Harold Meyerson, columnist for The Guardian and The Washington Post writes:
Maybe it’s just the timing – the proximity to July 4, the day Americans celebrate their independence from Britain – that makes the sudden rebellion of half a dozen conservative dioceses within the US Episcopal church appear so, well, un-American.
But the spectacle of the leaders of the right wing of American Episcopalianism clamouring for the Archbishop of Canterbury to save them from their crazy modernist American brethren is about the closest thing to a revocation of the spirit of 1776 that we Americans have seen in a very long time.
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Maybe it’s just the timing – the proximity to July 4, the day Americans celebrate their independence from Britain – that makes the sudden rebellion of half a dozen conservative dioceses within the US Episcopal church appear so, well, un-American.
But the spectacle of the leaders of the right wing of American Episcopalianism clamouring for the Archbishop of Canterbury to save them from their crazy modernist American brethren is about the closest thing to a revocation of the spirit of 1776 that we Americans have seen in a very long time.
Like most old-line Protestant churches in the US whose roots lie outside the South, the Episcopal church here has been growing steadily more liberal for a number of decades. In a sense, this evolution parallels some broader political shifts in American politics during the past 40 years, as both accredited professionals and moderate Republicans of the now-defunct Rockefeller wing of the party have tended to transfer their allegiance to the Democrats. And while not all professionals or Rockefeller Republicans were once Episcopalians, it is certainly true that Episcopalians were disproportionately one or the other or both.
America, of course, was always a land of many faiths. But by that most crucial of theological indices, highest median income of congregants, Episcopals came out on top for several centuries running. By the early 70s, this probably was no longer the case, as evidenced by the crack going around New York at the time that Jews had the income of Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans. Today an apparent majority of Episcopal prelates vote like Puerto Ricans, too – that is, distinctly on the liberal side.
Three years ago, a decisive majority of the American church’s bishops voted to accept the New Hampshire diocese’s election of an openly gay bishop. Then, on June 18 of this year, the church’s general convention elected Nevada’s Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori to a nine-year term as the church’s presiding bishop. Not only is Jefferts Schori the first woman to head a branch of the Anglican communion (the name for all the national churches affiliated with Anglicanism; if you’re more comfortable with Marxist parlance, call it the Anglican international), but she has also allowed the blessing of same-sex couples within her diocese (in which, keep in mind, the largest city is that bastion of traditional morality Las Vegas).
Jefferts Schori is the very model of a modernist Episcopal. She entered the priesthood just 12 years ago, at age 40, after a career as an oceanographer. (Her husband is a theoretical mathematician.) As a young woman, she told the Washington Post, her religious faith deepened while she was reading “Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein and the great physicists who talk about mystery”. Studying marine invertebrates, she added, had heightened her awareness of “the great wonder and variety of creation”.
All this has been too much for conservative Episcopals. Within a couple of weeks of Jeffert Schori’s designation, six of 111 dioceses within the American church announced that they had rejected her authority, chiefly over the issue of her stance, and the church’s, on gay marriage and ordination. Another five or so dioceses may follow, as well as some individual parishes.
Bishop Robert Duncan of the Pittsburgh diocese, one of the dissident six, told the post the traditionalists weren’t leaving the church but were asking the Archbishop of Canterbury for “alternative primatial oversight” – that is, to designate some church leader from another country to oversee them for now.
It’s this calling on Canterbury that seems so literally (or perhaps ancestrally) un-American. For even as the Church of England grew out of the political dispute between the Tudor monarchs and the Pope, so the Protestant Episcopal church in the US is a direct artefact of the American revolution. Two-thirds of the signers of the declaration of independence, whose anniversary we celebrate this week, were active or nominal Anglicans, and in rejecting the political authority of the king of England they could hardly have been expected to affirm the ecclesiastical authority of the king of England. The Protestant Episcopal church in America emerged in lockstep with the new nation.
Interstate conventions of the various dioceses began in 1784 and 1785, just as Americans were beginning to talk about drafting a real constitution for the fledgling confederation of states. The US denomination was formally organised in 1789, the year George Washington became the country’s first president, and the first elected House of Representatives and Senate were seated.
In more recent times, Anglicanism, like many western religions, has experienced its greatest growth in the developing world – in Anglicanism’s case, particularly in Africa, where cultural mores are not exactly in sync with those of the US. Nor are the African churches all that different from many of their more traditionalist western counterparts. Of the 38 national churches in the Anglican communion, only 13 ordain women as priests, and only three – the US, Canada and New Zealand – ordain them as bishops. Conservative church leaders from many nations have already made clear that they don’t want the Rt Rev Rowan Williams, who as the Archbishop of Canterbury is the leader of the Anglican communion, to invite Jefferts Schori to the next gathering of the 38 nations’ church leaders, scheduled for 2008.
And last week, Williams himself upped the ante with a “theological reflection” asking all 38 national churches to agree to a new covenant in which they would sacrifice some of their autonomy to the communion. Failure to do so, he added, could result in the relegation of the headstrong churches to a secondary status. This could conceivably lead to the creation of two separate and unequal Episcopal churches within the US – a dominant branch with Canterbury and a splinter that doesn’t have many actual existing members but can nevertheless sit at the archbishop’s elbow and yak into his ear.
None of this amounts to that consequential a story within the US, where the entire church, in all its wings and proto-wings, encompasses no more than 2.3 million Americans in a nation of 300 million. It matters because it reflects the tensions within the larger society (though time itself is impelling us towards the elimination of discrimination against gays and lesbians: among younger Americans, acceptance even of gay marriage now registers clear majority support in the polls).
What’s really interesting about this story, though, is that 230 years after America announced its break with England, a group of what to the naked eye appears to be relatively normal Americans is not simply breaking with its church but appealing to the authority of the Church of England for a rescue. That’s just not how we do it here. When Americans dissent, they walk; they devise indigenous (which should not be confused with ingenious) solutions; they form their own thing. How else could we have assembled the vast proliferation of sects, cults and loony ideas that are the very fabric of our land?
But instead of doing that, instead of establishing their own genteel, homophobic church like any good Americans, these guys are returning to the bosom of the Church of England? Where is the House Un-American Activities Committee when you really need it?