Saint John Henry Newman is sometimes said to have been gay, on account of a relationship with another male priest of whom he wrote, “From the first he loved me with an intensity of love, which was unaccountable.” This, however, is based on a childish modern prejudice. Victorians had a spirituality which permitted loving friendship of a kind with which, post-Freud, we have become lamentably unfamiliar. 

England has been let down by her Church’s inability to articulate a theology of friendship

Why does it feel strange for male friends to express their love for one another? England has been let down by her Church’s inability to articulate a theology of friendship that recognises the importance, if not centrality, of friends to Christian discipleship — and to lives well lived in service to local communities. 

Another priest called “Stuckey” Coles served as chaplain to and later principal of Pusey House, the Anglo-Catholic institution in central Oxford, at the end of the 19th century. He placed friendship at the heart of his ministry to University students. One such student later reflected that:

His two great enthusiasms — his religion and his friendships — were closely intertwined. His love of our Lord was expressed in his work for his friends and his longing to bring them to his own joyful faith, while his love for his friends stirred him to seek personal holiness that he might have more to convey. If ever it might be said of any man, “For their sakes I sanctify myself,” it could surely be said of him.

Jeremy Taylor, the 17th century Anglican divine, once wrote of friendship as manifesting the “greatest love and the greatest usefulness, and the most open communication and the noblest sufferings, and the most exemplar faithfulness, and the severest truth, and the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of minds, of which brave men and women are capable”. He believed that Christianity had “christened” that love and aspired above all else to extend it. “Christian charity” or love, he wrote, is “friendship to all the world”. 

Taylor also wrote that the aim to befriend the world is common to everyone. Nevertheless, “tyrants, and evil customs, wars, and want of love” makes friendship “proper and peculiar” or wrong. Today, we have certainly got it wrong.

Friends, according to my generation’s received opinion, are my world

“Generation Y” or those born in the last 20 years of the 20th century, as identified by the Church of England itself in two research projects in the 2000s, is itself peculiarly interested in friendship. However, theirs is a form of friendship which has strayed from what it could be if properly directed. 

Gen Y, it is said, has created structures of meaning in their lives built around narrowly conceived friendship groups. Those groups are a form of escape. Friends, according to my generation’s received opinion, are my world. They are the people like me, who look like me, who think like me, who encircle me and help me to navigate a world otherwise devoid of meaning. The individual uses friends as a distraction, as a means to escape the world of “other” people to whom they owe no allegiance. 

This, in turn, could explain many of the things that have gone wrong with our age. For instance, there is the fact that graduate students only seem to hang out with graduate students, creating the “anywhere” and “somewhere” divide which polarises British politics (as identified by David Goodhart) and inter-generational culture clash. 

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Four Loves in 1960 that “very few modern people think Friendship is a love of comparable value” to romance “or even a love at all”. The situation has grown worse since then. 

Lewis saw a world struggling with itself post-war, and he believed that friendship was part of the solution. Like his, our world has struggled with deadly global ideals (for example, post-9/11 jihadism). Ideals are viewed with scepticism. Friends remain part of the solution to the void that has been created — not the inward-looking, often all-too temporary groups of friends we have created, but rather friendship which is outward looking and inclusive. 

Falling in love is important, but England needs to be reminded that friends can be in lasting, loving relationships too. This is because those relationships, if rooted in the Christian faith, are expansionary and imitable. They build us up and give us the prospect of befriending the whole world.

My friends and I are disappointed that the Church is not focusing on the marvellous things that friends can do. They can say “I love you”, and together they can love the world. 

Jesus Christ himself put it this way in the words of St John’s Gospel:

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends.