This is a something I wrote on what’s shaking the Episcopal Church. I wrote it at the request of a friend at Future Majority, where it is cross posted.
Hey kids.
Alicecheshirecat recently talked a little bit about what’s going on in christianity and the Millenials, by way of statistics. I wanted to follow up with a little bit of completely non-statistical business on the hoo-hah happening at the Episcopal Chuch. First, let me tell you that what has been happening there is very important for gay rights, for Christians, for Millenials, and therefore for America.
Soundbyte version: the Episcopal church consecrated a gay bishop, everybody freaked, and the church is probably going to split.
I think this reformation and split is unimaginably good, because (as I’ve said before) I believe that lasting meaningful political change in this country is probably not possible without a reevaluation of Christ, and that non-christians can play a role in that. (That is, that we christians must reevaluate Christ, and the heathens can help. Not that the heathens have to at all accept Lord Jesus as personal savior.) I’ll spare you that argument here, but for you extra credit kids, go here, or here.
The changes going on in the Episcopal church, which are actually quite a bit broader than cooties, amount to something of a reformation. The theological groundwork has long been growing: consider Marcus Borg, whose studies on the historical Jesus are widely known in academic and theological circles, but almost utterly unknown in popular culture – Marcus Borg, whose wife is an episcopal priest. If you’re the link-reading type, read this interview with Borg about the reformation he sees happening.
The dedication shown by the Episcopal Church to Jesus’ teachings about including the outcast is at the forefront of this reformation, split, and reevaluation. And if – if – we can hand these guys a mic when the “news” hits about the split, it could reconfigure how a lot of people view christianity. Move the goalposts, dammit!
Given that the church is run by a lot of older folks, none of this is something that our generation is particularly responsible for, but my rough prediction is that the split is probably going to go down in about seven years, even though the interesting action is all going on right now. And according to those statistics alicecheshirecat talked about recently , seven years is when we’ll be about the age where we start waking up to religion. And by then we oughtta have much more serious sound systems in our control. And if our progressive political conspiracy can start paying attention early and lose some of the knee-jerk suspicion we have about christians, then we might be in good shape to hand them the mic when it happens.
Of course, most of the burden in reestablishing trust lies on the churches. As a christian, I consider this our best shot.
Now. The context and events.
Some Church Architecture, which I promise, is necessary. We come from Church of England, and you know those English, so hang in there…
The Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA) is an Anglican church – descended from the Church of England. Organized as a church shortly after the American revolution, it was the first autonomous Anglican province outside the British Isles. (wiki)
Anglicans of all nations share common liturgy, language, and ritual of all kinds, but are not legally one entity. Canon law (church law, as different from legal law) and official doctrine are only loosely correlated, and each entity governs itself. Property belonging to ECUSA does not belong to Church of England, it belongs to ECUSA.
We have two houses of government (sound familiar?): the House of Deputies (HoDeps), elected by the clergy and laypeople of each diocese (a region); and the House of Bishops (HoBips), which is all of the Bishops, also elected. At the head of the HoBips is the Presiding Bishop, elected by the HoBips. At the Head of the HoDeps is the President of the HoDeps, elected by the HoDeps. The Whole Shebang meets triennially at what is called General Convention – the most important meetings for the governance of the Church.
As for England – the Archbishop of Cantebury communicates with (but does not actually control) the Presiding Bishop, the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies (although lately the jackass has been pretending the HoDeps doesn’t exist). The Archbishop of Cantebury plays the same game with all of the other various Anglican Churches throughout the world.
Get that? Power is split between laypeople and clergy, and it’s all elected (representationally, if not democratically) from the bottom up. If that seems real boring and unimportant, contrast to Catholicism: the Roman Catholic Church owns all property of all Catholic churches everywhere. The Pope appoints Archbishops and Cardinals, and they appoint new Popes and Bishops, and Bishops appoint Priests, and so on.
Now, the events.
We been fighting over the gay cooties now for a while. Way back in 1997 we were one vote in the HoBips from authorizing blessing same-sex unions. On the other hand, four dioceses still barred the ordination of women. Who also have cooties.
In 2003, on the Feast of the Transfiguration (also the anniversary of Hiroshima) General Convention ratified an openly gay bishop. By a bizarre trick of ECUSA Canons, any Bishop elected close enough to General Convention has to be ratified at General Convention. By everybody. The diocese of New Hampshire scheduled their election precisely for this reason.
There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, but he made it by a solid sixty-forty margin, and nobody really contested the man’s capability to be a good bishop on any grounds but his homosexuality. His name is Gene Robinson. This is basically the faultline along which things are cracking open. The details of it are alternately bizarre and hilarious. I’ll give you the highlights.
After we ratified Robinson, everybody everywhere flipped their shit. Particularly in Africa. The Archbishop of Cantebury and a bunch of other internationally important cats, hilariously called Primates (no, I’m not kidding) sent back a report (the Windsor Report, best summarized here) which basically said “You have been naughty, and mustn’t have tea until you can sufficiently explain your behaviour and promise not to do it again. Also, same sex blessings are right out, is what we have to say.”
The Primates are also now developing an Anglican Covenant. That is to say, a set of hard doctrines in a church that has never ever had that. And if you don’t sign, or if you break the rules, then you’re OFF THE MOTHERFUCKING TEAM! Which means you get kicked out of the Anglican Communion, which means a lot theologically, but zero legally. What it means practically is up for debate.
