When, in 1983, Cecil Parkinson’s affair with his secretary, Sarah Keays, became public knowledge, Lambeth
Palace received more letters on this than on any other issue (far more than on Runcie’s controversial Falklands sermon the year before), with most of the opinion that Parkinson should not be allowed to remain in office. Margaret Thatcher had reportedly been reluctant to sack her favourite minister, whom she had earmarked for the Foreign Office; she made him Trade and Industry Secretary and it was only later, when it was revealed that Keays was carrying Parkinson’s child, that he resigned. Officials at Lambeth Palace thought it wise to draft a response affirming that adultery was wrong but that Christianity was a merciful religion: ‘Christians do not kick a man when he is down.’
44
Runcie also wrote a personal letter of support to Parkinson. Conscious that the Church should be seen to be defending Christian standards, the Bishop of Birmingham penned a piece for the
News of the World,
but chose his words carefully: ‘If [the Parkinson affair] makes us look again at what is happening in this country, it will have done some real good.’
45
Any accusations that the Church did not speak out about morality were of course exaggerated; the problem was that when it did, it was often ignored by the press and possibly even by the Tory Party, especially when the message was one that they did not want to hear.

In 1984, the same year that the government pushed through legislation relaxing divorce regulations, the Church’s Board for Social Responsibility produced
Foreword to Marriage,
aimed at prospective couples and designed to inflect modern approaches to sex within a Christian perspective. The pamphlet acknowledged sex as a pleasurable activity and not just for procreation, although couples were advised to seek a joint health check and virgins to consider an easing of their hymen before their wedding night. Husbands were encouraged to give their wives ‘gentle reassurance’ in the bedroom, being advised that equality in pleasure should be the aim but rarely the result: ‘like most other human activities [sex] can have its hilarious moments’.
46
Much more controversial were the references to homosexuality, which was not condemned outright as wives were
warned not to be surprised if their husbands admitted to youthful dalliances with men. Conservative Anglicans were predictably unimpressed with
Foreword
, especially as it seemed to condone sex outside marriage; nor did they have much faith in the Bishop of Birmingham, who chaired the board: ‘What people do in their own bedrooms is between them and God’ was the bishop’s favourite retort to any questions on sexual morality.
47
Foreword into Marriage
was the Church’s attempt at a frank and open discussion about sex but one wonders how many couples actually read it or whether they found it of use. In this post-feminist and
Cosmopolitan
era, its discussions about sex, and indeed its assumptions about women appeared a little quaint. The fact was that more and more couples were looking to the state rather than to the Church to endorse their unions let alone their activities behind closed doors.

MARGARET THATCHER MAY
have criticised the bishops for failing to provide moral leadership, but a far more serious and fractious development for Anglican traditionalists was that secular notions of morality and equality were seeping into the Church itself. The surge in second marriages in the 1980s lent credibility to an already well-established argument for the Church to consent to the marrying of divorcees, with many believing it a necessary move if the Church of England wished to fulfil its role as the Established Church. In the recognition that enforcing uniformity on this matter was likely to prompt a revolt, Lambeth Palace referred the matter to a diocesan vote, which thirty-two rejected and twelve accepted. Bishops therefore could consent to clergy remarrying divorcees, but no clergyman would be forced to marry a couple against their will. In this case, the Church conceded that individual conscience should play
a part, but no such resolution was possible over the next issue on the Church’s agenda: whether to allow remarried or divorced men to enter the priesthood. This issue split both the Synod and Parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee, the latter, in an unprecedented move, calling for a conference with the legislative committee of the Synod to solve the issue. When the Measure finally reached the House of Commons, admittedly late in the day and with a handful of frustrated Anglican Conservatives present, it was marginally defeated by fifty-one votes to forty-five. Seven months later, the necessary powers within the Church and Parliament made sure that the Measure passed, although according to a disgruntled John Gummer, it did so only on the ‘strength of votes from atheists and agnostics’.
48

