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The purpose of Part Two is to take a careful look at what is happening in the world around us with regard to identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage. We describe, as dispassionately as possible, what is going on in God’s world with its mix of goodness and fallenness, of glory and human weakness. In this Part of the book we are not seeking to interpret these observations from the perspective of the Christian faith. That will be the task of Part Three, when we will begin to discern what aspects are signs of God’s kingdom drawing nearer, and what aspects seem to be pulling us further away.

Chapter 5 begins by setting out social trends concerning singleness, marriage, friendship and loneliness. It considers the place of sexual activity in relationships, including issues of commodification, freedom and consent. An exploration of how identity is perceived in relation to sexual orientation and gender is followed by a brief timeline of how society has responded to these trends.

The focus of Chapter 6 is on scientific understandings of sexuality and gender. We begin by exploring the complexity and difficulty of scientific studies of sexuality before offering brief overviews of the science of sexual orientation, gender identity and variations in sexual characteristics. The chapter concludes with scientific findings about well-being, mental health, procreation and sexual orientation change efforts.

In Chapter 7 we turn to look at the place of religious faith in society. We notice how other religions and other Christian churches have responded to matters of identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage, before turning to the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. These brief overviews provide a backdrop for the theological engagement that is the focus of Part Three.

A social revolution seems to be taking place. Across British society, we are seeing changes in the patterns of people’s relationships, in sexual activity and attitudes, and in understandings of identity.

Relationships are changing. We are seeing changes in the proportion of people who remain single. We are seeing changes in the number and duration of people’s sexual relationships. We are seeing changes in patterns of cohabitation, marriage, and divorce. We are seeing changes in when and where people marry, in what they hope for when they do, and in whether children are part of the picture. We have seen legal changes allowing same-sex couples to marry, and we are seeing different types of family appearing. More recently, we have seen how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced how we think about, value and conduct our relationships; although it is too early to tell how deep or permanent that impact will be, it is likely that no part of British social life will be untouched.

Attitudes to sex are changing. We seem to be caught between expanding ideas of sexual freedom and increasing concern about freedom’s proper limits. Questions about sexual consent and power are becoming more prominent. Questions about sexual abuse have risen to the top of the agenda. Technology, often a harbinger of change in sexual practice, is raising new questions, such as those about the prevalence of online pornography and its continuing development, as well as the use of AI in various ways.

The ways in which we approach identity are changing. More and more of us are coming to recognize ourselves, or people we know and love, as trans, as lesbian or gay or bisexual, as asexual, as intersex. We are asking new questions about what that means, and about how anybody’s identity works, whichever words we might choose to describe ourselves. We are also asking what are the best terms to use (see also the Glossary), and about whether ‘identity’ is even the right category for thinking about all this.

For an explanation and discussion of the terms used in this paragraph, see Chapter 5, ‘Identity and self-understanding’ on here–here and the Glossary on here–here.

These changes are visible in all our lives, in the stories we tell and hear, in the questions we ask, in the arguments that we fall into. Related discussions fill our news, our online debates, our public forums, and our legislature. There are arguments about the public acceptance of same-sex marriage, or transgender identity in the very young, or the handling of cases of child sexual abuse, or what sex education in schools should cover, or the effect upon people of ubiquitous online pornography, of the impact of #MeToo – the list is endless.

All of this poses questions to us as a society. Should we focus on encouraging particular kinds of relationship? Or should we be enabling many different kinds of relationship, and many different kinds of family, to flourish? Are we able to be honest about the consequences of our choices? Do we have good ways of talking together about sex, about the good and the harm involved? Or do we need to learn to talk about it a whole lot less? Is identity something that we are given and need to discover, or are we free to define it? How are our identities, our bodies, our sex lives and our relationships connected?

