March 1, 2005
Episcopalians and the Smoke of Battle
By William Murchison

Why can't we Anglican Christians just get along? You might well be wondering about that -- asking why intramural eye gouging, rather than forceful evangelism, is what we're best known for these days.

I refer to the controversy that erupted in 2003 when the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire consecrated a non-celibate gay man as bishop. Oh, what a tumult arose -- Anglican "conservatives," especially in Africa and the United States, drawing together against "liberals," especially in Canada and the United States, to debate such an unprecedented step and to wonder aloud as to the possibility of our walking together any longer.

Now, still more news: to wit, a recent summit of Anglican leaders (archbishops of national church provinces) raises the possibility that, to keep the worldwide Anglican Communion together, the American and Canadian "liberals" may have to repent of their support for gay rights. The Episcopal Church's presiding bishop says that's not going to happen. The archbishop of Canterbury says it may have to.

This business hurts, I can tell you, speaking as an Episcopalian. Can't we find anything but sex to talk about? What about the Christian Gospel?

Good point you raise. Why do all of us talk so much about sex? Because that's the item at the top of the secular culture's agenda. Secular culture, for at least 40 years -- though I'd gladly accede if you wanted to stretch the time period back to the 19th century -- rests on the premise that self-expression and self-fulfillment are what life is all about. Holding back isn't good, so the culture says. If "it" feels good -- how many times have we heard this since the '60s? -- we're supposed to do it.

Yes, well. But what if what feels good isn't good, according to the divine order of things? Ah, in that case, you just rethink what we used to understand, or thought we did, about the divine order. Maybe we had it wrong. If divorce is so fine a thing, as society now seems to think (ignoring former teachings and prohibitions), homosexuality might be just as fine. Or anyway as blameless.

A pronounced tendency among modern theologians is to put human "rights" first and theological duties second. Such a historic reversal lets theologians -- along with professors, journalists and the like -- join the great 20th century social causes in one continuum. Civil rights, feminism and feminism's offshoot, sexual liberation -- just one opening after another in the way we see human entitlement. Whoever you are, says the culture, with arm draped encouragingly around the shoulders of us all, we're for ya (racists, sexists, smokers and George W. Bush excluded).

Why it proved so easy to seduce the mainstream churches is a matter likely to occupy Ph.D. students for generations. Anyhow, it did. The "mainstream churches" accord the world and the flesh more interest than they commonly accord the spirit. My Episcopalians, for instance, are so hot for evangelism and conversion that there presently are a third fewer of us than in 1965, at our numerical peak. But, boy, do we make headlines! The wrong kind, perhaps, but headlines, that's for sure: the natural consequence of brothers poking each other, so to speak, in the snout.

To what end, a point worth considerable consideration? When you're the church that wants to free everybody from supposedly artificial constraints, what do you do once all or most constraints have vanished? What are you selling, at that juncture?

My Episcopalians -- in company with numerous other Western Christians, ought soon to begin considering that question. Non-Western Christians, especially in Africa, ponder it regularly, concluding regularly that if the church isn't "selling" the Christian Gospel, it lacks any convincing reason for existence.

Virtuous and holy places there remain within the Anglican/Episcopal fold and always will. It's just harder than it should be to find them these days. All that battle smoke, you know -- cough, cough.

Copyright 2005 Creators Syndicate

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