Mortal Follies. William Murchison

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      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, John Spong, whose favorite theme was the need for radical overhaul of the Christian faith. It seemed the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, 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 СКАЧАТЬ