A grave with the bodies of 360 Christians inside is one reason not to rush into marrying gay people in church according to the Anglican leader Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby

“I’ve stood by a grave side in Africa of a group of Christians who’d been attacked because of something that had happened far far away in America, and they were attacked by other people because of that and a lot of them had been killed,” Welby told a phone-in radio show in London this weekend. The grave is in Nigeria.

The United Kingdom’s first gay marriages occurred just a week ago and listeners were questioning why the Church of England is not allowing gays to marry in church.

The “far far away in America” event refers to liberal churches in the US electing gay bishops or performing gay marriages. Muslim extremist groups in Nigeria have cited this as a reason for their mass slaughter of Christians.

The Archbishop saw—and smelt—the gravesite. “What was said is ‘if we leave a Christian community in this area’ … I’m quoting them [the extremists], this is not obviously something I think … ‘if we leave a Christian community in this area we will all be made to become homosexual and so we’re going to kill the Christians’. The mass grave had 369 bodies in it and I was standing with the relatives. That burns itself into your soul, as does the suffering of gay people in this country.”

There has been a predictably furious response to the Archbishop’s statement on social media. The Archbishop has been accused of giving in to “moral blackmail”; one reaction has been to publish an old National Lampoon cover of a dog with a pistol aimed at it “buy this magazine or we shoot this dog”.

A more substantive objection has been that the Archbishop is “consequentialist”, basing his response on the view that whether an action is right or wrong is determined solely by whether its consequences are good or bad.

That argument goes like this: if a consequence of the Church of England accepting gay marriage is that African Christians would be killed, that is clearly wrong and therefore one should be opposed.

“Archbishops are not supposed to be Peter Singer-style utilitarians,” argues Andrew Brown on the Guardian website (Utilitarians are a form of consequentialists).

One of the arguments in favour of gay marriage—within or without the church—is that gay teenagers suicide because they are exposed to critical condemning statements about homosexuality. The Archbishop was careful to mention his concern about this in the interview.

This is a utilitarian argument as well: suggesting that avoiding harm to people should be the basis of what the church (or society) decides to do regarding gay marriage.

It’s clear that the Archbishop (who does not support gay marriage) is basing his views on much more—including the traditional teachings of his church. He is not a consequentialist.

There are inconvenient truths here: while some on either side of the debate will argue that reports of people dying are exaggerated, wrong, or cannot be blamed on any action by a church, it is clear there will be consequences, and that they will probably involve people dying.