Fire-breathing Bishop who loathes Trump and supports gay marriage
THE TV cameras caught Harry’s reaction. ‘Wow!’ After 13 minutes and 43 seconds, Bishop Michael Curry had just wrapped up a sermon that was meant to have lasted just six minutes.
The prince wasn’t the only one looking slightly shellshocked. Other members of the Royal Family shared bemused glances and surreptitious grins.
However, nobody who knows Bishop Curry would have been surprised that, when offered the opportunity to address the royal family and a TV audience of one billion, he would veer off script (written on his iPad) and embark on a passionate speech about love, peace and racial equality.
For in America, the 65-year-old is well-known for his fire-breathing Southern Baptist-style preaching.
To a British audience, his quotations in St George’s Chapel from civil rights leader Martin Luther King would not have come as a surprise. But, in fact, Bishop Curry is not a Baptist minister like Martin Luther King. He is the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the US branch of the Anglican Communion – and America’s richest Christian denomination.
Few vicars at a traditional English wedding, though, will have ever peppered their address to a bride and groom with references to slavery and calls for an end to war, hunger and poverty. But then this was not a traditional English wedding. This featured a mixed-race bride whose great-great-great grandfather chose a surname after slavery was abolished in 1865.
Thus Bishop Curry intoned: ‘Love can help and heal when nothing else can.’ He seemed to revel in the consternation he was causing in some congregants. But as the first black leader of a very white church, he is used to challenging rigid orthodoxy. His grandparents were grandchildren of slaves in Alabama and North Carolina. The African-American spirituals, such as the one he quoted on Saturday, were passed down through the generations of his family.
He and his sister, Sharon, learnt them from their grandmother, Nellie Strayhorn, as they sat in the kitchen while she cooked. Nellie’s daughter – the bishop’s mother – grew up as a Baptist but switched to the Episcopal Church after she read Mere Christianity by Belfast’s C.S. Lewis. Her husband and Curry’s father, a Baptist pastor and civil rights activist, followed her into the Episcopal Church and was ordained. He converted after joining her at a service and being impressed to see her, a black woman, being offered communion wine from the same chalice used by white members.
The young Michael Curry spent most of his childhood in Buffalo, near the Canadian border in New York. Back then, in the Fifties and Sixties, racial segregation was a fact of life – even at church.
Tragically, his mother died after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage when he was in his early teens. His gran, Nellie, then looked after the family. Amid the racism they faced, she instilled in the young Michael the belief that all races were equal in God’s eyes.
As a family, they prayed every night. The young Curry would secretly hope that his father’s prayers would not go on too long, saying: ‘If it was the Baptist prayer, it would go on forever.’ A fateful comment in view of his own protracted sermon on Saturday!
Meanwhile, his father campaigned to end Buffalo’s policy of racially-segregated schools. Curry himself says he can never forget the day, in 1963, that he crossed from the black east of the city to the white western half and was able to attend an integrated school. Today, he firmly believes in combining Christian faith with social action. Indeed, he’s long been a champion of racial equality and LGBT rights. As Bishop of North Carolina, Curry was one of the first bishops to allow same-sex weddings to be performed in his diocese. He also took part in ‘Moral Mondays’ – demonstrations to fight Republican policies which were said to hurt the poor and marginalised. Inevitably, he has been criticised for highlighting socalled ‘white privilege’. Certainly, two books he’s written, Songs My Grandma Sang and Crazy Christians: A Call To Follow Jesus, focus heavily on racial justice.
He has recalled how his daughter once mistook TV footage of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen standing around a burning cross as Episcopal bishops in their mitres.
Thirty years earlier, no black child
would have been able to see a burning cross without being struck by terror, he said.
Curry did not know Meghan or Harry until he was invited to contribute to the wedding, reportedly on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who felt he would spice up the service – which he did.
Bishop Curry is the most senior churchman in America to have spoken out against Donald Trump and his un-Christian policies. This week, the clergyman is due to join a protest march on the White House.
Now a grandfather, Bishop Curry is still restless.
Sometimes he leaves his pulpit and strides up and down the aisle, his robes billowing around him as his arms fly in all directions.
With just seven extra minutes of his fire, love and brimstone, St George’s Chapel in Windsor got off lightly.