The incoming Archbishop of York has an interesting idea for how the church can deal with the Great Sexual Devolution:
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Ignoring the biblical injunction “Be not conformed to this world,” Bishop Stephen Cottrell instead believes that the “Bible has to fit the current culture,” as the UK’s Christian Institute relates it.
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We can’t “ignore the culture in which we are set where same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage are not only considered normal, but positively taught and encouraged in many homes and schools as a social good,” wrote Cottrell, who was tapped last month for the Church of England’s second most senior clerical position. He’ll assume the office of Archbishop of York when the present holder, John Sentamu, retires in June.
The remarks in question were made by the 61-year-old Cottrell, currently the Bishop of Chelmsford, in a 2017 address that contradicts not just culturally inconvenient biblical injunctions but 2000 years of Christian tradition and teaching. It was an awful lot of heresy to pack into one speech.
“He said it would be wrong to ignore the ‘damage’ that is done by rejecting Western society’s current view of human sexuality,” related the Christian Institute. Yet is Cottrell ignoring the grave damage done by that “view” of sexuality itself?
This includes an out-of-wedlock birth rate rising in the United States from four percent in the 1940s to 40 percent today (72 percent in the black community) and which is associated with a trove of social ills; a MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, or “trans”) agenda that engenders sexual confusion in children, leading to youths having genital mutilation surgery and then regretting it (note: MUSS individuals have a very high suicide rate); to the wide embrace of risky sexual behaviors and the spread of STDs; and to the twisting of man’s sexuality caused by indulging those behaviors and by pornography’s widespread use, which creates unhappiness and an “eye altering [that] alters all.”
The Christian Institute also quotes Cottrell as saying that he’s “not sure the church has ever before had to face the challenge of being seen as immoral by the culture in which it is set.”
Really? The Romans called the early Christians, who rejected elements of the dominant culture, “haters of humanity.” So this is nothing new. What’s perhaps different is that instead of Christians willing to go to the lions, we now have churchmen reminiscent of the Cowardly Lion.
Then again, some may suppose Cottrell has the Scarecrow’s problem. He also said that opposing homosexual relationships “can legitimise homophobia in others.” Yet opposing the beliefs or behaviors of any group — from thieves to adulterers to pedophiles to Democrats to Republicans — can possibly inspire hatred toward it (as violence against Trump supporters evidences). So this factor is irrelevant when formulating positions.
Performing (pseudo)intellectual contortions to rationalize away Truth, Cottrell further stated that “‘faithful Christian people’ interpret the Bible’s instructions on sexuality ‘differently,’” related WND.com Sunday, and that those instructions are merely “part of our story and our inheritance.”
“But what we can do is recognise that what we know now about human development and human sexuality requires us to look again at those texts to see what they are actually saying to our situation, for what we know now is not what was known then,” the bishop concluded.
Yet we “know” nothing now that can change unchanging moral principles. All we know that’s new (and often unproven) is what science, and sometimes pseudo-science, tells us. For example, what if homosexuality or MUSS feelings have a biological basis, as some assert?
This is as relevant to right and wrong as is the claim that psychopaths are born and not made. For genetics doesn’t determine morality. Asserting otherwise is to reject morality in favor of biological determinism — and thus reduce man to a mere animal driven solely by instinct.
But perhaps Cottrell’s most telling line was, “I have my views and opinions, of course I do, but I am also ‘Father in God’ to all of you.” Yes, and whatever “we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides,” remarked G.K. Chesterton, “I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.”
Chesterton was illustrating the absurdity of the “views and opinions” spiel. Cottrell doesn’t speak like a follower of the Man who said He was “the Truth,” but like a moral relativist; he behaves as if sexuality is not a matter of morals but taste — and he’d never, perish the thought, impose his preferred flavor on others.
If Cottrell is going to take his lead from the shape-shifting culture, however, his intellectual contortions will not end. Note that even now pedophilia and bestiality — whose practitioners are being rebranded as, respectively, minor-attracted people (MAPs) and zoophiles — are gradually being legitimized. So will he draw a line? If so, where and on what basis?
If he’s not going to follow the culture further into the abyss, his guide must be something transcending culture, time, and place — namely Truth. But he apparently has no awareness of this ethereal guide, for he wouldn’t have already been seduced by today’s Sodom were it otherwise.
This said, Cottrell actually is living the Bible, in a sense. “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine,” 2 Timothy 4:3 warns. “Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”
Rejecting his cross, Bishop Cottrell has apparently concluded that there’s no need to be a martyr when you can be Scratcher in Chief of Itches.
Photo: ChristianChan/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