In a communique from Dar es Salaam, the Primates expressed dissatisfaction with how the ECUSA responded to the Windsor report (the no tea report), in which they asked specifically for reassurances that we wouldn’t consecrate any more cotie-bishops, or make cootie-blessings. A lot of people have quoted this part of that:
If the reassurances requested of the House of Bishops cannot in good conscience be given, the relationship between The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion as a whole remains damaged at best, and this has consequences for the full participation of the Church in the life of the Communion.
Shit, guys, that’s a threat.
Since 2003, many parishes have decided that their Bishops no longer serve them. They think their bishops are associating with people who have cooties, and have therefore got cooties. It is very important to these people not to get cooties, so they have put themselves under new bishops. From Africa. This in itself is a radically new policy in the Anglican Communion, and the Archbishop of Cantebury is decidedly against it, as are many of the Primates.
These cootie-concerned Episcopalians already have formal and legal apparatuses in motion in the anticipation of the split. They’d like to stay Anglican, and don’t want to sit at tables with people who have cooties, or have maybe touched people with cooties. Also, they want to keep their church property when they split. Which of course belongs to the ECUSA, a legal entity like any other.
In the Dar es Salaam communique (everybody calls it a communique) the Primates and the Archbishop had the nerve to suggest a Pastoral Council – five cats. Two appointed by the Primates, one appointed to chair the committee by the Archbishop of Cantebury, and two appointed by the Presiding Bishop. Which figures out to… let’s see, two and one, add the two… carry the homophobia… totally stacked and conservative.
This Pastoral Council would be an autonomous authority structure, and would minister to all of the people who are so concerned with cooties in a parallel, bizarro Episcopal Church. They’d replace our official Canons, replace our General Convention, replace the HoBips , replace the HoDeps, and generally make themselves invasive, snakelike dicks.
So in the HoBips’ response to the Dar es Salaam communique, we were all “Bitch, step off. First off, we don’t believe in cooties anyway, and neither did J-dog. Read your fuckin’ bible already. Also, we didn’t off a bunch of suckers in the 1500s and the 1770s just so’s we could be under the authority of a bunch of unelected prelates.”
Actually, what they said was quite powerful:
We proclaim the Gospel of what God has done and is doing in Christ, of the dignity of every human being, and of justice, compassion, and peace. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children, including women, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children, including gay and lesbian persons, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church.
…we believe that to participate in the Primates’ Pastoral scheme would be injurious to The Episcopal Church for many reasons.
… it is a very serious departure from our English Reformation heritage. It abandons the generous orthodoxy of our Prayer Book tradition. It sacrifices the emancipation of the laity for the exclusive leadership of high-ranking Bishops. And, for the first time since our separation from the papacy in the 16th century, it replaces the local governance of the Church by its own people with the decisions of a distant and unaccountable group of prelates.
Bang, bang. The full text of the “Mind of the House” response to the Dar es Salaam communique is here.
My magic eight-ball says signs point to a split and same sex blessings in the Book of Common Prayer. My dad, an Episcopal priest, says signs point to the kind of super-english split dividing the Anglican Communion into Covenant Anglicans, and (second-class) non-Covenant Anglicans. I doubt that England will have the cojones to kick us out entirely, partly because English popular culture (like our generation!) doesn’t really give a rat fuck about cooties. And if they boot us Americans out over cooties, they’re going to lose a lot of English people, and they already got nosediving attendance.
So what?
I’m glad you asked.
How about you get worked up about gay marriage corrupting our kids, Senator Jackass? Wanna introduce a bill? Oh, right. You’re the one on about religious involvement in government, and freedom of religion. Forgot. Sorry. EAT IT!
And for the first time ever in this country, you have a seriously mainline religious entity (more presidents have been episcopalians than any other religion, for example) saying that Gays and Lesbians and Women are Welcome to Participate At All Levels.
And when we do the blessings, not piecemeal but nation-wide, it’s gonna be allll over the news. The blessings will look and sound an awful lot like weddings, and the line between them is gonna do that nauseating thing that your friend Eddie in the third grade could make a pencil do when he waved it up and down. There’ll be hymns and giant crosses and guys in vestments, and Pachelbel’s Canon in D(haha) and little kids in cute outfits.
So people all over the country are going to flip their shit, and this is the best possible thing that could happen.
There’ll be much talk about how we’re not real christians. We’re all sinners going to hell, and we’re basically kidding anyway, we’ve subjected the holy cross, hellelujah, to the gay agenda, we’re moral relativists who don’t believe in the primacy of the scripture, and a lot of other really heinous if predictable backlash.
But.
Picture the interviews with christians who are getting blessed – not because they’re getting legal rights and tax breaks, but because they wanted to affirm their relationship in the community of faith in which they’ve been living for twenty years.
Even better, picture interviews with Priests in collars on CNN. These priests will have a national platform from which to speak a fresh gospel – one which is in closer keeping with the historical Jesus’ teachings of love and inclusiveness, one which takes the Bible seriously, but not literally.
People who have christophobia because of their cultural surroundings, and people who have homophobia because of their religious surroundings will have a bit of a reevaluation of Christ.
Now picture being able to give these guys a platform from which to speak.
You with me?
