A majority of priests of the Church of England want the church to offer same-sex weddings and allow premarital and gay sex, according to a major survey.
The survey, conducted by the Times, found most Anglican priests think church teaching should be brought into line with public opinion on moral issues.
Most priests support a change to allow gay couples to get married in church, with 53.4 percent in favor and 36.5 percent opposed, revealed the survey, which assessed responses from 1,200 active Anglican priests.
The Church of England currently allows blessings for gay couples but only permits church weddings between a man and a woman.
A significant majority of the priests surveyed (62.6 percent) said the church should change its teaching on the immorality of premarital sex, with 21.6 percent accepting all fornication and 41 percent saying sex outside marriage is fine for people in “committed relationships.”
A little over a third of the priests (34.6 percent) said the church should not change its teaching on sex outside of marriage.
Similarly, 64.5 percent of priests said the church should end its opposition to gay sex and more than a quarter of those surveyed (27.3 percent) saying homosexuals should be allowed to have sex with whomever they want.
Another 37.2 percent of respondents said sex was fine between gay people in “committed” relationships such as civil partnerships or marriages but frowned upon casual gay sex.
Fewer than a third (29.7 percent) said church teaching should not change on the matter.
In 1998, Anglican bishops from around the globe passed a resolution declaring homosexual practice is “incompatible with Scripture.”
At the time, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey said: “I stand wholeheartedly with traditional Anglican orthodoxy. I see no room in Holy Scripture or the entire Christian tradition for any sexual activity outside matrimony of husband and wife.”
This autumn, England’s bishops will discuss formally reversing that teaching as well as whether to allow homosexual priests to have civil weddings, a practice supported by 63.3 percent of the priests surveyed.
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