The heresy trial of Bishop Righter was as much about the essence and character of Christian doctrine as it was about homosexuality. The rigged acquittal of Walter Righter demonstrated a dramatic narrowing of what it takes to place one’s self outside the Christian community. The gays call this narrowing “greater inclusion,” but it is nothing less than a redefinition of Christianity. At the heresy trial, those bishops who desired an openly homosexual clergy sought to impose a particular teaching about Jesus, while suggesting that obedience to the teaching of Jesus was a matter of personal choice.
Bishop Andrew Fairfield of North Dakota expressed a dissenting opinion that the Church’s traditional teachings are part of its doctrine and the teaching against the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals is binding on the Church and its bishops. As evidence he presented Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer as reflected in the 1979 General Convention resolution that proscribes the ordination of those indulging in homosexual behaviors.
Hypocritically, the majority opinion, as reported by the Episcopal News Service (an official organ of the Episcopal Church), held that “The Court is not giving an opinion on the morality of same-gender relationships. We are not deciding whether the life-long, committed, sexual same-gender relationships are or are not a wholesome example with respect to ordination vows.” This makes no moral sense whatsoever. The clergy of any Christian church are imagined to be the representatives of Christ on this Earth; they are role models of Christian manhood and womanhood. For the Episcopal bishops of America to announce to the world that it has no opinion about the fitness of homosexuals to be role models of Christian manhood and womanhood is a grotesquely spineless abdication of their moral responsibility to the Christian community, which includes Christians of all faiths. If they won’t make moral distinctions, then they are no longer in the morality business. These moral midgets went on to say, “We are not rendering an opinion on whether a bishop and diocese should or should not ordain persons living in same-sex relationships. Rather, we are deciding the narrow issue of whether or not under Title IV [the Church’s disciplinary canons] a bishop is restrained from ordaining persons living in a committed same-gender sexual relationship.”
Why aren’t they rendering an opinion? The Catholic Church is not tongue-tied on the issue of the ordination of randy gay priests. The Pope is against it, period, end of story. And what is all this jabber about life-long, committed homosexual relationships? Gays are only 2% of the population, and that 2% is overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly habituated to sexual promiscuity. Among this population, life-long monogamous relationships are virtually non-existent. When these rare attachments are discovered, the New York Times and the Advocate will showcase them in feature articles, lush with heart-warming commentary designed to lull the reader into believing that these relationships are common and representative of the larger population of gays. The fawning press always accepts at face value every gay claim of commitment and monogamy. No gay relationship is every viewed as skeptically as, say, Ronald Reagan. By what criteria does the Episcopal Church judge the “commitment” of two shack-up homosexuals? According to the bishops, this church has no standards for determining the fitness of randy anal erotics to be its representatives of Christ. In truth, they have a time-honored and crystal-clear standard to guide them in making this decision. It’s called the Bible, a.k.a Scripture. Every one of these guys spent years in seminary studying this time-honored collection of standards, but for queer personal reasons they have decided to park the Bible out behind the dumpster while deliberating the issue of an expanding gay clergy within their church. Their notion of the dividing line between the sacred and the profane is curiously their own.
In the advance guard of those promoting the wholesale homosexual colonization of the Episcopal Church was Bishop John Shelby Spong, who has spent his most productive years trashing the core doctrines of his church. Trashmaster Spong rejects the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (for examples, the Virgin Birth and the Bodily Resurrection) and yet, when posing before the bishops at Walter Righter’s trial, Spong sought the shelter of “the kerygma about Jesus,” his church’s core teachings. Spong went on to attack the character of those who would even question the ordination of homosexuals by intoning that the presentation against Bishop Righter (Spong’s personal assistant), “illustrates better than anything else I can cite the negativity and the harassing quality of this ecclesiastical version of ethnic cleansing that has now been undertaken by the religious right wing of the Episcopal Church.” So, if you believe that Scripture and the Christian commentaries might be correct on the matter of homosexuality, then you are guilty of “ethnic cleansing,” you are poised to bulldoze a million murdered gays into open graves. Got that. That’s what the religious Left considers an intellectual argument, and it’s typical of the tone in which Bishop Spong has addressed all of his intellectual opponents throughout his career. In truth, there is no confusion about Christian sexual morality; the gay clergy and their fellow travelers are simply trying their best to “muddy the moral waters.”