In a letter to the Bishop of Stepney, Jim Thomson, in 1979, David Sheppard privately acknowledged the difficulty that homosexuality posed for the Church and for him personally:

Sheppard was not the only one to deliberately shy away from the homosexuality debate within the Church. When he had first arrived at Lambeth Palace, Runcie had refused to add a foreword in support of the British Council of Churches liberal report
Sexuality and Christian Insights.
He publicly instructed his bishops not to ordain openly gay priests but that was as far as Runcie was prepared to go. In 1983 Rev. Giles Ecclestone of the Board for Social Responsibility, spelt out the dilemma facing Anglicans: ‘If the Church simply joins one or other
of these pressure groups it contributes to the continuing process of protection, splitting and polarising of attitudes. How can it remain open while refusing to ignore the genuine issues?’
50
This was a question that the Church hierarchy seemed reluctant to face, but their indecisiveness became increasingly impossible to sustain, with gay Christians on one side and traditionalists on the other both urging for clarity. Some, though, were appalled to see that gay activism had gained credibility in the Church. Writing in the
Evening Standard
in 1984, Max Hastings considered that ‘homosexuality is a misfortune that deserves every social sympathy. But it is contemptible to behold prominent members of the Church of England encouraging its exponents within the Church to “come out”’.
51

In November 1987, the House of Bishops published
Sexuality and the Church
but it was a cautious document. It offered tentative support to homosexual Christians but made clear that it would not be tolerated amongst the clergy. A line was drawn between homosexuality in society and homosexuality within the priesthood and therefore ultimately between the morals of the nation and standards within the Church. Arguably, this was a theologically unsound distinction for it implied that an individual’s homosexuality was an entirely different matter should the lay Christian seek an ordained role in the Church. When the report reached the Synod, however, the debate was co-opted by a group of conservatives who managed to pass a resolution affirming that sexual relationships should be conducted within marriage and that homosexuals should be called upon to repent. The Church was beginning to contradict itself.

A year later, the Bishop of London took the bold step of expelling the Gay Christian Movement from its headquarters in St Botolph’s Church in East London. Run by two openly gay clergymen, it had started life as a counselling service for gay men and lesbians but had gradually evolved into the main pressure group for gay Christians. The Bishop of London successfully won his case in the ecclesiastical court but it
was an unfortunate saga that caused much bitterness and showed the Church in an unflattering light. As the Bishop of Durham wrote much later, the problem was not that there was a division over homosexuality but the lengths that the Church went to brush over these divisions: ‘The presiding principle was deemed to be that the Church of England had to be kept together … our fudge only postponed the inevitable showdown.’
52
Nor did the intervention from evangelical Tory MPs help matters. The Church’s muddle over homosexuality became the main reference point for those Tories who wished to characterise the Church as lacking moral direction. Not that any of this concerned Margaret Thatcher, but it did certainly enhanced the growing divide between the party and the Church.

By far the most contentious issue to preoccupy the Synod was the proposal to allow women to enter the priesthood. The campaign for female ordination had been quietly gathering pace for fifty years or more and gained increasing momentum with the acceptance of female priests in other parts of the Anglican Communion, notably in America. In what was to prove a galvanising moment for both advocates and opposers, in 1975 the General Synod passed a resolution affirming that there was ‘no fundamental objection’ to women becoming ordained. The Movement for the Ordination of Women was established in 1979, in part to ensure that the Synod stuck to its word while traditionalists – both Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals – fearing that the Measure would be steamrolled through, combined forces to form an anti-ordination faction in the Synod. By the next time synodical elections came around (with many candidates campaigning on a pro-or anti-ordination ticket), positions in the Synod had hardened to such an extent that the issue would take over a decade to resolve. The House of Laity was divided, although the largest opposition came unsurprisingly from the House of Clergy. Most members of the House of Bishops were in favour but were aware that it would take time and required careful negotiation.