Mortal Follies. William Murchison
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inside church walls. It became possible, then fashionable, then—for the aspiring—politically essential to challenge the idea that homosexuality was in the least troublesome or objectionable. Whence the authority for these and like assertions? The authority of the convinced seemed to suffice. They knew; they understood. They asserted no more than the culture asserted.
Decisive votes that went their way quickly turned the convinced into the arrogant. If an idea or a policy was good for them, it was good for everyone else. Bishops who advanced or supported the revolution either disciplined or ignored those dissenters who asked merely for space to be faithful to an older, and in their eyes holier, way. The tolerance on which Episcopalians once prided themselves had brought forth strange offspring—intolerance of the politically vanquished. This time, there would be no cutting off of heads. The cutting off of careers, and of associations and relationships, would suffice.
The consecration, in 2003, of Gene Robinson as the Episcopal Church’s first avowed and practicing homosexual bishop focused international attention on conditions in the church and sped up an already steady exodus of laity and clergy. Dramatic (to put it as politely as possible) revision of the prayer book had driven away small numbers; larger numbers followed as the church undertook to ordain women. The increasingly speedy passage to affirmation of homosexuality cost the church many more members than had either of the earlier departures. Though, of course, the question is always open to dispute: How many depart for Reason X or for Reason Y? Or on account of spiritual fatigue? Or due to boredom or some other indefinable personal cause?
Even the Druids, it seems, are bailing out. While writing these lines, I happened on news that an East Coast Episcopal priest had renounced Christianity in order to become a full-time Druid, whereas before he had been just a part-time one, and mainly under cover. His wife was a Druid as well. I do not suggest such a priest is typical of Episcopal clergy. I suggest that the ability of our ecclesiastical environment to produce Druid priests may exceed like abilities in other, less (shall we say) freewheeling denominations.
Again I ask: Does it matter?
How can it not? What goes on in the modern Episcopal Church—what has gone on for the past four or five decades—bears on the affairs of all the mainstream churches, whose members are honorary children of the age in which they live, watching the same television shows and football games, eating the same fast foods, struggling with the same temptations, and constantly aware that the Christian consensus in the United States of America no longer exhibits the old signs of ruddy strength—aware, indeed, that the very need for Christianity seems to many, including some Christians, somehow smaller and more remote than formerly.
Let non-Episcopalians learn from us. We have been conducting an ecclesiastical estate sale: our godly heritage, our gift for worship and spirituality, priced for quick disposal on the marketplace. We’re all in this thing together, in greater or lesser degree. But what thing is “this” thing? We can scarcely doubt, after the last forty years, the nature of the challenge. It is to present a very old faith to an age bent on reinventing itself—so it might seem—every few years, if not every few months.
Meanwhile—
THREE
We Few, We Happy Few
A BIT MORE ABOUT US, THEN, AS PREPARATION FOR WHAT follows: who we are, we Episcopalians, and how we got where we are—wherever that may be.
As the 1950s came and went, there was much to be said for us, that was for sure. Even non-Episcopalians sensed as much. Not that all delighted in contemplation of the Episcopal Church’s vaunted specialness—its reputation for gentility; the richness and roll of the language that Episcopalians used to worship God; masonry churches smelling of history and ritual; social and economic prestige outsized for a membership easily smaller than that of the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans.
The Episcopal Church was the Church of England grafted into the American colonies, pruned and trimmed after the Revolution to suit changed circumstances but rooted still in the English Reformation of the sixteenth century. It was Protestant or Catholic—sometimes Protestant and Catholic—just as a parish (meaning a congregation) or a diocese (meaning a regional collection of parishes) desired.
In the church’s formularies and traditions could be found warrant for biblical proclamation as the high point of Sunday worship, or, alternatively, for the Eucharistic feast of Christ’s body and blood as the preferred emphasis (in which case “Holy Communion,” as the name for the service, sometimes gave way to the Roman Catholic term “Mass”). There were “high” parishes and “low” parishes, terms that pertained to the parish’s preference for preaching or sacramental celebration, sometimes just to a taste or distaste, as the case might be, for ceremonial detail and display. A “broad church” congregation (the term had more purchase in England than in the United States) was likelier to hear a particular Gospel passage construed as reproaching the social order—say, the capitalist environment—as opposed to rebuking the dark sins of heart and mind.
There was a certain messiness to the Episcopal way of life, as contrasted with the greater tidiness lived out in more single-minded bodies. Yet this same messiness rendered the church capable of attracting a broad range of worshippers, those who got past the persistent rumors of Episcopal snobbiness, or who took the sermon in whatever sense they preferred, finding in the Episcopal Church the perfect blend of everything. It was a Christian body with flair no less than commitment, comfortably—now and again, too comfortably—convinced of its sacred calling and plushy seat in the councils of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
Why such a church, nevertheless? Was it that God, some six hundred years ago—well into the Renaissance—conceived for his people in England a special witness which later was carried to the New World chiefly for the benefit of transplanted Englishmen?
The ways of the Almighty are famous for their lack of what could be called utter clarity. It seems clear at least that His Kingdom in England was faring well even as Henry Tudor, the eighth and most notorious of his name, ascended the throne in 1519. A part of popular wisdom is that Henry “founded” the Church of England so that he might divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Though he managed to achieve both marital goals, he founded nothing, ecclesiastically speaking. He merely (though it was not so “mere” a thing to his contemporaries) transferred headship of a thousand-year-old church from the Pope in far-off Rome to himself and his handpicked counselors and courtiers at Whitehall.
During Henry’s lifetime—he died in 1547—the Church of England remained doctrinally and liturgically quite comparable to what it previously had been, with bishops, priests, and sacraments that closely tracked the Catholic understanding. Afterwards came significant Protestant accretions to faith and practice, and in worship the substitution of English (“a tongue understanded of the people”) for Latin. Such miseries and persecutions as Henry inflicted—for instance, expropriation of the monasteries and the execution of loyal and saintly Romanists like Sir Thomas More—had chiefly to do with the royal desire for revenues and for sheep-like obedience on his subjects’ part. What had been the Church in England became the Church of England, the state church, of which to this day the sovereign remains nominal head.
When Englishmen reached the American colonies, less than a century after Henry’s death, they brought with them, logically enough, the Church of England. At Jamestown, in 1607 (the occasion noted in the church’s previously mentioned New York Times ad), a Church of England clergyman celebrated the Holy Communion under an awning, as Captain John Smith described it, made of sail, “til we cut planks, our pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighboring trees.” It was a moment consonant with the evangelical style for which the church has never perhaps received full credit: resolute, unpretentious, not without significant effect.
Not every colony offered the church hospitality. The Puritans of New England wanted religious matters their own way, but the southern colonies, especially Virginia and South Carolina, embraced the church with some warmth,