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TWO

Love in the Ruins

THE TIME COMES AT LAST TO TURN UP THE LIGHTS ON THE Episcopal Church’s present tumult and torture. I grant freely those are not words the national leadership of the Episcopal Church would employ—“tumult” and “torture.” The church’s national leaders, whether from conviction or professional need just to go on smiling, can be downright chirpy as a venerable ecclesiastical body burns to the ground.

In a 2007 New York Times advertisement keyed to the five-hundred-year anniversary of Anglican worship in the New World, church headquarters acknowledged, while strenuously playing down, the news about searing divisions within the fold. “Occasionally,” said the ad, with sublime understatement, “[Episcopal] struggles make the news. People find they can no longer walk with us on their journey, and may be called to a different spiritual home . . . Despite the headlines, the Episcopal Church keeps moving forward in mission. . . . We’re committed to a transformed world, as Jesus taught: a world of justice, peace, wholeness, and holy living. . . . Come and visit . . . come and explore . . . come and grow.”

Come and grow? This was curious. Virtually the last enterprise with which anyone would identify the twenty-first-century Episcopal Church is growth—the expansion of membership rolls through evangelism, conversion, and like inducements. What tales were “the headlines” telling about the Episcopal persuasion? One frequent and persistent tale was of Episcopal worshippers, not to mention whole Episcopal parishes—dioceses, even—detaching themselves from the Episcopal Church and its imputed corruptions, repudiating the Episcopal Church’s authority and control over them. It was common by 2008 for these secessionists to seek the supervision of an Anglican archbishop from Africa, Asia, or South America—someone believed more deeply wedded to biblical truth and Christian morality than were the bishops of the Episcopal Church. In the summer of the same year, more than a thousand high-ranking, theologically conservative Anglicans, coming chiefly from countries of the so-called “Global South,” and terminally provoked by the spiritual transgressions of American, Canadian, and English Anglicans, flung down the gauntlet. Hard. The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) professed for the sake of the Christian gospel to be walling off practitioners of the new theology from the contamination of false and competing gospels. It was possible, with only a glimmer of imagination, to see a day coming when “liberal” and “conservative” Anglicans would find themselves occupying separate, inviolable homes. Or maybe not. With Anglicans, one can’t always tell.

However that might be, Episcopal hierarchs professed low-level alarm at their church’s deteriorating prospects in the Anglican world. Church spokesmen spread wide their hands. Why, if hard-nosed conservatives were displeased by what the church was doing—softening ancient objections to homosexuality, according secular projects priority over theological ones—well, it was too bad, but maybe the recusant brethren would some day open their eyes and see what wonderful new things the Holy Spirit was revealing. If they didn’t in the meantime go somewhere else or just plain shut up.

Not that developments of this sort sprang from virgin soil. For twenty or thirty years, national Episcopal leadership had behaved as though the culture were its guide, its inspiration, its source of wisdom and truth. Whenever traditional Christianity clashed with late-twentieth-century culture, the Episcopal Church normally weighed in on the side of the culture: for enhanced choice in life, for more laxity and less permanence in belief. The consecration, in 2003, of a partnered gay priest, the poignantly named Vicky Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire was the definitive signal that for the present-day church there would be no reversal of commitments, no further attempts (save in New York Times ads) to portray theological rifts as mere differences of understanding and viewpoint.

Consequences ensued, and made news of a sort generally unwelcome at Episcopal headquarters in the home city of the New York Times. If some outward Episcopal splendors remained, along with signs here and there of genuine health and devotion, more noticeable were the indications of malaise and decay. In 1965, the Episcopal Church had boasted more than 3.5 million members. As the twenty-first century began, the United States had a population half again as large as in the mid-1960s, yet a third fewer Americans claimed to be Episcopalians. True, other Christian denominations—so vital, so attractive throughout the 1950s and on into the 1960s—were likewise losing members. Still, the plight of the Episcopal Church was splashed with special poignancy, not to say tragedy.

The church itself reported, on the basis of a 2005 survey, that only 12 percent of Episcopal churches held services that were 80 percent full or better. Thirty-seven percent reported “very serious [internal] conflict” in the preceding five years. The percentage of financially healthy congregations fell during the same period from 56 to 32. Barely half of Episcopal rectors and vicars described themselves as well-versed in the Bible. “Very few Episcopal churches,” the report said, “report that their members are heavily involved in recruiting new members.”

It was not exactly an environment geared for growth of the sort trumpeted in the New York Times ad, or for growth of any other sort! Around the time the survey was being conducted, I chanced upon some statistics concerning a once-potent Episcopal diocese—the one headquartered in Newark, New Jersey, and for years led by a media savvy bishop, John Spong, whose favorite theme was the need for radical overhaul of the Christian faith. It seemed the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, since 1972, had lost 46 percent of its members. Sixteen percent of its churches had closed down forever. Nor, the report went on, had a single new church or mission opened anywhere in the diocese during the past sixteen years. The picture was of ecclesiastical rigor mortis, of flies buzzing about a waxen countenance.

