Faith Matters: Rebooting The Episcopal Church?

by Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest via Covenant-Communion:

Posted on May 16th, 2010

Posted In: Faith Matters

It was the beginning of the end of the Episcopal Church as we have known it. At a Saturday ceremony in Long Beach, California, Mary Glasspool was consecrated as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, California. Bishop Glasspool has lived for 22 years in a committed relationship with another woman. She is the second openly gay bishop to be consecrated in the Episcopal Church; the consecration comes after warnings from the Archbishop of Canterbury and other Anglican leaders around the world that this decision means that the Episcopal church will soon lose its status as a full member of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

For non-Anglicans and non-Episcopalians, the issues here may be fuzzy. The Anglican Communion is a group of churches who acknowledge a common descent from the Church of England and maintain a relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Anglican Communion is not an organization like the Roman Catholic Church. The Anglican Communion is the ecclesiastical counterpart, more or less, of the British Commonwealth, and the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury in it is very much like the Queen of England’s role in the Commonwealth. The wheels of ecclesiastical procedure grind very slowly, but in due course of time the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States are on track to lose their status as full members of the Communion.

It’s hard to tell what the consequences will be here in the United States. The Episcopal Church will keep its property and continue to manage its affairs as it now does. It will probably continue to drift toward the PC left in various ways, and it will probably also continue to shrink. If the Anglican Communion decides to recognize a new local ‘affiliate’ as the American branch of the Anglican family tree, it seems likely that conservative and moderate Episcopalians may drift in that direction.

People like me will be in a tough spot. I think Bishop Glasspool’s election and consecration were ill-advised, but that is by no means the same thing as denying the possibility that in due time and with due order and deliberation, such a step could be taken without harm to Christian faith and morals. Those who elected her and those who have struggled for many years to open the doors for lesbian and gay people to share equally in the life and work of the church are doing so out of a deep vision of radically Christian love that is very much at the heart of New Testament spirituality. It is impossible not to admire, appreciate and be grateful for the spirit behind this determination to show God’s unconditional love for a group in the human family who have too often been cruelly oppressed. There are people all over the world who feel a little more hopeful, a little less lonely as a result of the consecration. If in my view this step was taken without the kind of deliberation and reflection in the wider church that something so consequential deserves, that takes nothing away from the courage and the dignity of those who brought matters to this point, nor does it in any way diminish my personal appreciation of the spirit displayed.

And those who criticize this step most bitterly need to reflect that earlier steps to desegregate Episcopal churches and ordain African Americans were once bitterly fought as well. When I was a kid there was a priest in our town who was basically driven out of his home and parish in Alabama because he dared to support Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott. Americans frequently mistake cultural conditioning for Biblical teaching; none of us should be so sure that our intuitive sense of right and wrong provides an infallible guide to God’s will.

And yet. It’s also impossible to avoid the reflection that the Episcopal church is unilaterally imposing its own vision of the church on a worldwide communion. Whatever one thinks of the matter on a personal basis, the New Testament as well as the Old specifically condemns homosexual behavior as contrary to the will of God. Myself, I think St. Paul’s condemnation of what was long known as ‘peccatum illud horribile non nominandum inter Christianos‘ (that horrid crime not even to be named among Christians) should be read as a condemnation of gratuitous sexual experimentation in a culture fundamentally deformed by widespread slavery and of Greco-Roman permissiveness towards what we would now call child sexual abuse and even rape rather than as an attack on the idea that some people are by the laws of their own nature drawn to members of their own sex. But that is one man’s opinion, and the institutional church with centuries of tradition and theological reflection cannot be expected to embrace radical new ideas overnight. This is not just a question about homosexuality; it is a question about how the church among other issues understands the nature of revelation and tradition. What does it mean, for example, to say that St. Paul didn’t know what was and wasn’t sinful, but that modern psychology can straighten him out? And to the degree that homosexual behavior and the meaning of that behavior changes from culture to culture, how should the different ideas and perceptions of people coming from different cultures be handled?

These are not easy questions and a person doesn’t need to be a homophobe or unthinking fundamentalist to continue to accept traditional Christian teaching on this subject. And when both the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches continue to embrace traditional ideas, it is unreasonable to expect the Anglican Communion to move at warp speed to accommodate the ideas of American Episcopalians (less than 5 percent of the Anglicans worldwide) on a topic this controversial.

Even if the mind of the church ultimately comes round to the Episcopal view of homosexuality, the Episcopal church has made a profound and historic error in attempting to force this choice on the Anglican Communion as a whole. A great deal more reflection and discussion is needed before a step this significant can be taken by a worldwide body, and the Episcopal insistence that all the world should march to the beat of an American drum and an American timetable on this issue violates the plain duty of members in a common fellowship.