Repeatedly and consistently, through Resolutions of the General Convention, Statements of the House of Bishops, and in the recent publication of the pastoral study Continuing the Dialogue(1994), the Episcopal Church affirmed that: “the teaching of the Episcopal Church is that physical sexual expression as appropriate only within the lifelong monogamous union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer…”, and therefore, “it is not appropriate for this Church to ordain a practicing homosexual, or any person who is engaged in heterosexual relations outside of marriage.”
That’s clear enough. Here’s a quote from a document signed by ten bishops of the American Episcopal Church: “Until now, the problem has not been a lack of clarity regarding the Church’s understanding of these matters. Rather it has been the growing number of bishops and diocese that have chosen to disregard and contradict this understanding both by their teaching and by their actions.
In an attempt to restore order in the Church where it had all but disappeared, we have engaged in a lengthy legal process within the House of Bishops over the past year and a half. Unfortunately, that process has been deeply compromised from the very beginning. We cite as only one example the fact that three out of nine judges authorized or performed ordinations identical to the one in question – and a fourth declared his willingness to do so; yet, only one recused himself, and then only after the majority Opinion had been determined.
Nevertheless, the Court has spoken. On May 15, 1996, the majority held that – all of our previous statements notwithstanding – the Episcopal Church has no Core Doctrine in the area of human sexuality; and therefore neither the doctrine nor the discipline of the Church has been violated.
We decry this Opinion as deeply flawed and erroneous. The Court’s disclaimer notwithstanding, its decision has swept away two millennia of Christian teaching regarding God’s purposes in creations, the nature and meaning of Christian marriage and family, the discipleship in relation to sexuality to which we are called as followers of Jesus, and the paradigm of the Church as Bride and Christ as Bridegroom. The distinction of Core Doctrine from other doctrinal teaching is without precedent of foundation in the Book of Common Prayer, the Resolutions of the General Convention, or the Canons of the Church. The very term, Core Doctrine, is a specious invention of the Court. There is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, whose ministry the Apostles proclaimed as the Gospel and enduring norm of the Church. There is but one Faith, which must rest on the foundation of this apostolic teaching….”
They went on to say, “We remain committed to the declaration of the General Convention, that the traditional teaching of the Church that marriage, marital fidelity, and sexual chastity are the standard of Christian sexual morality, and therefore declare that the ordination of non-celibate homosexual persons and the blessing of homosexual unions deviates from the biblical norm.”
They affirmed: “that it is not permissible, if it is even possible, in our polity for a bishop to teach or act on teaching which is neither supported by the Holy Scriptures, the Church acting corporately nor the Book of Common Prayer. We therefore declare that bishops who knowingly ordain non-celibate homosexual persons or who permit or endorse the blessing of homosexual unions do so without the authority of the Scripture, of the unbroken apostolic tradition, or of the Anglican Communion and are thereby threatening the unity and order of the Church. As a sign of the seriousness of this threat, we dissociate ourselves from such individually discerned teaching and pre-emptive action by bishops, other clergy, or diocese.” [Emphasis added].
This captures the essence of my concern. I do not much care about Scripture, but I care very much about the people who care about Scripture. They are an intact community, a cornerstone of our civilization. Any force that would weaken the social cohesion of this community also diminishes our larger civilization. Why would any sane person who cared about the preservation of healthy human communities want to muck them up by insisting that they honor oddballs in the grips of abnormal sexual fixations?
The ten bishops understood the importance of preserving a healthy Christian community: “We declare our conviction that orthodox Episcopal ministry must be provided to clergy and laity in diocese where the bishop has departed from the standards and norms set forth by the Church’s teaching. For their sake, we will take steps to create a fellowship of Episcopal parishes and dioceses which uphold Scriptural authority, and we also network with other Provinces of the Anglican Communion who share this stance.”
This means that if the local bishop is endorsing behaviors that are un-Christian by definition, if he is leading congregations into sin and error, then those congregations have a moral obligation to place themselves under the guidance of a bishop who has not joined the “amen chorus” of the homosexual social agenda.
The bishops noted that the threat posed to Christian unity by the homosexual colonization of church congregations was not limited to the Episcopal Church. They quoted the renowned Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Panneberg: “Whoever pressures the church to alter the normativeness of its teaching with regard to homosexuality must be aware that person promotes schism in the church. For a church that would permit itself to be pressured to no longer understand homosexual activity as a deviation from the biblical norm and to recognize homosexual partnerships alongside marriage, such a church would no longer be based on the foundation of Scripture, but, rather in opposition to its unanimous witness.” He’s saying that the promotion of homosexuality, of gay clergy, of gay marriage, of the gay sensibility, is an assault on the social and moral health of the Christian community. He is suggesting that this assault threatens a vital network of social institutions that are desperately needed if our civilization is to endure. This network of social institutions includes traditional marriage, the schools that influence our children, all religious denominations, and a constellation of healthful social organizations, such as the Boy Scouts, that struggle every day to assist their neighbors along the narrow path of human decency.
