Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline
Christianity
by William Murchison
(Encounter Books, 288 pages, $25.95)
Virginia’s Supreme Court recently ruled against
conservative former Episcopal Church congregations trying to keep
their property as members of a new theologically orthodox
Anglican denomination. Hundreds of local churches across America
are agonizing over whether to remain in the old and increasingly
heterodox Episcopal Church or depart, potentially losing
venerable church properties.
Former Dallas Morning News editor and current
syndicated columnist William Murchison remains in the old
denomination. He published his book about the Episcopal Church
just in time for the denomination’s implosively historic 2009
General Convention, which officially sanctioned gay clergy and
same-sex unions. Himself a long-time active Episcopalian in the
theologically orthodox Diocese of Dallas, and partial to the
church’s Anglo-Catholic wing, Murchison sagely traces the
church’s fall from America’s most culturally elite church to an
increasingly marginal, though still highly entertaining religious
sideshow.
The Episcopal Church’s current crisis technically began
with its 2003 election of openly homosexual Bishop Gene Robinson,
igniting growing tensions with the nearly 80 million member
Anglican Communion, especially its increasingly dominant and
conservative African members. But Murchison traces the church’s
wrong turn to the 1960s, when Episcopal elites increasingly chose
for cultural conformity rather than cultural transformation. Like
other Mainline Protestant elites, Episcopalians began to shed
“exclusivist” claims about Christianity in favor of pluralism,
where every ideology has a voice except for orthodoxy.
Not surprisingly, the rejection of orthodoxy in favor of
cultural and political fads, whatever the spiritual consequences,
has been disastrous for Episcopalians and all Mainline Protestant
denominations, all of which have been losing members since the
1960s, between 25 and 40 percent. Former Presbyterians and
Methodists and Lutherans either gave up on organized religion, or
they joined evangelical or Catholic churches, or they, more
permanently, died (!), leaving few if any descendants, as
Mainline Protestants, especially Episcopalians, have notoriously
low birth rates. The current Episcopal Presiding Bishop even
celebrated this demographic collapse, claiming that Episcopalians
were protecting the planet by abstaining from children.
Sixty years ago, Murchison recounts, the first president of
the National Council of Churches was an Episcopal bishop whose
robust goal was: “a Christian America in a Christian world.”
Somewhat presciently though, Jewish theologian Will Herberg noted
of 1950s spirituality, despite the crowded churches, that it all
seemed a “secularized Puritanism, a Puritanism without
transcendence, without sense of sin or judgment.” Middle class
religious complacency gave rise to impatient 1960s radicalism,
when socially aroused church elites, following through on the
political dreams of early 20th century Social Gospel theorists,
began to rebel against church traditions in favor of political
revolution.
Notorious, and highly charismatic, California Episcopal
Bishop James Pike, who graced the cover of Time
magazine, embodied this new restlessness. At the church’s 1964
General Convention, he bewailed “outdated, incomprehensible, and
nonessential doctrinal statements, traditions, and codes,” having
seemingly forgotten his own consecration vows to steadfastly
resist all “strange and erroneous doctrine.” Pike urged a
“theological revolution” to make the Gospel “relevant,” which
entailed junking “myths” of past centuries, like the Virgin Birth
and the Trinity, which were “unintelligible.” Eventually Pike
pushed so hard that heresy charges were formally pressed. But
ultimately, the Episcopal Church nervously shrank from ousting
Pike for his apostasies. Pike’s unprosecuted rebellion
foreshadowed expanded chaos for the church, as it succumbed to
the surrounding secular culture’s demand for personal autonomy,
accompanied by moral fragmentation.
Although Pike and his supporters strove for a “relevant”
church, their influence helped spiral the Episcopal Church from
3.5 million in the 1960s to barely 2 million today, across 4
decades when the U.S. population increased by 50 percent. The
embodiment of this decline was Bishop John Shelby Spong of
Newark, whose best selling books deriding the Virgin Mary as a
possible prostitute and speculating about St. Paul’s sexual
preference got him on Phil Donahue. But the years of his
progressive leadership, which included the ordination of actively
homosexual clergy in defiance of church policy, saw a 40 percent
decline of his diocese’s membership. “Why Christianity Must
Change or Die,” was the title of one Spong book. But the form of
doctrine-less Episcopalianism attracted only white, upper middle
class, highly educated suburban liberals, and not very many of
them. In recent years, respective Episcopal clergy have professed
to be a Druid, a Muslim and a Buddhist. The first two ultimately
left the ministry, and the third was denied election as bishop.
