A series of conflicts over sectional emancipations and inclusions [meant that] there were some very good stories of emancipation to be told, testimonies to the liberating implications of the Gospel and the pastoral involvement of the church, the enormously influential struggle for civil rights in the USA, for instance, and the Latin American base ecclesial communities that gave new energy to Catholic witness in the face of poverty and economic injustice. These threw a lifeline to a floundering liberal imagination, offering a matrix by which the present could be presented as standing in perpetual judgment on the past, allowing the Western hegemonic tradition of modernity to re-brand its anti-conservative appeal.
In grasping the lifeline, however, Western liberalism paid its price. From that point on, it became identified with one kind of moral cause to the exclusion of others. It became a church-party proper, a specific agenda to pit against other agendas.
The whole storehouse of what gay Christians have felt and thought about their lives should become a matter of wider reflection, reflected on by those who are called to live this experience, by those who are called to accompany them in their living, by all who share their understanding of living as something they owe an account of to God.
The St Andrews Day Statement addressed questions quite specifically to gay Christians, not to liberals, and about the essentials of Christian faith. Its authors thought there was an exploration to be had, which, if undertaken in good faith, might yield a common discussion over what it could mean to be both homosexual and Christian. …Is the gay Christian movement still attached to the wheels of the liberal chariot, content with the victim-mentality that the liberal programme prescribes for it? Or can it present itself as the bearer of an experience of the human that is, at the very least, of irreplaceable importance for our understanding of our own times?
Oliver O’Donovan The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm
