It’s Not Just White Privilege in the Anglican/Episcopal World

A short time ago I linked to a Pew Research study showing that both the Episcopal Church and the rest of the Anglican world in this country are overwhelmingly white.   A little later I showed that the Episcopal Church, for all the years of gaudy rhetoric about social justice, is still right there at the top of society.

There are a couple of other Pew studies that I’d like to put in front of you.

The first is this one, from 2016, that the Anglican/Episcopal world is more highly educated than the rest of American Christianity.  The church I’m now in is at the other extreme.

I think this shows that Anglicans and Episcopalians are, by and large, out of touch with the needs of groups at the other end of the spectrum, irrespective of their ethnicity.  It’s just a fact that the two ends of the socio-economic spectrum look at things differently, but most Anglicans and Episcopalians are hard pressed to walk a mile (or even a kilometer) in the shoes (or lack thereof) of many others.

And this leads to the consequence of that educational disparity: the Episcopalians are again at the top of American Christianity when it comes to income.  Mercifully the Anglican side dodged the bullet (wasn’t included in the survey,) but given that the ethnicity and education are so much the same, it’s hard to believe that the income Anglican parishioners are pulling in is that much different from their Episcopal counterparts.

The class stratification of Protestant American Christianity is something that has always bothered me, which is a big reason I enjoyed being Roman Catholic for so many years (until the status seekers got the upper hand.)

There are those in the ACNA who want to go the way of the Episcopalians in the social justice field.  The Episcopalians’ way isn’t Biblical (otherwise they’d to this) and hasn’t worked either.  American Christianity may not deserve better, but it certainly needs it.