An old friend is a minister in the Episcopal Church. I’d describe him as a traditional conservative. He’s not very political, but you cannot be involved in church life without understanding the politics. It’s not just the normal internal jostling for power that you see in all organizations. In the modern church, you have the outside politics, which is mostly a battle between the New Religion and traditional normalcy.
Nowhere is that more obvious than in The Episcopal Church. Largely anchored in Public Protestantism, the church has been swept up by all the fads that have popped out of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Since much of what animates the modern Progressive is a hatred of tradition, particularly the Christian tradition, there’s a wing of the church that believes it must destroy the church as part of its holy mission.
The primary point of entry, so to speak, for the radical wing is the issue of sodomy. Years ago, Bishop Gene Robinson decided his ticket to success in the church was to abandon his family and take up with a man. He went on to become the first openly gay Bishop of the church. Ever since, the church has been a magnet for homosexuals, creating problems for the church and greater Anglican communion.
For the first time, the global organizing body of Anglicans has punished the Episcopal Church, following years of heated debate with the American church over homosexuality, same-sex marriage and the role of women.
The Anglican Communion’s announcement Thursday that it would suspend its U.S. branch for three years from key voting positions was seen as a blow to the Episcopal Church, which allows its clergy to perform same-sex marriages and this summer voted to include the rite in its church laws.
It was also seen as a victory for conservative Anglicans, especially those in Africa,, who for years have been pressing the Anglican Communion to discipline the U.S. body.
“The traditional doctrine of the church in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds marriage as between a man and a woman in faithful, lifelong union,” the leaders of the Anglican Communion, which represents 44 national churches, said in a statement during a meeting in Canterbury. “The majority of those gathered reaffirm this teaching.”
Although it’s too early to predict what will happen three years from now, when the Episcopal Church could vote on its response to the suspension at its denomination-wide meeting, observers say it is unlikely that the U.S. church will reverse its position on same-sex marriage. This could prompt the Anglicans to continue the suspension or make it even harsher, not allowing the Episcopal Church to fill key positions on the global body.
“I don’t believe they will be ‘kicked out’ or exiled, but they will continue to be at a distance if they don’t change their direction,” said Jeff Walton, communications manager for the Institute on Religion & Democracy, a conservative Washington think tank that is frequently critical of mainline denominations.
The decision in England will have little impact on Episcopalians in the pews, who have grown increasingly liberal after the 2003 consecration of the openly gay priest Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire. That action prompted dozens of U.S. churches to break off and declare their allegiance to conservative rival groups.
You can tell how much someone values a thing by how much they are willing to give up in order to keep it. When negotiating a contract, part of the strategy is to determine what the other side is willing to concede and at what price. In fact, you want to find out what is not on the table, so you don’t waste your time. Sometimes, there’s no deal to be made and you want to figure that out quickly.
Here we see something I’ve written about often. Progressivism is a religion and it is a covetous one, similar to Islam. That means you cannot be both a Progressive and a Christian, without compromising on one or the other. You either slight your Progressive faith on issues like sodomy and abortion or your Christianity takes a back seat to your Progressivism. As my ancestors would say, “A man who chases two rabbits catches none.”
That’s why the pews are empty. Any attempt to reconcile the teachings of the church with the teaching of the New Religion will just alienate both the Progressive parishioners and the normal ones. My friend the minister says this is the challenge facing his parish. Neither side is happy with the attempts to commingle the two religions so both sides find a reason to leave. The only folks holding out are the geezers who do so out of habit.
Ultimately, that’s a perfectly fine outcome for the Progressives. Just as the Muslims turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, Progressives would love nothing more than to turn the churches into moon-bat meeting houses. If killing off the competing faith means killing off the church in which they have attended since childhood, they are fine with it. In the end, like the leadership of The Episcopal Church, they are Progressive first, everything else a distant second.
I was brought up CofE but now that I live in the USA, I have attended my local Episcopal church. Not any more. In 2016, Brexit was denounced from the pulpit because it was based on racism. The rector didn’t have much of a clue about the issues, but that didn’t stop him. The new rector came in now sermons are more like CNN newscasts that anything else. His own personal Twitter account supports every liberal cause, and then some. Jesus is pushed to the peripheries. I was castigated for taking my own 1662 version of the BCP and told to conform. I’m done with it. I now listen to services on the web (for as long as they last) and read my KJV. I just wish that I could find a traditional church in my area but there doesn’t seem to be any. God Bless.
