The Episcopal schism
I was moved to write this piece by a story that appeared in today's Washington Post. It concerns one of the Episcopal churches in Virginia that has voted to break away from the national Episcopal Church because it ordained a bishop who happens to be gay and will bless gay unions if not actually conduct gay marriages. This church and the others in the breakaway group have instead proclaimed their allegiance to a rebel Anglican denomination in North America organized by the gay-baiting Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria.
More on Archbishop Akinola in a minute. The church in the Post article is called St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, almost the same name as St. Stephen's Episcopal Cathedral here in Harrisburg, Pa. I was raised a Lutheran but have been a member there since I got married back in 1988. The Lutheran Church has gone through a number of schisms in its long history in the U.S., and now has close to 40 different "synods." These originally had more to do with the German or Swedish origins of the churchgoers, but now are sharply different theologically. The Missouri and Wisconsin synods are extremely conservative, while the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is quite moderate, much closer to Episcopalians than to the conservative synods. I felt as comfortable in the Episcopal Church as I did in the ELCA.
That these Virginia churches would ally themselves with Archbishop Akinola is truly astonishing, showing these congregations to either be extremists or deluded or both. Akinola is opposed to gay clergy and the ordination of women, which has brought him hails and huzzahs from Episcopal conservatives in the U.S. But his beliefs go much further off the deep end than that. He vocally supports a proposed law in Nigeria that would criminalize gay relationships and make it a crime to even associate with a gay person, to the extent that AIDS support groups would find themselves criminals as well. It is anti-Christian in the extreme. Akinola is the antithesis of Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who supports gay rights and opposes the schism.
I can't say there aren't members of St. Stephen's Episcopal Cathedral in Harrisburg who support Archbishop Akinola, but I doubt there are many. I remember a few years ago the stunned silence that resulted when a member, during the post-service announcements, called on fellow male parishioners to join him at a meeting of the Promise Keepers, a national group of evangelical Christian males who promoted male dominance in the family structure. I never heard the Promise Keepers mentioned again at St. Stephen's, but I always think of them whenever President Bush makes one of his "I'm the decider" statements.
Conservative religious movements have been an integral part of the rightwing Republican movement of the last 12 years. Nearly all these groups have demonized gays, who as I've said before, are the new Jews of today's world. They fill an apparent need among rightwing extremists for a group of outsiders to persecute. Since it's no longer socially acceptable, post-Holocaust, for them to demonize and persecute Jews, gays fill the bill nicely. And as I've also said before, if you want to feel really weird and creeped out, take a statement by a Christian group denouncing gays and substitute "Jew" for "gay." You'll have something that could have been printed in Der Stürmer during the Nazi era.
Ultimately, it may be in the best interest of the Episcopal Church in America to allow the schism to occur. The dissidents shouldn't be allowed to take the church buildings (most state laws don't allow this anyway), but let them go. I somewhat optimistically believe the rightwing era in America effectively ended with the 2006 Congressional elections. Yes, let them go if they insist on leaving and want to declare their allegiance to a gay-baiting Nigerian. They are not a youth movement, and will eventually die out. The Lutherans survived theological schisms, and so will the Episcopalians.