Nigerians, Anglicans Clash Over Gays

Sub-Saharan Africa - Nigeria
1 Mar 2005 - Yahoo! News

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The colonial-era cathedral in Lagos is a symbol of tradition and quietude amid the clamor of a sprawling African metropolis. The Nigerians who pray inside have come to stand for firm conservatism in the rift over homosexuality that threatens to split the 77 million-member Anglican Communion.

British missionaries brought the Anglican faith to Nigeria, whose 17.5 million faithful now stand as the largest community outside the United Kingdom. That gives them a powerful voice in the debate with liberals in the United States, where a gay bishop has been elected and gay unions blessed, and Canada, where gay unions also have been approved.

Thursday, church leaders meeting in Ireland asked the U.S. and Canadian churches to withdraw for three years from the influential Anglican Consultative Council, a body of bishops, priests and lay people who meet in between the church's once-a-decade international conferences.

Primate Peter Akinola, Nigeria's top Anglican, had described the blessings of same-sex unions and gay bishops as a "Satanic attack" on the church and has made anti-gay remarks.

"We cannot continue to be in communion with people who have taken a step outside the biblical boundaries," he told a Nigerian newspaper, The Guardian, last year.

"I cannot think of how a man in his senses would be having a sexual relationship with another man. It is so unnatural, so unscriptural. Even in the world of animals, dogs, cows, lions, we don't hear of such things."

African bishops at an October meeting in Nigeria agreed they had to keep their vision of Anglicanism distinct from liberal trends in the West. They resolved, for example, to stop sending seminarians to schools in the West and to establish more seminaries in Africa.

The request that the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada withdraw from the Anglican Consultative Council sparked fears the church was moving toward a formal breakup. But the move was welcomed by many Nigerians.

"For me it's simply outrageous for a church to approve of homosexuality, which is an affront on God," Nigerian Anglican Akinyemi Johnson said.

"The primates have taken a bold stand in asking those who support gays in the church to step aside. It is up to them to decide now if they want to come back."

Nigerian bishops contacted Saturday by The Associated Press declined to comment on the news from Ireland, saying they would wait for Akinola to speak first. Akinola, who had attended the Irish meeting, was still out of the country Saturday.

A cultural gap between the West and the developing world is only widening, according to Isidore Emeka, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Nigerian church history.

"For the West, science is now God and everything can be explained in rational terms, including homosexuality," Emeka said. "But in Africa, superstition and the old ways of doing things are still very strong and resist new ways."

Emeka says Nigerians could lose funding from rich but liberal churches in the West.

Akinola already has issued an encyclical to the church membership exhorting them to prepare for the worst and be ready to refuse financial assistance from liberal churches.

Copyright 2005 by the Associated Press. All rights reserved.