Broad Strokes

Today Andrew Gerns posted a piece on Episcopal Cafe titled "An American Battle on African Soil." For the most part, he quotes Kerry Eleveld's article "Akinola's Power Play", which appeared in the most recent issue of The Advocate, a "national lgbt newsmagazine" (I have some quibbles about some of what they call news, but that is another post for another time). In his opening Gerns writes:

The focus on homosexuality and the work of establishing parallel Anglican structures in the US and in the Anglican Communion has distorted the relationships of the African Church, made a few powerful at the expense of the average African Christian and distracted them from their mission.

The "African Church?" What African Church? Africa is a large continent with a myriad of countries, cultures, languages, traditions, and histories. There are probably as many different opinions about things Anglican in Africa as there are in North America. And Archbishop Akinola, the subject of The Advocate's article, does not represent all African Anglicans. While I might expect that kind of writing from The Advocate, I expect better from Episcopal Cafe. Gern's posting is just one example of a deeper problem within the ongoing "crisis" in the Anglican Communion. "The African Church," "the American Church," the conservatives," "the liberals," "the radical left," the radical right..." None of those groupings is a monolithic block of people who think exactly the same way.

Often where we group people is a matter of perspective. A number of years ago I represented the Fairfield County Chapter of the Connecticut Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights on the Coalition's statewide steering committee. Steering committee representatives from other chapters in the state looked at the other Fairfield County representative and me as being conservative because we came from a conservative part of the state. Yet when I attended the local chapter meetings, the members there viewed me as being pretty radical because I spent time with friends in the more progressive areas of the state, not to mention all those radicals on the steering committee. And just to keep challenging my own perspective, there are several people I know whose political--and religious--activities constantly remind me that "gay" does not automatically equal "liberal."

I don't think this is something we can avoid entirely. However, we can, and must, work to keep ourselves from using broad labels to categorize "the other." Sometimes "the other" is "us."

Peace,
Jeffri