Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) does not strike a sympathetic character. The former head of the powerful Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate and current
Metropolitan of Budapest and Hungary is the sort of man who makes both friends and enemies with equal ease. Moreover, as a high-ranking Russian cleric granted a Hungarian passport (and subsequently visa-free access to the Schengen Zone), it seems natural that suspicion will follow him wherever he might go.
As a consequence, there were not a few people delighted to read a July 5th report in the Russian dissent outlet Novaya Gazetta that a 19-year-old former “cell attendant,” George Suzuki, was accusing the Metropolitan of carrying out a fourteen month long campaign of sexual harassment against him. Suzuki, who left the Metropolitian’s residence for the last time in January with a stolen Rolex, 30,000 euros in cash, and a phone filled with pictures and recordings of his time with the powerful bishop, is now living with his mother in Japan and claims that he took the stolen watch and cash, because he believed they would protect him from further harassment–which does not make a whole lot of sense, but has gone largely unquestioned by those delighted by the chance to strike a blow on a man whom they despise. Meanwhile, Metropolitan Hilarion’s defenders, for their part, are mounting a denial that frankly does not help his cause or theirs. The minute you accuse the CIA of planting a story you have already lost the argument.
Left with No Defense
The truth that no one seems very interested in admitting is that Metropolitan Hilarion’s best defense is closed to him. There is, after all, the possibility that this dalliance (whatever it was; Suzuki does not claim they ever had sex) was consensual and now Hilarion is being blackmailed. A position supported by things like the stolen money. Of course, this defense would be in itself a confession by the Metropolitan, who is after all (in accordance with the canons of the Eastern Church) supposed to be celibate and definitely (in accordance with the rampant homophobia of ecclesiastical life) not supposed to be attracted to men.
One cannot deny that embedded in the response to the so-called Suzuki affair is not a small amount of homophobia. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the hetrosexual affairs of bishops have not elicited similar opportunism. The once presiding hierarch of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of America and the now “defrocked,” Joseph Al-Zehlaoui was forced from his throne when his by-all- accounts-consensual relationships with adult women (which were, like so many of these relationships common knowledge) became fodder for internet gossip. Our collective bias was made a bit too apparent when the woman who was willing to cooperate in the campaign against Al-Zehlaoui was spoken of as a “victim” while the woman unwilling to denounce him was painted as an accomplice. This dichotomous treatment points to another fact of this whole lurid business. Just as homophobia fuels the accusations made against homosexual clerics, misogyny underpins the accusations made against hetrosexual ones. After all, if you conclude that a woman who has had a 16-year-long relationship with a man, a relationship she began whilst already an adult, married, and a mother, and who co-owns not one but two pieces of property with this man is a “victim,” you are a misogynist incapable of seeing women as adults who are responsible for their own behavior. It is an infantilizing view of women, though one many women take advantage of, for certain.
Consenting Adults and Our Own Fears
Before I go further, I should probably make it clear that what I am talking about here is not the accusations of child sex abuse which have shaken organized religion over the past twenty years, most notably within Roman Catholicism.
I am here concerned with how we think and speak about the consensual sexual activity of bishops and priests, people for whom Christian churches have set up unrealistic expectations about sexual conduct while at the same time historically benefiting from the fact that those whose desires failed to conform to societal expectations often sought refuge in clerical life as a sort of “get social acceptance free” card. It was a tension that for centuries benefited all parties. The Church was given access to a seemingly endless pool of talent and the talent bought for themselves a degree of freedom, a compromise of a life (which if we are being honest is what to some extent we are all afforded).
But the past century has changed this ancient agreement, seemingly without consulting any of the concerned parties. In an era when authenticity (whatever that means) is held as the highest of virtues and privacy is an increasingly rare commodity, it appears that people (all people regardless of their secular politics or theological positions) have somehow come to believe that the idealized expectations of clerical sexual conduct must stand while the tacit acceptance of the fact that no one lives like the rulebook dictates be cast aside.
The New Puritans
This is compounded by a reality that throughout Western culture there is a growing puritanism. This is not the puritanism of the fundamentalist Purity Balls or the Tradwives prairie dresses. It is the puritanism that arose from the Women’s Movement, in progressive and even so-called revolutionary circles, where people sought to enlighten away the more unruly parts of the human spirit. The puritanism masked as social progress (as the great American essayist Joan Didion observed nearly fifty years ago) is ultimately “the aversion…to adult sexual life itself.” Adult sexual life is filled with ambiguities and uncertainties such as it does not nicely conform to ideology. Yes, there are power imbalances. Every relationship, sexual or not, has these. Desire is not politically correct. It is not concerned with the great project of human equality. It is born out of the world of nature where there is no such equality.