Speaking of the Episcopal Church’s deviant bent, Dean Richard Lobs observed: “I see our denomination as evidencing corporate behavior that is different from other mainline denominations. From my vantage point I observe that other denominations in the post-sixties have pushed to the edge of the theological and moral envelope but are in a drawing back process. I am watching them re-center themselves into Scripture and their statements of faith. Alas, I see our senior leadership bent on ill-advised and self-destructive social experiments and ventures.”
As national columnist Bill Murchison observed of the hypocritical Righter acquittal: “Disapproved in Scripture and disallowed in Christian moral teaching, homosexuality is accumulating major power within the major Protestant denominations. The clearest evidence of that power is the recent judgment by the Episcopal court that sodomy constitutes no barrier to ordination.”
Bishop Robinson: Modern Moral Relativist
On August fifth, 2003, the “progressive” Episcopal clergy, at their General Convention in Minneapolis, voted to confirm a sexually active homosexual as the next bishop of New Hampshire. The response from the representatives of the vast majority of Anglicans living in Asia, Latin America and Africa, the so-called Global South, was immediate. These bright minds understood at once that the issue at hand was not homosexuality, but biblical authority. The proponents of an expanding gay clergy wanted a gay bishop and they were not about to let anything as trivial as the plain text of the Bible stand in their way. After 2000 years of consistent teaching about human sexuality and family life, the gay lobby is now insisting that these vital matters be “imaginatively construed in a certain interpretive trajectory,” as one attending bishop put it. The Anglican bishops of the Global South scoffed at this anti-Scriptural innovation and threatened to go their own way.
With the Anglican Communion on the verge of schism, and ever more congregants abandoning the Episcopal Church in disgust, we might ask ourselves what the Episcopal Church gained from its demotion of the Bible to a collection of suggested guidelines. Well, the Episcopal Church got V. Gene Robinson as the emblem of an emerging New-Age Episcopal Church. Mr. Robinson is every inch the model of a modern moral relativist. With his elevation to bishop, the Episcopal Church became the first major Christian denomination anywhere to choose a bishop who admits to indulging in homosexual behavior. According to Episcopal gay activist Louis Crew, Robinson’s consecration is especially important because churches have traditionally rejected homosexual behavior. Crew predicts that thousands of homosexuals will flock to the Episcopal Church. Robinson himself said that his becoming a bishop is “a huge step for gay and lesbian folks in the church.”
Never mind that the 1998 Lambeth Conference had passed a resolution calling homosexuality “incompatible with Scripture.” Addressing the Minneapolis conference, Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh intoned: “This body, in willfully confirming a person who is sexually active outside of holy matrimony, has departed from the history of faith and order of the church of Jesus Christ. This body has denied the plain teaching of Scripture and the moral consensus of the church throughout the ages…With grief too deep for words, the bishops who stand before you must reject this action.” At that moment Bishop Duncan was flanked by more than a dozen bishops.
Robinson’s response to this was to say that the Episcopal clergy was already crammed with homosexuals and that if he declined the office of bishop another homosexual would soon snatch it up: “Anybody who thinks this would just go away if I stand down is being delusional…If I were to stand down today, it would not be very long until one of them [homosexual clergy] was nominated and elected. And so the Reverend Robinson answered a question about the truth of Scripture with a blunt observation about internal Episcopal realpolitik. In short, we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it. The Episcopal Church has been colonized by homosexuals; it is now their haven and their launch pad. Archbishop of Nigeria Peter Akinola characterized Robinson’s consecration as “a satanic attack on God’s church.” Nigeria embraces over seven times as many Anglicans as does America.
Of course, Robinson’s elevation was praised by the arch-liberal Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who describes himself as a “hairy lefty.” Williams has advocated socialism; he has questioned the truth of those parts of the Bible he doesn’t like; he has knowingly ordained homosexuals in the past; he has praised “The Simpsons” television show for its “virtue.” His writings about human sexuality are critical of society’s “insistence on a fantasy version of heterosexual marriage as the solitary ideal.” Not surprisingly, 350 English parishes have barred him from conducting Communion in their churches. Williams says he’s surprised by the emotional commitment of his critics.