Six months later, at its General Convention in Columbus, Ohio, the church chose as presiding bishop a woman, the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, whose initial sermon to the convention hailed “our mother Jesus” (a “metaphorical” reference, she tried later to explain) and called for the church to focus on poverty, health, and “sustainable development.” Further, lay and clerical deputies declined an invitation to affirm their belief in Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation. It was as if the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had refused a chance to affirm the blessings of capitalism, and its debt to Adam Smith. Or, no—it was more. The deputies were quarreling, by implication, with the One identified in their church’s creed as “Maker of heaven and earth . . .”

Many Christians, I think, might want to ask, what goes on with the Episcopal Church? What, in heaven’s name, actually does go on?

Quite a lot goes on. But first, a related question demands attention: Does whatever goes on in just one church, regardless of history and methods, truly matter?

I hope to make clear in due course that it matters considerably. This is partly because the Episcopal Church, on account of its outsized prominence in American religious affairs, and its membership in the worldwide Anglican Communion, matters considerably. Episcopal affairs matter, furthermore, because the trap into which the Episcopal Church has stepped, with eyes wide open, as it happens, is one into which the other mainline denominations have inserted a foot at least part way. The trap of which I speak is commitment to the ways and means of twenty-first-century culture as surrogate modes of following Jesus Christ. The Episcopal story is a cautionary tale, and cautionary tales have applicability beyond the circumstances from which they spring.

This is just such a tale—for Christians of varied persuasions, including those who may wish, some pages on, to hurl at me the nearest potted plant or wine glass. A distinguished historian—and Episcopalian-since-turned-Catholic—noted over a decade ago the common thread joining the varied stories of today’s mainline denominations. The churches, wrote Thomas Reeves, are becoming “uncertain guides in a civilization starving for lack of purpose and solid moral and ethical guidelines.” “Solid teaching,” Reeves wrote, “is at a premium, and the basics about sin, repentance, judgment, and hell frequently go unexplored. . . . It is all too often presumed that God is wholly and merely . . . nice.” Just the right kind of God for us, one might say—a God likely to win the approval of a culture that carefully avoids offending subcultures viewed as emerging from repression.

A culture of “liberation”—the one we now live in—presents itself as perpetually at war with the remnants of the unliberated culture dominant until the mid-1960s, after which, miraculously, everything became possible.

And what was that? It was whatever had been previously unthinkable, if not impossible, thanks to the deadening hand of white male supremacy. Fullest scope and expression for non-whites: that was for starters. Next, fullest scope and expression for women. Then, the same for . . . for whatever someone (even a white male) found it edifying to express. Wait: maybe not “edifying.” The word implies preference for one style over another style, one taste, one outlook, over something else. Hierarchy! Inequality! Gradations of value and worth! It was what the 1950s, of unblessed memory, would have affirmed. No, thanks. Instead of “edifying,” say “satisfying.” If a thing satisfied—forget old taboos and shibboleths—wasn’t that enough?

As for religion, wasn’t the nice God a decided improvement on the old God of Judgment, high in the heavens, thundering His displeasure with His creations, demanding from them reverence and obedience? Say your Christian flock hankers increasingly for the nice God. Do you not, supposing you minister to these lambs, feel tempted to bring on board at the very least the newer insights, the fresher ways of understanding what we mean by salvation?

The more we think of our common culture as a culture of general liberation, the better we comprehend the challenge inherent in ministry to it. A minister of the Gospel—Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian—who comes bearing news of proper obligations finds himself under a serious burden. A culture of liberation wants no such news. It wants to know not what it can’t or shouldn’t do, but what it can do and, without further obstruction, will do. To that culture the minister says what, exactly? No? Yes? Maybe? The difficulties that lie in such a choice cannot and should not be underestimated.

What do I propose, then, as my course of action?

I am going to argue against many of the assumptions that my church, and like bodies of the Christian mainstream, have sopped up from the culture these past forty years, ostensibly for the sake of furthering Christian witness.

I am going to argue that these assumptions, far from strengthening Christian witness and potency, are likely keeping from the doors of our churches millions eager for an encounter with a God not presumed in advance to be merely “nice.”

I am going to argue that, far from challenging secular styles and outlooks at odds with the Christian revelation, the churches have appropriated some of secularism’s least rational notions—and thereby shamed themselves.

I will argue that the churches’ love of such baubles, bought cheap in the marketplace, frequently outweighs their commitment to the Christians basics. And that this, in turn, makes them look like retailers not truth.

