Anglicans in Canada and Same-Sex Unions

The Anglican Church of Canada holds a national governing meeting called the General Synod. One session put human sexuality on the agenda, and delegates were asked to study a theological question: whether church blessings for same-sex unions count as a faithful, spirit-guided development of Christian teaching, in light of what Scripture says about the dignity of every person.

Civil same-sex marriage was already legal across Canada by then, but churches govern marriage through their own rules, known as canons. The Anglican discussion therefore ran on a track separate from the courts and Parliament.

A debate of many decades

By then, the church had wrestled with the subject for decades. It had set out to build a theological case for revising the marriage canon so that two people of the same sex could wed, and the outcome was a theological study. Responses across the denomination were mixed, and the church had no agreement for settling its disputes over sexuality.

Two ideas under review

The study concentrated on two concepts that had slowed any change. The first was gender complementarity, the belief that marriage rests on the pairing of male and female. The second was procreation as a purpose of marriage.

On procreation, the study observed that opposite-sex couples are not required to be able to have children before they marry. On complementarity, it argued that once women and men fill every kind of social role, the difference between them carries little meaning beyond biology. Attention could move to commitment, trust and mutuality, qualities that same-sex partners can embody just as fully. The study added that many Christians see in committed, lifelong, monogamous same-sex partnerships a quality of love that calls on the church to understand them in marital terms.

The wider religious picture

Other denominations took other positions. Official Roman Catholic teaching does not recognize same-sex marriage, which set it in contrast to the Anglican inquiry. Opinion inside the Anglican tradition itself has ranged widely, and the question of the marriage canon has returned to later synods.