The TEC thinks they should be central, vocal and visible. Well, they are. Institutionally, they are run by "egopapists." Or, blind narcissists, self-evidentely. Or, meglomaniacs without reasons. Or, "Gasbags" for cause and with merit. This is TEC's theological and cultural legacy. MCJ offers a reasonable screed here, one of justifiable frustration. We recommend following MWJ and linking to it.
http://themcj.com/?p=33537
BACK TO THE BIBLE
Sunday, July 15th, 2012
Ross Douthat of the New York Times looks at the precipitous decline of the Episcopal Organization and other manifestations of liberal Christianity and wonders whether liberal Christianity can be saved. Although regular visitors here know that the argument about when the Episcopal Organization began to go south is a perpetual one, Douthat begins with a certain megalomaniacal old gasbag:In 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.
I think you can make a plausible case for the Episcopal death spiral, while perhaps not starting with the megalomaniacal old gasbag, at least becoming inevitable with him. Over the years, a number of Catholic and Orthodox commenters here have quite correctly pointed out that any church that did nothing whatsoever about the megalogmaniacal old gas bag has no business protesting Gene Robinson.
After all, Robbie, as homosexual as he might be, is still a paragon of Christian and evangelical virtue compared to the megalomaniacal old gasbag. The Episcopaltanic may have struck the iceberg long before anyone ever heard of the megalomaniacal old gasbag. But the water didn’t start pouring into the ship until TEO refused to do anything about him other than hope that he went away.
As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.
Another point that I’ve been making for many years. The Episcopal Organization gets the publicity that it does not because of anything it has to offer. The media plays up the Episcopalians because Episcopalians look Roman Catholic, what with their pointy hats and hooked sticks and Latin terms in their prayer book and saints and whatnot.
Those stories about the Episcopal Organization really have nothing to do with the Episcopal Organization. They’re a backhanded way for the leftist American news media to tell Rome, a church that actually still matters, “Do you see how respectfully we’d cover you if you’d back off the abortion talk, ordain women and gays and generally agree with us? And it would benefit you; these days, the Episcopalians are thriving!!”
Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.
Not that conservative Christianity in any form has done much better.
Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.
But the left has done WAY worse.
But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.
And it does you absolutely no good to pretend that you’re perfectly fine when all the evidence says that you’re grievously ill.
Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.
Then Douthat makes a point that is far more profound than I think he realizes.
But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.
In the 1800′s, anti-slavery was considered a “liberal” cause probably because you could find no end of conservative theologians, particularly in the southern United States, who lamely attempted to provide a biblical basis for chattel slavery.
It’s significant that one of the most savagely anti-slavery voices among the Christian clergy in that century was the great British Baptist Charles Spurgeon, a man who was, as far as I’m concerned, the single greatest preacher of the Gospel in the English language up to and including Billy Graham, the man from whom I learned who Jesus was in 1969.
Did Spurgeon eventually turn into some kind of Christian proto-leftist? Hardly. Here’s a little something on what was called the Down-Grade Controversy. Long story short, Spurgeon cut ties with British Baptists because he felt they were becoming too liberal.
And that’s basically what Douthat hopes happens. That liberal Christians remember that they are, or at least call themselves, Christians.
What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God … the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”
Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that per haps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.
Otherwise…what’s the damned point?
Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.
In one respect, atheists are right. You don’t need religion in order to do “good.” Or if you want yourself “spiritual,” you certainly don’t need the Christian religion to do good. Jews certainly do much good while one of the pillars of Islam is charity. Indeed, it’s probably impossible to find any religion anywhere that does not have the care of the less fortunate as one of its foundations.
Or if you want to “do good” and “spirituality” doesn’t matter to you, you can always join the Optimists, the Rotary Club, the Freemasons or any other service club that happens to strike your fancy.
So can liberal Christianity reconnect with its religious basis? Rediscover its Christianity, if you like? Theoretically it could, as the example of Charles Spurgeon mentioned above. The question is whether or not it wants to.
At Stand Firm, Tim Fountain put together a list of other resolutions recently passed at the Episcopal Organization’s recent General Convention. Notice anything peculiar about them? The ones that passed all skew to the left, backing this or that secular leftist cause. Many of the ones that didn’t were more centrist or provided possible cost-effective alternatives to actions TEO was already determined to take, particularly in the area of health care.
And do any of you remember this?
Resolved, That the 75th General Convention receive and embrace The Windsor Report’s invitation to engage in a process of healing and reconciliation; and be it further
Resolved, That this Convention therefore call upon Standing Committees and bishops with jurisdiction to exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion.
That was Resolution B033. Frank Griswold pushed that through at the 2006 General Convention. It’s since been thrown into the garbage can of Episcopal history but what I recall the most about it was the absolute outrage it engendered among the Episcopal left.
If I remember correctly, people like Liz Kaeton burst into tears at its passage. Something like twenty bishops immediately issued a statement saying that B033 was dead-on-arrival in their dioceses and you couldn’t read a leftist Anglican blog that wasn’t either blazing mad or rhetorically sobbing on its fainting couch.
And over what? A resolution that was never going to be observed by liberal bishops anyway? Resolution B033, the bravest example of actual leadership in the Episcopal Organization that I’ve ever seen(whether Frank knew what he was doing or not), represents what the Episcopal Organization and other mainline Protestant churches must do in order for the rest of us to take them spiritually seriously again.
Here’s a thought experiment for you. What if the Episcopal Organization consecrated Gene Robinson and Mary Glasspool, “blessed” same-sex relationships but completely reversed itself on abortion, deciding in convention that the Catholics had it right and that abortion was a great(but forgivable) eviI?
Not only did the Episcopalians now consider abortion to be a great(but forgivable) evil, but any Episcopalian who disagreed with this teaching was unworthy of Episcopal ordination on any level and that any already-ordained Episcopalian who publicly disagreed with the church’s stance was liable to be deposed.
Yeah, I know, you write great science fiction, Johnson. But if the Episcopal Organization had had the reputation of being fiercely anti-abortion in 2003 but consecrated Gene Robinson to its episcopate anyway, would you still have left? To be honest with you, if that had been the case, I would probably still be an Episcopalian.
Because I would understand that while I had been baptized into a liberal Christian church, many of whose stances I know longer agreed with, I would also know that my church knows how to do something actual liberal Christianity has forgotten, or no longer cares to know, how to do. Say no to the secular left.
Otherwise, I’m going to come to the conclusion that I came to in 2003. My “church” is nothing more than a purely secular and entirely political body that utilizes Christian terminology and rites in order to slap a thin coat of “spiritual” varnish over whatever purely secular and entirely political cause is current this week.
By the way, Douthat’s column seems to have struck a nerve. Click here. But if you read nothing else today, make SURE that you click here where the prevailing attitude among Jim’s commentariat seems to be, “The megalomaniacal old gasbag? Never heard of him.”
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