The Washington Post describes the war for the soul of the Church of the England on the way to modernization.
Debate over that question is upending Britain’s official church, the symbolic heart of a global Anglican Communion that includes the Episcopal Church in the United States. The narrow loss of the measure has so infuriated liberal church leaders that many insist that the only way forward is to simply show conservatives the door….
…At a time when casual churchgoers are abandoning pews, these conservatives argue that the Church of England cannot afford to alienate some of its most active members: Anglo-Catholics and
evangelicals whose numbers are swelling even as they organize into what some here are calling a British version of the American religious right.
“What is happening here will fall into a very long story of battles amongst Christians,” said Gill R. Evans, professor of intellectual history and medieval theology at Cambridge. “If women bishops does go through, and we think it will eventually, there may very well be a proportion of the Church of England who walk away.”