Mortal Follies. William Murchison
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showed much disposition toward forelock-tugging and the automatic ratification of a stranger’s “should” or “ought.” In this most democratic of nations, champions of the authoritative long ago made a sort of peace with the Great Oh, Yeah?—with the right to heckle, deeply ingrained in the American character. All the same, the 1960s were something new in our national experience: a time of defiance, provocation, and exhibitionism for their own sake, of fist-shaking and nose-thumbing all across the cultural spectrum. A favorite exhortation from the late 1960s and early 1970s became, loosely, a kind of watchword for the period: “If it feels good, do it!” To claim that these six words were the creed of a whole culture would be, as with any slogan, going infinitely too far. Still, this particular slogan encapsulated the increasingly common notion that personal choice trumped outdated rules and regulations. The whole appeal to openness and untapped possibility found lodgment in unlikely places, such as the universities and the churches, teaching institutions where the “vertical” approach to knowledge and instruction had generally held sway.
Virtually across the board, choice exerted itself as the determinative factor in art, in music, in self-expression; in courting and marriage and personal relationships; in the use of time itself. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed the right of an American woman to decide entirely for herself, and without obstruction, the vexed question of whether to bring a pregnancy to full term. In 2003, the justices found it indefensible that Texas should statutorily penalize consensual sodomy, given that (in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy) an emerging awareness of liberty gave substantial protection “to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.” The justices sang sweetly of “an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.”
In business, said Peter Drucker, “knowledge workers” were similarly in control of their own destinies, could they but see it. Free speech came to embrace, with societal and judicial permission, attitudes like the burning of American flags and the sprinkling of movie and television scripts with words once rendered in the funny papers, delicately if suggestively, as “&!#@$#@.”
In time—partly because they seemed to have little choice, partly because the fever of the times carried them away, the teachers loosened up. Perhaps, they started to reflect—just perhaps—the old ways really had grown offensively, uselessly old. Perhaps, as “the kids” were trying to instruct us, it was time for reassessment, reevaluation, growth.
In the meantime, could someone shut the window, please? With all that racket from the street: How could anyone think? The noise, of course, was that of metaphorical bricks being hurled metaphorically from below, smashing metaphorical window-panes, scattering metaphorical books, papers, and chalk.
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,