All of this also poses questions to the Church of England as it does to other churches. What challenges do these changes pose to existing teaching and practice? What new possibilities and opportunities do they suggest? How are we to respond? What teaching, what forms of care, what rites, what disciplines, what ways of relating do we need? How do we respond as followers of Jesus? How do we respond as readers of the Bible, as inhabitants of a tradition, as members of a worldwide Church? How do we live and share the gospel – God’s good news for the world in Christ – amidst all these changes?

Chapter 3 provided an outline of the Church of England’s teaching on marriage and the place of sex within it, setting these in the context of God’s gift of life and of the many relationships in which that life can flourish. Chapter 5 surveys some of the social changes that surround us in these areas, highlighting some that seem to pose the most urgent questions. In Chapter 6 we look at recent scientific developments that can contribute to our understanding of all these topics. In Chapter 7 we ask what responses there have been to these topics so far in the Church of England, in other churches, and in other religious communities. In each of these chapters, we do not have the space to provide more than a brief description of recent developments, but you can find more detail in the Living in Love and Faith Online Library (www.churchofengland.org/LLF).

The whole of Part Two is only one step in our journey, and these chapters are not themselves meant to offer answers. They aim to provide preliminary descriptions, and to pose some questions, in order to set the scene for later Parts. In those later Parts we will explore Christian responses to these questions.

Before we begin, however, there are some important caveats to offer. First, British society is diverse, and always has been. It includes people of different religions, ethnicities, cultures, classes and genders. It is constantly being remade by people who bring other inheritances into it, and influenced by all the societies that surround it. It is also shaped by capitalism and its values, by modern technology, by a history of colonialism, by democratic politics, by a globalized market economy – and so on. We don’t have enough space here even to name all the many forces that shape the world we live in, let alone argue about which are the most significant.

We have not had the space to tease out how the social changes we describe differ across ethnic groups, social and economic backgrounds, or regions – either in society as a whole, or within the church. There will be many exceptions to all of the trends we describe. There will be many ways in which those trends are tangled up with class structures and other uneven distributions of power. The descriptions we offer are only rough and partial characterizations – a broad brush picture – to serve as a backdrop to our explorations.

Second, none of the changes we discuss in these chapters is completely new. Even if we are living through a revolution, it is one that has been brewing for a long time – and there are all kinds of historical parallels to most of the elements that we now think of as new. The present situation may pose questions with a new urgency, or in new terms, but none of those questions is completely unprecedented. Whatever response the church gives to these questions now, that response will be one more episode in a long history of deliberation and decision. As we will be seeing in later Parts, the church has all sorts of resources to draw on as it responds – even if it also has all sorts of disagreements about the value and best use of those resources.

Third, we have had to choose which topics to cover and what words to use and not one of those decisions is neutral. We are talking about topics that people care about passionately and the words we use are likely to trigger strong emotions. They have the capacity to bless or to harm. They can certainly all be argued about – and those arguments abound in church and society. We will highlight below some of the main instances where there is dispute about the terms we have chosen to use.

The way we have arranged our material is not neutral, either. Think, for instance, about your own reactions to the opening paragraphs above. They describe complex social changes and suggest that those changes might amount to a social revolution. Did you hear this as a story of progress – however uneven and fragile that progress might be? Did you hear it as a story of decline – of the erosion of important institutions or the forgetting of important truths? Did you hear it as describing something too messy to be thought of as either progress or decline? Did you hear it and think that, in a wider historical view, this is not really a revolution, just the ongoing process of change? All of these perspectives, and more, have fed into the production of this book – and, however much we have tried to smooth them out in the pages below, you will still hear echoes of them.

Finally, all of the questions that we raise throughout this Part are questions posed to us by real people’s lives. They are posed by our own lives, the lives of all the people in our churches, the lives of our families, friends and neighbours. None of those people is a problem to be solved, or an issue to be argued about. This book is about us – all of us in our society and in the church. It is about our relationships, our identities, our experience in all our conditions of life. It is about the influence that our patterns of living have on others, for good or ill. It is about the questions that all of us pose to one another: questions about how we can live together in love and faith.