I have watched with no small amount of horror as the rightful anger at the abuse of children as morphed to cover the consensual sexual affairs of adults–primarily women and young gay men–who are told by their would-be defenders that they are somehow too fragile, too vulnerable to make choices concerning their sexual lives if confronted with a man who is older or richer or “more powerful.” It is, quite literally, infantilizing, applying the same supposition we make of children, that consent is not possible, to adults. It is misogyny and homophobia, dancing under the banner of Revolution.
It’s the Sex Not the Secrecy (Even if Secrecy is Bad)
Now, there will be those who say that trouble, for the Catholics and the Orthodox at least, is that we have created a culture of secrecy. And this is an argument to which I am somewhat sympathetic. Perhaps it is the tacit part of our tacit acceptance that has created the problem. But then I tuned in to the Church of England’s Synod meeting earlier this month. Here gay and lesbian people, including gay and lesbian clerics, are arguing to rightly end the secrecy. They are even looking to change the rulebook, the dreaded and now horribly titled Issues on Human Sexuality. They are looking for stated approval and public acceptance.
The response has not been, as one might expect, a positive one. Over the course of the debate, conservatives desperately plead for “legal advice” and “time” while progressives talked about “Grace” as a catchall. And while it is no secret, I am sympathetic to the arguments of the latter and a bit exhausted by the former, I was struck (but unsurprised) by the fact that no one was able to say what was really going on: There are some people in the room and in the Church of England (as everywhere) who are very unnerved, maybe even disgusted, by the idea of two men having sex.
As a result of this discomfort and/or disgust, they do not want any public acknowledgement that such a thing happens (although it does and always has). Which is why weddings are off the table for them, because weddings are (at their core) a public celebration of the fact that we as a community have determined that we are okay–even enthusiastic–about the concerned parties having sex. Everything else is romantic embellishment.
The End of Romance
And perhaps it is all that romantic embellishment that got us here in the first place. As I have written elsewhere, my maternal grandparents were among the first in their respective families to not have an arranged marriage. They married, because they were in love, which for most cultures and for most of human history is a very novel idea. A good one (by and large), but only if we can accept it without thinking that giving social place to romantic love somehow gives us the right to domesticate all passions. To make a French garden of the sexual urge.
Those same grandparents, my Pappou George and Yiayia Kay, would not have been particularly troubled by the fact that a bishop might have a girlfriend–or a boyfriend. They, like most from their time and culture, accepted this as part of the way in which the world works, one of the many accommodations we offer one another as we stumble through life. To wit, my grandmother would speak warmly about the “friend” of an ostensibly celibate priest from her childhood (a man who would eventually become a bishop), because this friend kept candy in his pockets for the children during church services, sneaking them the treats when their parents looked away. My grandmother had been allowed to live a public romance in a way few of their peers were permitted and yet she still understood that a fundamentally romantic ethic (and here I mean not just as in the ethic of romantic love, but an ethic that sees the world through the lens of the ideal) was not one that would get you far in a fallen world.
The Anglican priest and public theologian, Rev. Jarel Robinson-Brown (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is a friend and sometime collaborator whom I imagine at this moment is either amused or annoyed that I have brought him up alongside Hilarion) has noted that Christianity has not yet developed a proper theology of sex. He is right, and in the absence of such theology, we have filled the void with 1000 things that are all entirely unhelpful. As a consequence of this failure, we have created a space where all desire becomes a potentially weapon in the hands of one’s enemies. Nevermore than if one wears clerical garb-which makes us all look very silly.
Putting Aside Childish Things
I am not a fan of Metropolitan Hilarion, but I am also aware that in this moment he may very well be more sinned against than sinning. We have some very strange ideas about sex which seem to heighten when the issue at hand is the sex life of a man of the cloth. We imagine that they can be in some way perpetual children, removed from the sexual instinct. We want to call “father” men to whom we have forbidden the one act that makes actual fathers. We want to be presumed children in the fact of their sexual natures (which are human natures) It is a gross misunderstanding of adult life, of human nature. It is a romantic and childish view of the world. There will most certainly be more “sex scandals” so long as we hide are head in the sand. And I, for one, am ready to talk about more interesting things.
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