The gay priest, V. Gene Robinson, was consecrated at a makeshift altar in the University of New Hampshire’s ice hockey rink. The whole affair followed a stock formula. As with the two ordinations of the gay Barry Stopfel, the venue had been packed with gays who had been invited to give their noisy ascent to one of their own. As with the two Stopfel ordinations, there was an opportunity for people to object to the consecration and then the officiating bishop speedily noted the objections, saying the concerns were well known and had already been discussed, and then he rushed to conclude the ceremony. The liberals were demonstrating their lack of concern for the defining aspects of accepted Christian culture.
And who is V. Gene Robinson? He’s a person with so little personal insight, integrity and common decency that he lured a woman into a faux marriage to which he could never fully commit himself. He robbed this woman of the flower of her life and denied her the gift of some man’s complete dedication and fulsome passion. This woman bore Robinson two children before he revealed to her his true essence. He is a practiced charlatan; he inflicted needless pain on his innocent wife and children. This coward’s final confession shattered his marriage, deprived his wife of a husband and her children of a consistent male role model. Daddy had the hots for hairy guys in pink crotchless panties. His family had to swallow the pain and humiliation.
In a gush of self love, Bishop Robinson seeks our sympathy with descriptions of his private struggle with his oddball sexual proclivities. We are supposed to find his struggle ennobling, but it’s just pathetic and self-serving. He’s just a user. No amount of clever sermonizing, no amount of showmanship at the altar, could balance the scales for all the psychic damage he has inflicted on his wife and children. Having strip mined his family for all they were worth, he moved on. Now he has a gay lover; he’s livin’ large, but his grotesque distortion of the sacrament of marriage will remain his enduring moral monument. Nonetheless, he’s now a poster boy for gay spirituality. Perhaps that’s fitting.
Would the heartbreak of this woman have been averted if there were a gay marriage privilege? Not a chance. Gays who marry for the purpose of making themselves appear to be “real men” must marry a woman to do so. For these gays gay marriage will always be second-rate and useless. When they finally ripen into their full gayness and pop out of the closet some woman gets her emotional guts stomped out. Is it any wonder that the vast majority of Christians world wide have rejected V. Gene Robinson as a fit representative of Christ on Earth?
The Catholic Church, which has had its own problems with gay clergy, has no difficulty reading black-letter Scripture. So when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had an audience with the pope in October 2003, the pope made it clear that the ordination of flagrant homosexuals by the Anglican Church was an impediment to the reunification of the two churches, a dream that has lingered on since 1534 when Henry the VIII detached the English Church from Rome. Speaking of the ordination of the gay bishop, the pope said, “As we give thanks for the progress that has already been made, we must also recognize that new and serious difficulties have arisen on the path to unity.”
On Vatican Radio, Cardinal Walter Kasper spoke of “the conflicts and tensions that have emerged in the Anglican Communion in recent months following the ordination of priests who practice homosexuality.” The cardinal is in charge of the Vatican’s office for relations with other Christian denominations.
The Gay Agenda Rips Churches Apart
So the Episcopal Church’s liberals indulge in a flirtation with a priesthood that is emotionally focused on its own gender at the expense of a centuries-old hope of a more united Christian community. These liberals are imposing a radical redefinition of Christianity on their communities. Those Christians who seek to escape from a church that is promoting homosexuality on them are threatened with eviction from church property.
An arch-liberal Episcopal priest, the Rev. Harold Lewis of Pittsburgh’s Calvary Episcopal Church has filed a lawsuit to prevent conservative parishes from continuing to use Episcopal Church property if they dissociate themselves from the national church over the issue of the Church’s emerging, flamingly gay clergy. In other words, the promoters of an ever-expanding, anti-Scriptural, gay clergy are threatening traditional Christians with eviction if they dare to act on their moral convictions. The liberals are insisting that it’s the gay way or the highway for traditional Christians. Conservatives who want to leave the Episcopal Church USA would also be compelled to leave the World Wide Anglican Communion, a federation of 38 national churches, because the Anglican Communion recognizes only one church in each country.
Using the World Wide Web, American conservatives have joined forces with Anglican leaders of the vast majority of the planet’s Anglicans in Africa, Asia and Latin America who have already announced that they will not associate with a church that glorifies flagrantly homosexual bishops. The Episcopal Church is not alone in its disintegration over the issue of gay infiltration. The Presbyterian and Methodist Churches are also threatened with the division of their spiritual communities.
