« My Bad... | Main | Mary Cheney Is Expecting »
December 05, 2006
Choosing Bishops
Posted by: Chris
It's one thing for conservative Episcopal congregations to express their disagreement with the 2003 election of a gay bishop in New Hampshire. It's another thing for them to secede from the U.S. Episcopal Church over the issue, threatening a schism in one of the few Protestant denominations that didn't split over slavery.
And it's still another for them to align instead with a controversial African bishop who favors jailing gays for the crimes of marrying, forming organizations, or even holding hands in the street.
That's exactly what two of the Episcopal Church's largest and most influential congregations, at least according to the Washington Post, are in the process of doing. The Falls Church and Truro Church, both in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, will vote next week whether to leave the Episcopal Church and instead affiliate with Nigerian Archbishop Peter J. Akinola, who has emerged as a leader for disaffected conservatives within the worldwide Anglican Communion. The Post reports:
Three other churches in the 193-congregation Virginia diocese -- the nation's largest -- are also voting this month. And Saturday, the Associated Press reported that leaders of the San Joaquin, Calif., diocese voted to affirm their membership within the Anglican Communion, a slap to the U.S. church that some see as a first step toward a later vote to separate. That would be the first entire diocese to leave the mother church.
Although some orthodox congregations have been leaving since 2003 -- as some did in the 1970s, when ordinations of women began -- advocates think they are getting closer to creating a new, U.S.-based umbrella organization that would essentially compete with the Episcopal Church. And the two Fairfax churches are on the vanguard of the movement, which could lead to massive changes in the 226-year-old denomination, years of painful litigation or both.
"In one sense there is a sadness because this feels like a death," said Mary Springmann, a soft-spoken stay-at-home mother who worships at Truro and plans to vote to split when a week of voting begins Sunday. "Like someone who has been gravely ill for a long time, you keep hoping there's going to be a recovery. And at some point you realize it's not going to happen. Right now . . . there is a feeling of hope and expectancy about where God is going to lead us next. It's kind of exciting."
If the votes at the Falls Church and Truro succeed, as their leaders predict, the 3,000 active members of the two churches would join a new, Fairfax-based organization that answers to Nigerian Archbishop Peter J. Akinola, leader of the 17 million-member Nigerian church. The new group hopes to become a U.S.-based denomination for orthodox Episcopalians.
The two Fairfax County churches object to the elevation to bishop three years ago of Eugene Robinson, who was elected by the New Hampshire diocese despite the fact that he is openly gay and non-celibate; he is in a long-term relationship. It's hard to imagine how these conservative Episcopalians see the issue of homosexuality as so central to their theology that it justifies seceding from the denomination. But it's even harder to imagine why they think "God has led them" to affiliate instead with Archbishop Akinola.
This is, after all, a man who has said homosexuality is "an aberration unknown even in animal relationships," something contravened of course by reams of scientific data about hundreds of species. Akinola lobbied the Nigerian government earlier this year to enact a law that would throw gays into jail for up to five years if they hold private commitment ceremonies, form organizations to lobby for their rights, or hold hands in the street. The legislation applies equally to TV stations or newspapers that publicly portray same-sex couples.
Even the Bush State Department registered an objection to the draconian law, passed in February, saying it contravenes Nigeria's obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
So how do these two historic Virginia congregations reconcile Akinola's aggressively anti-gay views with their own, which are not so extreme?
Jim Pierobon, a member of the Falls Church serving as a spokesman for both Fairfax churches, said he believes Akinola is trying to ease tensions between Nigerian Anglicans and Muslims by supporting the law. That doesn't mean the leadership issue doesn't weigh on Pierobon's conscience.
"I can't ignore what's gone on," he said Friday. "It gives me pause. But I understand it well enough that it's not a show-stopper."
Easing tensions between Nigeria's Christians and Muslims would be an unusual move for Akinola, considering the same month he backed passage of that country's anti-gay law, he incited Christians there into revenge violence against Muslims angered over the Mohammed cartoon controversy. Following reports of burned churches and 43 deaths at the hands of angry Nigerian Muslims, Akinola issued a statement that said, "May we at this stage remind our Muslim borthers that they do not have the monopoly of violence in this nation." Some 80 Muslims were subsequently killed by angry Christian mobs, who went on to deface mosques and burn a Muslim district with 100 homes.
So these conservative congregations consider it "a show-stopper" for other churches from a different diocese within their denomination to select an openly gay bishop, but it's not "a show-stopper" to put themselves under the direct authority of a bishop who would throw gays in jail for holding hands and who incites Christians into violence against Muslims.
Back in February, after the Nigerian law was enacted, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., penned a Washington Post op-ed that slammed Akinola for backing the legislation. John Bryson Chane concluded his column by posing a question to Akinola's allies back home in the U.S.:
I feel compelled to ask the archbishop's many high-profile supporters in this country why they have not publicly dissociated themselves from his attack on the human rights of a vulnerable population. Is it because they support this sort of legislation, or because the rights of gay men and women are not worth the risk of tangling with an important alliance?
As a matter of logic, it must be one or the other, and it is urgent that members of our church, and citizens of our country, know your mind.
With their votes next week, these two congregations are answering Chane's question. Whatever their motivation, the willingness of these churches to break affiliations that date back more than two centuries and submit instead to such a morally misguided bishop shows how obsessed they've become with their sexuality to the exclusion even of basic humanity. The Episcopalians should say good riddance.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834527dd469e200d834cc0f7053ef
Comments
The comments to this entry are closed.
Andoni on Dec 5, 2006 10:28:35 PM:
Yes, good riddance. That is the exact same thing we Democrats said to the racist, homophobic, and sexist Southern Democrats when they left the Democratic Party.