It’s one of the Commonwealth’s more enduring talents: the ability to maintain a dignified silence while standing in the middle of a moral mess largely of its own making. Ghana tightens its laws on LGBTQ people, and the wider family of nations responds with the sort of polite throat‑clearing usually reserved for awkward toasts at Rotary dinners. No one wants to cast the first stone, largely because everyone remembers who supplied the stones in the first place.
Christ, Culture, and the Silence of the Commonwealth: A Personal Reflection Inspired by Ghana
There is a particular kind of silence that hangs over the Commonwealth whenever one of its member states tightens laws against LGBTQ people. It’s not the silence of ignorance, nor the silence of diplomacy. It’s the shared, quiet, experience of a club that knows its own history too well. A club in which too many members carry the same inherited laws, the same inherited prejudices, and the same inherited Anglican weight. No one wants to cast the first stone because, in truth, no one’s hands are clean.
Ghana’s Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill has drawn international attention, but the Commonwealth’s response has been muted. Its difficult for an organisation to speak boldly when its own foundations include the very legal codes that criminalised same‑sex relationships across the empire. Those codes were exported, enforced, and moralised by colonial administrations and missionary bodies alike.
The modern Commonwealth inherits that legacy, and so its silence isn’t surprising. It’s the silence of a family that recognises its own reflection in the mirror and doesn’t quite know what to say.
Within Ghana, the Anglican Church’s support for the bill reflects a wider pattern: Scripture interpreted through the cultural lens of a society that prizes traditional gender roles, heterosexual marriage, and tightly defined family structures. When that lens becomes the primary interpreter of the Gospel, the church risks making God in its own image, projecting human ideas of order, authority, and morality onto the divine. The result is a theology that feels familiar, comfortable, and culturally coherent, but which may not resemble the liberating Christ of the Gospels.
This dynamic becomes especially visible in the way the bill is framed as a defence of “family values.” The phrase itself isn’t new. Churches across the world have used it for decades, often with sincerity, sometimes with anxiety, and occasionally with a touch of nostalgia for a world that never quite existed.
In Ghana, the Anglican Church’s endorsement of the bill reinforces its own vision of the family: a vision that excludes LGBTQ people not only from marriage but from the moral imagination of the nation. A human social agenda becomes a theological mandate, and the state becomes the instrument for enforcing it.
The church’s public statements often appeal to “the design of creation” or “the natural order,” drawing on biblical language that has been interpreted through centuries of cultural assumptions. When these interpretations are presented as universal divine truths, the church risks confusing its own cultural inheritance with the voice of God. The danger isn’t that the church has a moral vision, every church does, but that it mistakes its own cultural preferences for eternal commandments.
This isn’t a uniquely Ghanaian problem. It’s a human problem. Churches everywhere are tempted to baptise their own cultural norms. In some places, that means strict family structures. In others, it means consumerism, nationalism, or individualism. The form varies, but the temptation is the same: to imagine that God looks very much like us.
The Anglican Church’s support for the bill in Ghana raises questions about the relationship between religious authority and state power. When a faith community endorses legislation that criminalises consensual adult relationships, it moves beyond pastoral guidance and into the realm of coercion. The state becomes the enforcer of a particular theological worldview, and the pluralistic public sphere shrinks. Freedom of conscience, a principle the Anglican tradition has often defended, becomes conditional on conformity to a specific moral code.
For LGBTQ Ghanaians, the consequences aren’t theoretical. Criminalisation erodes dignity, restricts autonomy, and reinforces social stigma. It tells a group of citizens that their lives are incompatible with the moral order of the nation. It tells them that their existence is a threat to the family, to society, and to God. Such messages don’t reflect the liberating Christ who moved toward those on the margins, not away from them.
If we warily turn to the Gospels, Christ the Liberator consistently challenges systems that dehumanise. He confronts religious leaders who use the law to exclude. He refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery. He speaks with the Samaritan woman at the well. He heals those whom society has cast aside. His authority is rooted not in enforcing moral purity but in restoring human dignity.
A Christ who liberates wouldn’t support a law that deepens stigma or criminalises identity. He would call the church to a compassion that exceeds cultural comfort. He would remind the faithful that the law of love, love of God and love of neighbour, stands above all other commandments, and he would warn against the danger of projecting human fears onto the face of the divine, turning God into a guardian of cultural norms rather than the source of radical grace.
The Commonwealth’s silence, the Anglican Church’s advocacy, and Ghana’s legislation all sit within a shared historical and theological landscape. The colonial past, the missionary legacy, and the inherited legal codes form a backdrop that can’t be ignored, but history doesn’t determine the future. Churches can reinterpret. Nations can reform. Communities can grow.
The question, then, isn’t whether Ghana is uniquely at fault. It’s whether the church, in Ghana, in Britain, across the Commonwealth, is willing to see Christ not as the defender of cultural norms but as the liberator who calls his followers to a deeper, braver love.
That is the challenge, and it’s one the church can’t meet while making God in its own image.