For decades the Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists, with 12.5 million members altogether, have provided the foot soldiers and ideological underpinning for liberal causes from abortion to environmentalism and a reflexive opposition to any expression of American self interest. This lurch to the political left has cost the Episcopal Church 36% of its membership in the past three decades. The entrenched elite of the Episcopal Church are well to the political left of the folks in the pews, who are sitting there in discomfort.
Sadly, this comfortable elite sponges its living off of endowments left by former generations who would be disgusted by the New Age liberal clergy’s obsequious fawning before the radical homosexual social agenda. These entrenched pulpit potatoes have spurned the traditional belief that the Christian community extends beyond the living to include all their Christian forbears. Christians pray each week for both the living and the dead. Overwhelmingly, this larger Christian community would be appalled by the anti-biblical fashions and Christianity-lite perspectives of the left-winging-it New Age innovators. There has been 2000 years of consistent Christian tradition, but now, suddenly, there springs forth this babbling brook of feel-good pop theology. Rather than adhere to the Fifth-Century Saint Vincent Lerin’s standard of “what has been held everywhere in every time by everyone”, the New Age wise guys of the clerical Left are promoting their personal vision of a Church where the acquired wisdom of thousands of years of human experience now counts for less than their personal tastes.
On May 7, 2004 the Associated Press reported that “United Methodist evangelicals said yesterday their church should split after three decades of discord over homosexuality, signaling a deep rift in the nation’s third-largest denomination.” The desire to break away reflected the evangelicals continuing frustration that a preoccupation with the desires of a small number of homosexuals had distracted the 8.3 million-member church from its primary mission. “We can’t bridge the gap separating us,” said the Reverend William Hinson, president of the Confessing Movement for Conservative Methodists. “Our people, who have been faithful and patient, should not have to endure our endless conflict.” But schism is not imminent. Once again, the New Age insurgents are frustrating the spiritual needs of faithful traditionalists by using church law to prevent any of America’s 36,000 Methodist congregations from using Methodist property if they dissociate themselves from the emerging anti-Scriptural, gay-friendly, Methodist Church.
By the conclusion of its national policy meeting the delegates had affirmed that gay sex was “incompatible with Christian teaching” and made it a chargeable offense under church law for clergy to conduct same-sex marriages and for unmarried ministers to have sex. None of which will stop the New-Age utopians within the Methodist Church from promoting homosexuality. As with the Episcopal Church, the insurgents consider church law to be mere window dressing. It is there to sooth the fools in the pews, to keep them contributing, to encourage their continued presence so as to lend this increasingly gay church a much-needed aura of legitimacy. The last thing the radical clergy want is to be the clergy of a clearly new-fangled, anti-Scriptural haven for homosexuals. Such a church would lack prestige; it would lack moral stature. It would not be a place in which to build a lucrative career.
The Methodist liberals grumble about the resolution’s negative stance on gay sex. They want to allow regional Methodist districts to set their own standards for ordaining gays and lesbians, which is a formula for the eventual moral rollover of the Methodist Church. If you allow the camel poke his nose into your tent, and then just his ears, eventually the whole camel will be inside your tent. Likewise, gay counterculture values can infiltrate any social institution incrementally if allowed to make that first small intrusion. Gayness is not a private matter confined to the bed room, it is a strange and radically different world view; it is a constellation of alien perspectives; it is an alien sensibility. Gays, as living vessels of this alien world view, seek an expanded comfort zone in which to act out lives shaped by their peculiar sensibilities. This means that their presence in any community will be transforming. Those normal people who welcome gays into their communities should understand that they may be welcoming people who are not content to simply settle in and behave like everyone else. When the opportunity arises, when they have accumulated enough influence, then gays may begin to change things to suit themselves. The old welcoming committee may find itself relegated to the back row. This is human nature, but because gays have a human nature that is somewhat different from that of most humans what they consider a comfort zone may make normal folks mighty uncomfortable.
My purpose is not to argue the correctness of Scripture, but to emphasize the importance of Scripture as a defining force in our civilization. It is a source of social cohesion, which is necessary if our civilization is to continue. Our only alternative is barbarism, which is the anticipated consequence of ceaseless assaults upon the shaping values of our civilization’s necessary social institutions: marriage, the temples of worship, the schools of our children.
