It’s not big news or a secret that homosexuality is a controversial topic for nearly every major religion around the world. While it can be tempting at times to think of entire religions in general as being anti-gay, as time marches on and even the most conservative of religious traditions are forced to grapple with issues such as permitting sexual minorities to join the clergy and blessing same-sex marriages, divisions within and across denominations and geographical regions are becoming more apparent.

The recent debate over allowing LGBT individuals and women into the clergy in the Anglican Communion has perhaps demonstrated this idea more strikingly than any time in recent memory. The Anglican Church is itself a complex organization. According to the Church of England’s website: “As a worldwide family of churches, the Anglican Communion has more than 70 million adherents in 38 Provinces spreading across 161 countries. Located on every continent, Anglicans speak many languages and come from different races and cultures. Although the churches are autonomous, they are also uniquely unified through their history, their theology, their worship and their relationship to the ancient See of Canterbury.”

While most closely associated with the Church of England, Anglicanism encompasses many different kinds of churches and the Anglican Communion is a much more loosely organized faith than the more hierarchical and centralized Roman Catholic Church, for instance. This level of diversity has allowed for many variations within Anglicanism, and has led to many ideological splits as well. The most visible in recent memory has been the debate over allowing LGBT peoples and women into the clergy, and subsequently to the position of bishop.

Seeing this, the Vatican, from which the Church of England originally split in the 16th Century, has seized the opportunity to attract some converts in recent weeks, appealing to conservative Anglicans who are bristling at the Church’s increased openness to queer individuals. Nick Squires of the Christian Science Monitor writes:

The Vatican launched an historic initiative Tuesday to make it easier for disgruntled Anglicans worldwide to join the Roman Catholic Church. The church said the move was not a swipe at the Anglicans but it could nevertheless result in hundreds of thousands of churchgoers unhappy with openly gay and female clerics defecting to Rome.

Pope Benedict XVI gave his approval to a new framework to bring back into the fold Anglicans who oppose their church’s liberal stance on gay marriage and the ordination of women priests and gay bishops while allowing them to retain some of their separate religious traditions.

And it appears that there’s a very good chance that their tactics will be successful. Avril Ormsby quotes Stephen Parkinson, the director of the Forward in Faith (FiF) group, a worldwide association of Anglicans opposed to the ordination of women priests or bishops, when she writes:

“The diocese in Papua New Guinea would be an obvious one, there are one or two dioceses in America which might possibly, and there is certainly a diocese in Australia that might consider it,” he added.

Individual dioceses would decide whether and how to make such a conversion, FiF said. Local worshippers who disagreed with such a move would be left without a diocese, the group added.

Clearly, this is a less than ideal situation for the liberal members of more traditional congregations, including quite a few queer people, I’d imagine, who would essentially be left behind and left without a church of their own if such a scenario were to play out.

The independence that Anglican diocese are afforded has led to some other interesting trends worldwide. One of the most intriguing concerns sub-Saharan Africa, a region known for its hostility towards homosexuals, a hostility that is often fostered by religious leaders. However, despite their dislike of gays in the clergy, many feel it is unlikely that African Anglicans will convert to Catholicism:

Early indications from African bishops are that most Anglicans, despite their fierce opposition to homosexuality, will be saying “thanks but no thanks” to Rome’s new offer, largely because of the autonomy that they enjoy within the Anglican church.

This is an ironic view, given the origins of so much of the homophobia on the continent. As I wrote in an article on the gay rights struggle in sub-Saharan Africa, one of the sources of anti-gay feelings in the region is anti-colonialist/anti-Western feelings and these feelings rely on the argument that homosexuality is a European lifestyle imported to Africa. It’s interesting then that the same desire for autonomy from the West that fuels such homophobia also serves as the primary motivation for African Anglicans to stay with an increasingly gay-friendly institution.

The Anglican Church isn’t the only denomination of Christianity within the international community dealing with LGBT-related issues at the moment. While Corey has written before about how the Lutheran Church in the United States has been moving slowly towards acceptance of queer individuals and couples, the Church of Sweden, the largest Lutheran Church in the world, recently voted to allow its priests to wed same-sex couples in new gender-neutral church ceremonies. This decision comes after official legislation was introduced earlier this year allowing same-sex marriage in the legal context, and is being hailed as a big step forward in terms of marriage equality.

Meanwhile, the International Lesbian Gay Association’s (Europe) annual conference was held in the Southern European island nation of Malta last week, and religion was a main topic of the conversation. The conference allowed individuals to speak on the conditions in their country regarding religious and cultural barriers to equality, spokesperson Bernard Muscat said:

“The possibility to network with people facing similar barriers in other countries allows one to gain perspectives that are critical to the attainment of LGBT equality goals,” Muscat said.

Religion and culture will be tackled through the conference as two important determinants that directly influence the way a country deals with minority issues. Participants will share their experiences with regards to religious and cultural barriers faced in their countries.

“Participants from a mix of cultures and a number of religions will be present during the conference, with activists coming from as far as Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Georgia. A number of participants from Northern Africa and the Middle East will also be participating,” Muscat said.

While we may continue to debate what role religion should play in the politics of the gay rights movement worldwide, it is clear that religion does play a role. It’s import to remember that it is never as cut and dry as “us vs. them” – there are many many religious and spiritual queer folks around the world who wish to have their equal civil rights and continue to practice their religious beliefs unfettered at the same time. Continued engagement from both member of the religious community and the activist community will hopefully ensure that everyone’s needs are met as best as possible going forward.