After yesterday’s votes, there are now 17 dioceses voting against taking the next step towards an Anglican Covenant in the Church of England. That’s seven more than those in the “for” category. How it fares in England, of course, is at least notionally important in light of Communion structures and personalities.
Listeners to the BBC’s “Sunday” program(me) heard professor Diarmaid MacCulloch’s current take as he debated Bishop of Sherborne Graham Kings.
What swings the argument against is that people realize that this is a sort of centralization proposed for the Anglican Communion which has never been Anglican, which is against Anglicanism. The Anglican Communion is not an Anglican church; it’s a family of churches.
Responding to the idea that “[n]obody’s forced to do anything; these are recommended courses of actions,” MacCulloch not-too-subtly noted:
This lunatic proposal has gone down a path [where] once you start, you don’t see the alternatives; and watching [the Covenant process] happen has been like a rather slow-motion version of the Gadarene swine.