In a Beliefs column in the New York Times, author Peter Steinfels tells us that, “The ‘new reality’ among Episcopalians that the researchers describe involved a new emphasis on the spiritual rather than the institutional and the local rather than the diocesan or national.” And, “Those interviewed for the study were generally quite candid in describing conflicts in the church. But those conflicts were less likely to be over theological or ideological differences than over frustration, even anger, at diocesan and national offices that were accused of not ‘honoring local wisdom’…” When it came to the moral legitimacy of homosexual relationships, we are told, respondents said, “In their view, these were matters that congregations had managed to deal with in their own, more flexible fashion.”
The problem is that the free exercise of “local wisdom” and the management of Christian identity in a more “flexible fashion” leads to confusion as to what behaviors befit a proper Christian. Too much “local wisdom” and fashionable flexibility will lead the Christian community straight back to the moral incoherency that threatened the young faith of the First Century. Saint Paul ensured the future of Christianity by bringing definition to just this sort of moral incoherency.
The study, by the Rev. William Sachs and Dr. Thomas Holland, “found plenty of anxiety and debate about Episcopal identity at the grassroots. What were the church’s core beliefs? What were its boundaries? Shouldn’t there be greater clarity about these things?” Well, yes. The sheep are straying. Where is Saint Paul now that the Christian community really needs him? In Scripture, perhaps.
America Looks to an African Zion
According to the Reverend Martyn Minns of Fairfax, Va., who attended the Minneapolis convention: “When the plain teaching of the Bible was referenced, eyes rolled, and with expressions of polite exasperation were told that it was time to move on. The Bible simply hadn’t kept up.” In this atmosphere the Episcopalians consecrated a bishop who believes that gay sex is sacramental. Traditional Episcopalians (American Anglicans) immediately requested a second Anglican province in America and pleaded for permission to place themselves under the leadership and authority of African archbishops.
After that, the super-liberal Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, promptly called an emergency meeting to forestall a schism in the American Episcopal Church which, with only 2.2 million members, is less than 3% of the 79 million Anglicans on the planet.
Despite the fact that Episcopalians are a mere one percent of American adults, they receive fawning press attention because they have championed the gay social agenda, because Episcopalianism is the church of the aging WASP elite, and because the wealthy media elite like to give press coverage to rich and influential people like themselves.
With the focus on homosexuality, the press missed the big story: when traditional American Anglicans place themselves under the guidance of African prelates it will signal the beginning of a mammoth transfer of religious prestige from the moribund West to the ascendant Christian communities of South America and Africa. Because of rampant divorce, abortion and dwindling birthrates in the West, the surging Christian populations of South America and Africa will each surpass that of the West in the next 50 years.
To quote Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom, “In North America, at least, most visions of the coming century are based firmly on extrapolating familiar domestic conditions. The imagined future looks a lot like the American present, only with Western liberalism ever more in the ascendant. Western Christians have since the ‘60s expected that the religion of their Third World brethren would be fervently liberal, activist and even revolutionary, the model represented by liberation theology.” As it turns out, the Third World doesn’t share this WASP vision, nor does it care for the patronizing “compassion” of cosseted Western academics who imagine it to be their burden to guide their brown and black brethren to the guilt-free Utopia of liberal permissiveness. Brushing aside the liberal blueprint for a shameless tomorrow, the black pastors of Africa (and America) are finding their own voice and are speaking with confidence in the defense of traditional Christian morality. Since the year 2000 the number of blacks who identify themselves as Democrats has fallen by 11%. Many express their revulsion toward those Democrats, mostly white liberals, who are so aggressively promoting the cause of gay marriage.
In any case, when the Minneapolis conference ended, the black bishops of Africa knew they had been snubbed by the posturing white liberal elite of the American Episcopal Church, which chose to protect its liberal credentials at the expense of battleground Christians who are struggling to win converts to Christ in parts of the world where the mere mention of a homosexual Christian clergy will send religious seekers scurrying into the arms of Islam. How can the righteous African bishops explain to their African congregations the words of a Vancouver bishop who approved of gay marriage and who declared: “We have no reason to suppose that any one religion is truer than the others,” which pretty much trashes the notion that Anglicanism is based on revelation.
What the arrogant Western bishops need to have explained to them is that the typical member of the Anglican Church is a 40-year-old African woman surviving on $10 a month. Her African bishop and his fellows will not need much convincing to dissociate themselves from the morally moribund splinter faction of self-satisfied Northern Hemisphere clergy who are bent on promoting an anti-biblical homosexual agenda. Of course, the morally lax but wealthy Northern Hemisphere clergy will continue to use their wealth coercively against the theologically conservative but financially weak churches of the Southern Hemisphere. White liberals always know what’s best for their backward black brothers.
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2004
June 6, 2004