If you favor women bishops or oppose the Anglican Covenant you will be labeled a fascist, a Nazi, equated to a follower of Hitler, or compared to a member of the BNP. The Bishop of Bishop of St Asaph, the Rt. Rev. Gregory Cameron, is latest to deploy such an equivalence.
Inclusive Church and Modern Church this week launched a campaign against the Anglican Covenant. The Telegraph reports,
The Bishop of St Asaph, the Rt Rev Gregory Cameron, who was on the committee that drew up the covenant, described the opponents as “latter-day little Englanders” [link added].
In a letter to the Church Times, he said the two groups had “turned themselves into the nearest to an ecclesiastical BNP [link added] that I have encountered”.
He continued: “They resort to the old tactics of misinformation and scaremongering about foreigners and outside influences to whip up a campaign against the Anglican Covenant and replace reasoned argument with a ‘Man the barricades!’ mentality that is little short of breathtaking”.
[Cameron] denies that the Covenant would take power away from the General Synod: the Covenant text clearly states that “each church or each instrument shall determine whether or not to accept such recommendations”.
Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, director for Unity, Faith and Order at the Anglican Communion Office, has also issued a response to the advertisement, saying that the Standing Committee would only be able to make proposals to the Instruments of the Communion “on steps to be taken to encourage discussion and discernment”.
She says that it was wrong to say that non-signatories would no longer count as part of the Communion. They would remain members of the Communion, but “signatories will have made a commitment to live in that communion in a particularly enhanced way, and to a process of consultation and common discernment.”
Recall that when Cameron reported on the Windsor Continuation Group he famously said “how do we make things stick?” (Cameron was a member of staff in the ACO before his elevation to bishop.) Recall, too, that the WCG report is what the ABC and the Secretary of the ACO refer to in invoking sanctions on The Episcopal Church and the Southern Cone. And yet Cameron asserts in his letter to the Church Times, “there is no element of coercion anywhere in the text” of the Covenant.
In 2000, he was appointed Chaplain to the Archbishop of Wales, Rowan Williams. Cameron was appointed as Director of Ecumenical Affairs by the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion in 2003, becoming Deputy Secretary General in 2004. He was Secretary to the Lambeth Commission that wrote the Windsor Report.