But who’s to say their bi-faith choices were necessarily
wrong?
Unlike other Mainline denominations, some with larger
memberships, the Episcopal Church’s antics, and decline, gets
more media play. Many of America’s founders were Episcopalian,
after all, and the church, having reached America’s shores at
Jamestown in 1607, is America’s oldest. It has served as
America’s religious finishing school, often offering refined
worship and beautiful buildings even on the frontier, when
Methodists and Baptists prayed in more rustic fashion. The
Vanderbilts, Astors and Roosevelts were Episcopalian and, by one
account in the 1950s, three-quarters of social weddings in the
New York Times were Episcopalian. Once derided as the
church of Wall Street, and the Republican Party at prayer,
Episcopalians since the 1960s have quickly compensated for lost
time, pivoting left, and professing to be the voice of the
voiceless, even as most members are still wealthy or upper middle
class suburban whites.
Murchison argues that Old Money helped define, and unravel,
the Episcopal Church. Growth and dynamism require
entrepreneurship and risk. But who wants that when you have
endowments and beautiful buildings? Provocateurs like Pike and
Spong could push far, but there was far too little push back. Why
risk the conflict? Meanwhile, comfortable Episcopal elites, ever
with a sense of noblesse oblige, embraced the Civil Rights
Movement, denouncing segregation in 1955 as “contrary to the mind
of Christ.” Ten Episcopal bishops joined Martin Luther King Jr.
at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The Episcopal Church then and
now has few black members. But commendable civil rights activism
sated a thirst for social change among Episcopalians that led
directly into the feminist movement, including the 1970s
ordination of women, and ultimately homosexual causes in the
1980s to the present. No longer mostly confined to saving souls,
church elites saw themselves as liberating American society from
“privilege.”
Meanwhile, the church accepted divorced clergy in the early
1970s and easily accommodated the 1973 legalization of abortion.
Christian traditions about the priesthood, marriage, and human
life were crumbling, as the Episcopal Church struggled to stay
apace with secular America, while distancing itself from much of
Christianity. Fresh from the Civil Rights movement, the church
professed to be social justice minded. But it was silent, if not
actively complicit, in the break-down of family structure, with
the disastrous impact upon children, especially among the poor,
including inner city blacks, for whom fathers married to mothers
was becoming an oddity.
In attempting to elevate the poor and racial minorities,
the Episcopal Church, like other social organs of liberalism,
unintentionally but actively contributed to their further social
impoverishment. Likewise, in its 40 year pursuit of “diversity”
and pluralism, Episcopalianism is now succumbing to uniformity.
The last General Convention insisted that all Episcopalians shall
oppose Defense of Marriage laws, seemingly without regard to
personal conscience.
Murchison laments this long and tragic decline of a once
great church body. He offers no specific solutions for recovery
except reliance on the Holy Spirit and historic Christianity’s
mystical doctrines, which no Episcopal prelate can ever truly
override. About 100,000 mostly former Episcopalians have formed
the new Anglican Church in North America, which, while not yet
recognized by the Archbishop of Canterbury, is recognized by most
global Anglican archbishops. And at last year’s Episcopal General
Convention, at least two dozen bishops responded to the votes for
gay clergy and same-sex unions by affirming their own continued
fidelity to the historic faith and the global Anglican
Communion.
So in parts of what used to the great Episcopal Church in
America, there are embers of renewal, even while most of the old
temple collapses, with most of its attending priests apparently
not even noticing. Murchison, whose own conservative diocese is
so far remaining in the Episcopal Church, tells the story well,
with some sadness, but also hope. Anglicans both inside and
outside the Episcopal Church will appreciate his account.
