Incompleteness, Imperial Legacies, and Anglican Fudge: How Concerns about Gender and Sexuality Affect how Anglicans do Theology

Abstract

Gender and sexuality are potent flashpoints showing up deep fissures in Anglican ecclesiology and identity. There has been growing attention to the power imbalances within Anglican hierarchies. Whether in African leaders’ public disavowals of what they consider Western Christian backsliding, or in social media discussions about the Anglican churches’ positions on their clergy’s and ordinands’ sex lives, old orders of authority are no longer operating unchallenged. Here, Anglican self-understanding of itself as a tradition characterized by comprehensiveness and broadness is assessed through the lens of decolonial theology, interrogating norms of power. In a context of continued dismantling of imperial structures of power, and decreased toleration of the maintenance of old hierarchies associated with empire, the concept of unity as a good in itself is, where this is perceived to stem from a desire to uphold imperial control, likely to be challenged.