Another argument follows from that one. It is that our greatest mistake is in failing to see the Gospel as overriding mere circumstance and condition; conveying at all times and in all places, to all people, on equal terms, the same message of unconditional love and forgiveness. Our mistake, in other words, has been to overvalue cultural reflexes, to underestimate the power of the Christian Gospel to knock flat all divisions, all perspectives, by whomsoever adopted or concocted.

The Episcopal Church and the culture of the twenty-first century—by which I mean society’s attitudes, tastes, preferences, and the like, as expressed in word and action—do not always by any means stroll hand in hand, whispering confidingly to each other. But their relationship, at least from the Episcopal side, has become intimate, self-reinforcing. The ways of the world have become, in frightening measure, the ways of the chameleon church still calling itself Episcopal.

The implications of the change in how Episcopalians “do” religion are impossible, at this early date, to understand fully. I argue all the same that we must begin to think about them, to handle and weigh them, holding them to the light, inspecting them up and down. What is this “religion” thing about anyway? Salvation, I believe, is the traditional answer: the merger of discrete human purposes with those of One whom the creeds identify as “Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” Hanging around a church of traditional conviction, one gets the idea—at least one is supposed to—that such a God, nice or not, is highly consequential, more so than a television news anchor, a Hollywood studio head, a Nobel Prize laureate, a Fortune 500 executive, a bishop even.

Commonly, revolutions begin from below. Not the Episcopal revolution—a shake-up encouraged, sometimes imposed, from the top down. The apostles of cultural adaptation knew generally speaking what they wanted, hence what everyone else should want. While unconvinced Episcopaliansm in the ‘60s and afterwards, scratched their heads, wondering what was wrong with things that had so recently seemed right, those bent on effecting change informally, were organizing.

Again and again, in churchly councils, church “progressives” out-organized and outvoted the stodgy old standpatters—and from repeated successes gained confidence in the rightness of their endeavors. A “modernized” Book of Common Prayer, easily less cognizant of human sin than all its predecessor liturgies, went into the pews. New biblical teachings, sounding from the pulpit and the seminary lectern, raised new questions about the authenticity, hence the authority, of Scripture. Priesthood was bestowed for the first time on women, contrary to historic understandings of the priesthood’s essentially “male” character. Outside the church, new moral attitudes took shape concerning the permanence and sacred nature of marriage. Rather quickly these attitudes made their way inside church walls. It became possible, then fashionable, then—for the aspiring—politically essential to challenge the idea that homosexuality was in the least troublesome or objectionable. Whence the authority for these and like assertions? The authority of the convinced seemed to suffice. They knew; they understood. They asserted no more than the culture asserted.

Decisive votes that went their way quickly turned the convinced into the arrogant. If an idea or a policy was good for them, it was good for everyone else. Bishops who advanced or supported the revolution either disciplined or ignored those dissenters who asked merely for space to be faithful to an older, and in their eyes holier, way. The tolerance on which Episcopalians once prided themselves had brought forth strange offspring—intolerance of the politically vanquished. This time, there would be no cutting off of heads. The cutting off of careers, and of associations and relationships, would suffice.

The consecration, in 2003, of Gene Robinson as the Episcopal Church’s first avowed and practicing homosexual bishop focused international attention on conditions in the church and sped up an already steady exodus of laity and clergy. Dramatic (to put it as politely as possible) revision of the prayer book had driven away small numbers; larger numbers followed as the church undertook to ordain women. The increasingly speedy passage to affirmation of homosexuality cost the church many more members than had either of the earlier departures. Though, of course, the question is always open to dispute: How many depart for Reason X or for Reason Y? Or on account of spiritual fatigue? Or due to boredom or some other indefinable personal cause?

Even the Druids, it seems, are bailing out. While writing these lines, I happened on news that an East Coast Episcopal priest had renounced Christianity in order to become a full-time Druid, whereas before he had been just a part-time one, and mainly under cover. His wife was a Druid as well. I do not suggest such a priest is typical of Episcopal clergy. I suggest that the ability of our ecclesiastical environment to produce Druid priests may exceed like abilities in other, less (shall we say) freewheeling denominations.

Again I ask: Does it matter?

How can it not? What goes on in the modern Episcopal Church—what has gone on for the past four or five decades—bears on the affairs of all the mainstream churches, whose members are honorary children of the age in which they live, watching the same television shows and football games, eating the same fast foods, struggling with the same temptations, and constantly aware that the Christian consensus in the United States of America no longer exhibits the old signs of ruddy strength—aware, indeed, that the very need for Christianity seems to many, including some Christians, somehow smaller and more remote than formerly.

Let non-Episcopalians learn from us. We have been conducting an ecclesiastical estate sale: our godly heritage, our gift for worship and spirituality, priced for quick disposal on the marketplace. We’re all in this thing together, in greater or lesser degree. But what thing is “this” thing? We can scarcely doubt, after the last forty years, the nature of the challenge. It is to present a very old faith to an age bent on reinventing itself—so it might seem—every few years, if not every few months.

Meanwhile—