In Anglican Archbishop Nicholas Okoh’s first press conference on July 14, he addressed the controversy that is sweeping the global Anglican communion and condemned homosexual behavior as well as other Anglican provinces that have adopted an unbiblical acceptance of it.
“In this matter silence can be detrimental to public well-being,” he said. “The issue at stake of human sexuality is not an Anglican prerogative and it is by no means limited to the Anglican circle as … is clearly shown all over the world.”
“Same sex marriage, paedophilia and all sexual perversions should be roundly condemned by all who accept the authority of Scripture over human life.”
Archbishop Okoh succeeded Archbishop Pete Akinola as primate, or head archbishop, of the Anglican Church of Nigeria on March 25. With roughly 18 million members, the Church of Nigeria is the largest province in the Anglican Communion.
This is probably going to win me another charge of being a closet progressive (Charles Gore won similar accolades in his time, of course).
I hope Archbishop Okoh plans to continue his predecessor’s practice of calling the secular authorities of his country to account (also an Evangelical mandate), because, despite the lively Christian faith evident there, it doesn’t yet seem to have done a great deal to change many aspects of the indigenous national culture.
Secondly, while I understand the archbishop’s desire to focus on what he perceives as being imported from outside Nigeria, I would like to see him speak in more holistic terms. Divorce, adultery, spousal abuse and premarital sexual activity are all departures from the biblical standard and I suspect Nigerians have indulged in them without much outside intervention.
There is also the issue of language. People have rightly argued that the West frequently fails to comprehend the idiom of Third World religious discourse, but I suspect that there is a corollary. A word like “perversion” can be read literally as a departure from what is prescribed, but in contemporary western discourse it carries a far more negative and sinister tone. I doubt that most of us would term divorce or even premarital sex as “perversions” in that sense, but literally that is what they are. While I would imagine that Archbishop Okoh appreciates that distinction, rather than twinning same-sex marriage with divorce as a example of the corruption of Christian culture, he chooses pedophilia. To me, that’s not so far removed from a progressive making an equivalence between someone who opposed Proposition 8 and those advocating violence against homosexuals.
I imagine that Okoh meant that same gender sexual attraction was deeply disordered, which it is — it is a “perverted” [wrong course] sexual attraction. Of course, all attraction towards sin is “disordered” but some is more so than others.