Mortal Follies. William Murchison
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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