The Very Last Straw?
Conservative Episcopalians Rally in Texas
by William Murchison
It isn’t that the ruckus threatening now to cleave Anglicanism like an overripe cantaloupe has nothing to do with sex. It would be disingenuous to say such a thing. Sex, in all its manifold forms and expressions, pervades modern culture, from top to bottom. The almost 2,700 Episcopalians (including 46 bishops, 799 priests, and 103 seminarians) who turned up at Dallas’s gargantuan Wyndham Anatole Hotel in early October had not come to revisit women’s ordination (which most support) or even to debate modernized liturgical language (which most there seem to have adopted anyway).
No, it was the Reverend V.—for Vicky, oddly enough—Gene Robinson who had inadvertently lured them there: Robinson, whom the Episcopal General Convention, in August, had confirmed as bishop of New Hampshire in the succession of the holy apostles; Robinson, a man living unashamedly with his male lover; Robinson, a priest who, having taken a wife in the conventional way and sired children, had abandoned them in order to embrace his inner gayness.
Vicky Gene Robinson succeeded in getting Anglicanism’s attention as not even John Shelby Spong, with his personal design for remodeling Christianity, ever managed to get it.
Come to This
So it has come to this at last, was what the Dallas 2,700 seemed unconsciously to be murmuring as they sat through a three-day prayer-meeting-cum-mobilization-rally. What has come to this? A large number of things, it would seem. Robinson’s elevation to bishop (he was consecrated on November 2 by Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, among others) was the back-breaking straw for a camel panting under the massive weight of new affronts to old doctrines and convictions. The Anglican crisis is shaped by two oddly opposite commodities: (1) tolerance, and (2) tyranny.
Tolerance, openness, diversity, ambiguity—for many an Anglican these properties repose at the heart of Anglicanism. The idea of “living in ambiguity” infects Episcopal sermons and theological articles. No closed avenues of inquiry, no cut-offs for debate: Anglicans lap up this kind of thing. It prevents their ever coming to theological closure—the pastime, supposedly, of narrow Evangelicals.
A truly tolerant Anglican views Scripture the way most Supreme Court justices view the Constitution—as a document from which to unearth new, previously undreamt-of meanings. Such as the moral equivalence of heterosexual marriage and homosexual commitment.
The love of broad-mindedness led Episcopalians, in the 1960s, to tone down yucky matters like sin. Whereas the classic Book of Common Prayer had taken a somewhat dire view of human pastimes (“We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.”), a more with-it version, adopted in 1979, eliminated much of the angst and guilt. As one theologian, the Reverend Kendall Harmon, reminded the Dallas 2,700, “We have gone from ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ to clients in the palm of a satisfied therapist.”
The rise of feminism prompted the Episcopal Church to discard the all-male priesthood as, among other things, a hindrance to workplace equality. From female priests to gay priests was in some sense a logical progression, the social criteria for the job having come to trump the theological ones.
William Murchison a syndicated columnist, is author of Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Encounter Books).
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