In George Will’s article on the travails of the Anglican communion, the shrinkage of the American Episcopalians and British Anglicans, accompanied by the growth of the African communions, is described as centering most obviously on the issue of ordaining gay clergy, but more fundamentally on the interpretation of scripture and adherence to tradition. Some key graphs:
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It is not the secessionists such as Duncan who are, as critics charge, obsessed with homosexuality. The Episcopal Church’s leadership is latitudinarian — tolerant to the point of incoherence, Duncan and kindred spirits think — about clergy who deviate from traditional church teachings concerning such core doctrines as the divinity of Christ, the authority of scripture and the path to salvation. But the national church insists on the ordination of openly gay clergy and on blessing same-sex unions.
In the 1960s, Bishop James Pike of California, who urged the church to jettison such “theological baggage” as the doctrines of Original Sin and the Trinity, was the last active bishop disciplined for theological reasons. Duncan doubts whether Pike would be disciplined today.
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The shrinking Episcopal Church (2.4 million members, down from 3.5 million at its peak in 1965) is a small sliver of the worldwide Anglican communion (at least 77 million and expanding rapidly). Its travails are, Duncan says, yet another lingering echo of the 1960s.
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Today, the typical Anglican is a middle-aged African woman. The burgeoning Nigerian church says it has 20 million Anglicans; Duncan believes it may have 25 million but perhaps chooses to underreport so as not to exacerbate tensions with Nigerian Muslims.
In London, more Muslims attend Friday prayers than Anglicans attend Sunday services. Last December, on the Sunday after former Prime Minister Tony Blair was received into the Catholic Church, more Catholics than Anglicans attended services in England, an increasingly common occurrence now, five centuries after the Reformation.
……The Episcopal Church once was America’s upper crust at prayer. Today it is “progressive” politics cloaked — very thinly — in piety. Episcopalians’ discontents tell a cautionary tale for political as well as religious associations. As the church’s doctrines have become more elastic, the church has contracted. It celebrates an “inclusiveness” that includes fewer and fewer members.
And that throwaway paragraph at the end reflects the central reality for too much of modern mainline “Protestantism”. Politics, and the desire to be thought-well-of by the well-to-do progressives who are too-spiritual-to-be-judgmental, has resulted in a clergy for which chastity is optional, but diversity is not. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” reinterpreted as, “Be as undemanding of your neighbor as you are of yourself,” now includes not mere tolerance for human frailty, but the absolute celebration of it, almost as further proof of God’s grace. It is as if Romans 6:15 had been stricken from the Bible.
What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law,
but under grace? God forbid
Except that nothing is truly forbidden, other than intolerance for Leftist politics and social mores. The only forbidden fruit is Mom’s apple pie, if it is accompanied by commitment to historic Christianity and the values that have allowed America to thrive up to now.