The Episcopal Church is the remnant of a dead empire, or a department of the British government, the Chirch of England, which has been pretty anemic ever since most of its clergy fled the country during and after the revolution, having sworn an oath of allegiance as they had at the time of their ordination, always in England of course, since there were no Anglican bishops in the colonies to do it here. They have never recovered, which is why the USA has barely more Anglicans tha Canada, a country with only 10% the population. This is also why the Methodist Churches are five times the size of the Episcopalians here, if not in The UK, where most Methodists are Welsh, even if Methodism was founded by an Anglican priest, Wesley. Today of course they are getting power-slammed by “modernism”, as the Catholic Society of Pope Pius X puts it, or the schismatic traditionalists who fetishized the Oath Against Modernism devised by their namesake to combat innovations in doctrine.
Plenty of us Catholics ignore the commie in the Vatican, he will be gone soon.
“The only folks holding out are the geezers who do so out of habit.”
Or, literally, for the sake of their funeral. Honestly, I’ve read and heard from old people whose viewpoint is that circumscribed: they don’t really care what’s going on in the church. All they’re thinking about is the nice funeral they’ll have in the pretty surroundings that have been familiar to them for so many years.
“…you cannot be both a Progressive and a Christian, without compromising on one or the other.”
And there it is. The key demarcation for this time in our nation’s history, and the harbinger of the Apocalyse. A Democratic vote is a rejection of God and 2000 years of religious principles, and kudos to whatever hardy soul is the first to stand up and speak it plainly. So far Franklin Graham has come the closest, and he’s been vilified from all points on the political spectrum for actually refusing to compromise his spiritual integrity.
This isn’t just a fight for the soul of America, this is freakin’ Armageddon.
Life increasingly resembles a Jack Chick cartoon.
The weird thing is, the more the church tries to be ‘progressive’ the more it alienates traditional church-goers, but the gaps in the congregation aren’t filled by the progressives, who would rather celebrate a mosque being opened than a church being maintained. Even if the mosque steadfastly refuses to officiate gay weddings (which the church is accepting), the progs want Islam to succeed more. Like I say, weird.
I think the issue is that much of what defines Progressivism is a reaction to traditional western liberalism. That means they will side with the Muslims in tearing down the church, even though they know the Muslims plan to kill them next. Like libertarianism, Progressivism does not work outside the lab. The internal contradictions become impossible to tolerate.
Further evidence, I guess, that progressives only exist for today. Despite all their fine-sounding rhetoric, they can only see the immediate ‘must do now’ and eschew any long term view. The Muslims however will wait their turn.
I still wonder about a church that was founded on the divorce of a King.
I grew up in the Episcopal Church (born ’51). The division between progressives and conservatives started coming to a head in the early 60s when the Left took power and sued (successfully) to take the property away from the conservative parishes. It was shameful. they even took over a beautiful monastery in the mountains overlooking Santa Barbra (where I went on a number of retreats) and turned it into a homosexual den of vipers.
I left my beliefs pretty much in the late ’60s and came back thru (ironically) thru Protestant evangelicalism and joined the Anglican Catholic Church (ACC, and “catholic” as in not Roman). The ACC is aligned with African bishops who have really led the charge, worldwide, against the gaystapo. We use the Book of Common Prayer (1921) and the old hymnal.
yeah, verily, yeah.
I wish (in the people’s republic) that I could find an unsullied church to attend.
“You either slight your Progressive faith on issues like sodomy and abortion or your Christianity takes the back door to your Progressivism”
FIFY
If Martin Luther could see what Protestantism had become he would had stayed with the Catholic Church.
Roman Catholicism is headed down the drain with the Episcopalians for exactly the same reasons. The process accelerated when the Curia kicked out a theologian Pope and replaced him with a left wing political hack.
What really ruined the Catholic Church was the Vatican II in the 1960s, it made Cathocism more like Protestantism.
I agree about Vatican II, having been an adolescent in a Catholic family at the time. It was clear that the outfit claiming to have codified universal and eternal truths was starting to change its mind about some of them.