Where's Gene?

Has anyone else noticed how the Simple Country Bishop has effectively vanished? There's hardly been a news story about him since the Sudanese archbishop's plainspoken words about the error of Gene Robinson's consecration, and the necessity of his standing down if any healing is to happen in the Communion. The stream of ENS stories about Gene has even dried up. And Gene's disappearance act is not one that he's engineered: he's certainly not returned to New Hampshire, or discontinued his self-absorbed and disturbing blog entries, or ceased talking about himself. And we know he's busy making a film about (what else) himself. But the Ubiquitous Me is not to be found in newspaper articles or TV stories or in the pronouncements of his fellow bishops. So what's happened?

Perhaps there's really nothing more for the media to report about him. After all, the story is pretty much been told: Gene is a bishop. Gene is gay. Gene was not invited. Gene is victim. Gene is hurt. Gene only wants people to talk to him so they'll like him. Etc. Once that story's told, there's really not much more to report. Only Gene can talk about Gene as much as Gene would like to talk about Gene, after all.

But it seems there is more going on. The American bishops abandoned their effort to get Gene admitted to Lambeth. They quit talking about him entirely. They are pretending he doesn't exist. Why is this so?

Simply put, it's because they never really cared about Gene Robinson in the first place. It was never about Gene, except to Gene. In a very real sense, they are as self-absorbed as Gene is, and he was important only to the extent that Gene served their purposes. As Bishop Iker observed, if they did really care about Gene's exclusion, they would have removed themselves from Lambeth in solidarity with their brother bishop--and they didn't even think about doing that. No, Gene Robinson provided them with their progressive bona fides, their token "victim of hate," their evidence of courage in standing up for the "downtrodden." And he was only that insofar as he did not prove an embarrassment or an inconvenience.

But that's what happened. Gene Robinson, in all his gayness, proved to be a terrible embarrassment. He destroyed what undoubtedly the Americans thought was going to be a nuanced and effective wooing of the Sudanese. And they found that even with the Nigerians, Ugandans, Rwandans, Kenyans and others missing, they were still a minority on the issue of homosexuality, and all Gene Robinson did was make it worse. He was a totem for everything the majority of the Communion finds odious and offensive about the American church. And he had to go.

Of course as anyone who's seen Robinson interviewed or read his writings about himself can quickly discern, the man's self-awareness is nil. So there's no chance he realized he was becoming an embarrassment and withdrew from view himself. No, it's almost certain one or more of his fellow bishops, or perhaps the Presiding Bishop herself, had to do the dirty deed of throwing him under the bus, to borrow a metaphor from his Integrity friends. It's not clear how it happened, but undoubtedly someone "had a talk" with Gene, and told him to be a little less visible--in essence to go away. Certainly it was put in gentler terms, cleverly leveraging that lack of self-awareness. Probably he was told that in order to advance the cause of gay rights the issue needed to be decoupled from him and his consecration, and so forth. But the bottom line was Gene needed to go and needed to be told to go.

Bishop Iker was right to call out his fellow bishops for their rank hypocrisy. Their shunning of Robinson--for that is what it is--proves that they really don't care about the causes they champion, so much as they care about being viewed by themselves and others as noble for championing their causes. And at the end of the day, they aren't inclusive or tolerant or loving or accepting, save to the extent it makes them feel good about themselves and encourages others to think better of them. They certainly aren't so toward the orthodox, but they aren't even so to their token gay colleague Gene.

And even though there may be a bit of poetic justice in the same narcissistic instinct so evident in Robinson being what has seemingly led to his being abandoned by his fellow revisionist bishops, one has to feel a bit sorry for Gene Robinson. After all, he was led to believe that they really liked him, that they really supported him, that they would really stand up for him, and that they would not abandon him. And the fact that Robinson is abnormally obsessed with what others think about him can only make his hurt worse, if he's ever able to confront the ugly truth that they never really cared for him except to the extent he served their purposes and egos.

Robinson may have been sidelined, but there remains plenty of evidence for the rest of the Anglican bishops showing why the American revisionist version of Christianity is pretty repellant. And ironically, the crass, utilitarian treatment of Gene Robinson by his fellow revisionist bishops speaks pretty potently to how a religion focused on self and worldly politics shows none of the charity or other fruits of a faith centered on the saving grace of Jesus Christ.