It seems to me that both the American Episcopalians and their bitterest critics in some of the African branches of the Anglican Communion are making similar theological errors: all sides are turning cultural preferences and habits into religious mandates without an adequately critical theological examination of their own biases. If American society is so permissive, sexually and in other ways that we should all think twice before we assume that our changing cultural norms reflect eternal law, sub-Saharan Africans are also not without their quirks and their blind spots. Neither conservative Nigerians nor liberal Americans come to this fight with clean hands; however the church at large ultimately resolves these issues both sides might do better to review and correct their own shortcomings rather than hurl anathemas at their enemies. Until time, reflection and the Holy Spirit show us the way forward I would like to see us all go on quarreling bitterly in the same house as high and low church Anglicans have been doing for centuries and I’m sorry that both sides have taken provocative steps that make this unlikely.

I’ll let the Nigerians and their allies analyze their shortcomings. Looking at the Americans, the failure of the Episcopal church is primarily a failure of leadership. There were not enough grown ups in the room to fashion and impose the kinds of compromise that historically have kept Anglicans together. More generally, the lack of strong institutional leadership and adult supervision in the Episcopal Church has taken its toll. Over the years, the leadership of the American Episcopal church has gradually lost credibility and authority in the Anglican Communion as a whole. Episcopalians have the reputation not simply of being theologically liberal, but of not being theologically serious. It is not just that people disagree with conclusions that we have reached; they don’t think we take these matters seriously enough. We have acquired the reputation of being flighty, feather-headed seekers after theological novelty who uncritically import the latest fads of secular culture into our religious doctrine and life. That is not a fair description of the full life of the Episcopal church, but our bishops, theologians, seminaries and others have done a poor job of making the case that we are grave and deliberative people who don’t do things lightly.

More, it is incontestable that the American Episcopal church has been grievously inadequate for decades now, and the lack of theological and institutional gravitas that now limits our church’s ability to make the case effectively for gay rights is one of the many bitter fruits of this institutional failure. I have blogged before about the degree to which the Episcopal church leadership in the last generation has frittered away its moral and political authority and capital, and that its inability to respond creatively to the challenges the church faces is accelerating its decline. In this context, the loss of the link to Canterbury is going to have a greater impact than it otherwise might. There are significant numbers of Episcopalians who don’t feel particularly Nigerian, but who are appalled and disheartened by the gap between the challenges of the church and the capacities so many of its leaders. If Canterbury offers a way for American Episcopalians to go on being Anglican without having to give up the kind of broad church tolerance that has always been part of the American Anglican tradition, a surprising number of Episcopalians might welcome the opportunity to shift over to an ecclesiastical structure that has more of the dignity and gravitas that, historically, have been among the great virtues of the Episcopal church.

But that is speculation. What is real is how far we Episcopalians have fallen. When I contrast what Episcopalians were doing and thinking about when Reinhold Niebuhr, Dean Acheson and George Kennan were working on what became known as the Marshall Plan and what we are doing today, I am so overwhelmed by a sense of our failure and decline that it is hard to see how to go forward. Saving democracy and restoring prosperity in Europe while fighting the excesses of anti-communist hysteria at home: the Episcopalians of sixty years ago thought more clearly and acted more effectively than we are doing today. Episcopalians were disproportionately influential in the expansion of opportunity and justice in the United States and the world in the not too distant past. Theologically, intellectually, politically, we provided this country with some of its greatest leadership. We like to think we care more for social justice than those stuffy old Episcopalians of old, but what they did for the world was farther reaching, more consequential and accomplished more real good for more people than anything our poor, foolish, divided, distracted and declining church can dream of today.

The difference between then and now is not, I think, a question of liberal and conservative. It is a difference between wisdom and inconsequence, leadership and drift, excellence and mediocrity, purpose and impulse. A church whose leadership was more concerned with its institutional integrity, more prudent, more committed to preserving unity of faith on essential matters, better equipped to defend and expound its core doctrines would actually be more effective at innovation and reform than the Episcopal Church now is. Each new step forward would increase our credibility; we might not be the trendiest group in town but when we moved, it would mean more than it now does.

I do not know what the next turn of the screw will bring. Increasingly, I fear that the Episcopal church desperately needs somebody to press the Control, Alt, Delete keys; the software has come crashing down around our heads and we need to reboot. Perhaps that is what is happening now; perhaps the rupture with Canterbury will open the door to a fresh start.

Something needs to happen. I’ve never been more deeply convinced that the Anglican spirit has something unique and necessary to offer the United States and the world — and I’ve never been less confident that the Episcopal Church has any idea how to do the work to which we are called. Whatever happens now will be different from what went before; the separation of the Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion will change them both, and not for the better.