The Baptist News, of all places, makes this observation:
Beneath the salacious headlines from the Anglican Church in North America lies a high-stakes battle about military chaplaincy.Although one of the nation’s smaller Christian denominations, the ACNA endorses a disproportionately massive share of United States military chaplains. And that has been a profit center for the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy, led by a bishop who now has fled the denomination to start his own.
The ACNA, for all of the publicity it’s gotten lately, isn’t that large of a denomination, although it’s growth has been respectable (a concept which plays its part in this saga) in its relatively short life. But why all of the attention on this relatively small group of people, up to an including a Washington Post correspondent making a career out of its misfortunes? The answer is twofold: its own demographics and the place of the military in American society.
One mistake Evangelicals and evangelical adjacent types repeatedly make is that it’s all about sheer numbers, that if we somehow get saved and mobilised a large enough number of people we can make our “Pickett’s Charge” big enough to overwhelm the forces of darkness and take our country back for God. The last half century should demonstrate the falsity of this concept. Anyone with an elite background knows that, it’s not getting to the large number of people that gains you control over a social system, it’s getting to the right people. Once you do that the rest will follow. This is especially true in a society where respectability is such an obsession as it is with ours.
The ACNA’s elevated demographic–which it has in common with the Episcopal Church, including the racial makeup–has its own perils, but its presence in the upper reaches of our society (and a not inconsiderable presence in the DC area) makes it a threat to our elite. People like Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland may be deeply offensive to the pseudosophisticates that dominate our chattering class, but they’re a sideshow. The ACNA is a perceived threat, thus the space in the Washington Post. The fact that it has a desultory leadership structure (and the leaders to go with it) only makes it more vulnerable.
The situation with the military itself is a little different. Ever since the days of Barack Obama elite opinion has worried about the conservative nature of military people and the possibility of them eventually doing a coup. (I was trashed for expressing this opinion in my piece Every King is Proclaimed by Soldiers, but somebody needs to live in reality.) The push for DEI in both the military and the intelligence/police apparatus is an attempt to end this threat. Although conservative denominations such as mine maintain endorsing agencies for military chaplaincy, and are more likely to see their sons and daughters join the military, again the ACNA is a greater perceived threat, especially due to the relatively large group of chaplains that the JAFC has endorsed and are serving.
The ACNA has made its share of mistakes. The problem facing the ACNA is that its structure and the people who populate it may not be well positioned to fix them in a timely and decisive matter. From that standpoint what we are seeing is a power struggle emerge, and experience indicates that such in churches are ugly and non-beneficial to the mission that Our Lord put us on the earth to do. But there’s a reason why the ACNA is a special target, and that needs to be understood by everyone–and soon.
Positive Infinity 