The new religion correspondent at the Guardian, Riazat Butt, has mixed feelings about the slow fracture of the Anglican Communion. In a column in Religious Intelligence, she says that on the one hand, she admires the openness of debating in public about scripture, sexuality and more. At the same time, she just wishes we’d just get on with it.
Talking is something that Anglicans are good at. But I kind of wish they’d do something else. For at least four years the threat of a schism has been hanging over the communion and people write about walking apart and falling off fences but the key word here is threat. Unless I’m deaf I’ve not heard the crack of a rupture so it leaves me thinking that this much-hyped schism, which by all accounts should have happened months ago, is the longest and slowest break-up in history.
She comes to this conclusion:
I’ve not been at the party that long but a clear pattern is emerging. Every week I read about more Americans fleeing to what they perceive to be more tolerable climes and more bishops seething in their mitres as the Archbishop of Canterbury fails to satisfy someone’s demands.
All in all, she’d love some closure:
In the absence of international Anglican Top Trumps I would like some closure, not fudging, from all sides. If you’re going to break up, please do it now so we can move on. There’s nothing worse than being in a relationship that isn’t moving forward. The hardest ultimatums fail to get the desired response, leaving one party resorting to increasingly dramatic gestures. You’re tied to each other, you can’t remember why, but you’ve been together for so long you’re almost too scared to go it alone. How long can you keep threatening to leave someone?
Read the rest.