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  • Is the Departure of Resurrection Austin the Beginning of a Stampede Out of the ACNA?

    There’s plenty of angst:

    I am happy to announce that the parish vote has reached a quorum with more than an 80% majority in favor of disaffiliation with the Anglican Church in North America and pursuing affiliation with the Episcopal Church with the Diocese of Texas.

    The last month has been intense for all of us, and it was certainly not the summer we expected. Thank you for leaning in on such a vital discernment process, opening yourselves up for dialog, and being diligent in prayer. I am so proud to belong to a parish that has never been afraid to face complex topics while demonstrating hope and faith in our Good Shepherd to see us through.

    My take: although I’m sure there are more of these coming, for better or worse I doubt that it will be a stampede, the inclusion of a church in the home of the Longhorns notwithstanding.

    The basic thing that most people overlook is the highly heterogeneous nature of the ACNA itself, which fits Sun Yat-Sen’s description of a “heap of loose sand.” Both–yes, we’re up to two now–of the high profile disaffiliations have been out of Todd Hunter’s Church for the Sake of Others, which is a largely exvangelical enterprise. It’s not surprising that the exvangelicals, fleeing the mindless dogmatism of their past, don’t like to discover that the ACNA was started because TEC had overrun the boundaries of the Gospel and had torn down the barbed wire fence, thus the need for some hard boundaries. It’s also the case that exvangelicals, desirous of moving up from their populist origins, would find that the favoured secular values of the day–especially in the upper reaches of society–are at odds with the proclamation of ACNA and its GAFCON partners. This last point is an endless problem in the Anglican/Episcopal world, as I discussed in my post Squaring the Circle of Anglican/Episcopal Ministry.

    My initial enthusiasm with the influx of people coming out of the evangelical world into the ACNA was misplaced. (My mother’s experience should have been instructive, but sadly it wasn’t.) At this point I’m not worried about the people in C4SO who leave the ACNA, I’m more worried about the ones who stay. Don’t put that cattle guard in just yet.

  • The 1928 and Cranmer’s Shape — The North American Anglican

    The 1928 and Cranmer’s Shape

  • Watergate: A Personal Reflection

    It’s that time of the decade again when we look back on the Watergate scandal and how it brought down Richard Nixon and many of those around him. In this case it is the fiftieth anniversary. I usually like to note that at this time of year–the scandal itself drug out for almost two years and beyond–because I feature two recordings of John Erlichmann testifying at the Senate Select Committee on the subject. You can hear the first of these here and the second here.

    As will become evident, I still have my doubts on many of the “official” explanations of what happened. Some of these doubts arose during the events and some are the result of subsequent events, which cast the whole thing in a different light. This is a personal reflection of the impact the scandal had on me–and I’m sure on others–and how life was different as a result of it.

    Let me start by presenting this, which brought much of the pain of the era back into consciousness:

    At the beginning of 1973, things were starting to look up. The Vietnam War, which had dominated the years before, was coming to an end. It wasn’t the best end (something that was obvious at the time) but it was probably the best we could hope for. I was graduating from prep school in June. That hadn’t been the happiest experience but I had “swum the Tiber” and left the school’s church behind, and had been accepted to Texas A&M and left the school’s socio-economic slice behind, and things were finally looking up.

    Watergate and the other crises of the era–especially the oil related crises–wrecked all that.

    I listened to the hearings while working at the family business during the summer in the drafting office shown above. I (and my co-workers) were a little mystified by the whole thing. More to the point, I had read subversive books, and knew there were other ways of dealing with problems like this. In a Westminster system, the government would resign, we’d get a new government, and things would go on. In other systems the whole thing would have been shoved under the rug, the lower level miscreants given the boot, and life would go on. The United States–which supposedly had the greatest form of government the world had ever known–could bring itself to do none of these things; it took what seemed like an eternity to finally get to a “changing of the guard” while the nation was torn apart with night after night of the scandal (that was before the 24-hour news cycle we have now) and its energy drained from the Cold War it was supposed to be engaged in with the Soviet Union.

    The basic problem was twofold. The first was that the U.S. Constitution made it difficult to remove a President from office, a simple fact which has been repeatedly forgotten in all of the subsequent impeachment efforts. The second was that Nixon’s opponents turned the whole thing into a moral crusade–a very American thing to do–in order to advance their cause. Had they been more focused on their effort, they could have sent the Republican Party to a permanent wilderness, but they missed their best chance to do so.

    In the middle of all this most of my faith in this system–a faith which hadn’t been done any favours by my aforementioned prep school–was seriously damaged. Things bounced downward as the decade wore on, leading in part to my first writing of this. It also led to my serious consideration of emigration, which for better or worse I never went through with. Texas A&M turned around my faith in this country and altered my spiritual course as well.

    Subsequent events have shown several things.

    The first is that our government is capable of intrusive, one-sided suppression of our liberties in ways that Nixon’s people could only dream of, and that the same group of people who attacked Nixon for his dirty tricks have employed worse on our population. That puts the whole business of Watergate in a new light.

    The second is that the right–especially the religious right–ploughed into political involvement without really understanding the nature of their opponents nor how to achieve their objectives. This is why their effort stalled and they ultimately turned to Donald Trump, an unlikely a hero of religious conservatism as one could want. I discuss this in my “retrospective” on my earlier writings.

    The third is that Watergate taught people that dragging out scandal and resorting to the legal system were the way to “get things done.” Such has poisoned our political system ever since.

    But we have a “democracy,” don’t we?

  • Washington DC is a failed city — Unherd

    If you had to pick the exact day when the young, affluent, and oblivious of Washington DC were forced to accept that they live in a failed city, 22 …

    Washington DC is a failed city

    Mike Pence might want to consider this…

  • Admitting the Failure of the Sexual Revolution Without Admitting It

    Timothy Fountain’s piece That Golden Age of Porn is an honest piece on the era of 1969-1984 when porn was distributed freely (thanks in part to SCOTUS) in print and in theatres. Porn was a major disseminator of the sexual revolution.

    Tim’s major contribution in this piece, however, was to remind everyone of the routine trashing of people who objected to the sexual revolution in general and porn in particular:

    First of all, objections to the Golden Age of Porn were “cancelled” in the same way objections to “Pride” are censored today. To challenge the public proliferation of porn was to be:

    But there were consequences, not the least to feminism:

    Self-described feminists sometimes attacked porn as “objectifying women,” then pivoted to extol it as “women finding empowerment through their sexuality.” Very much like arguing for elevation of women’s sports while simultaneously bringing biological males into women’s events and locker rooms.

    The sexual revolution in general put feminism in a tight place. Were women supposed to spurn sex in order to minimise contact with men? Or was it their most powerful weapon? Feminism has had a schizoid cast to it ever since, something that becomes evident when women like Paula Jones and Tara Reade come forward.

    Tim brings us to the present: the transgender movement. It’s worth noting that the sexual revolution used to be called the “free love” movement. We were promised that, when our inhibitions were cast aside and we ripped off our bourgeois phoniness to be our true selves, that we would all be happy. But that’s how it started: how is it going? What we have really done to ourselves is turn sexual activity into a performance-based arena, where there are some winners and many losers. Porn made it look easy. It’s not, especially when it intersects with real relationships.

    The trans movement is a way of removing the performance-based sexual activity by pivoting away from sex to gender, and from there to tie gender to personal identity, which in turn ties is to the issue we can never seem to get away from, authenticity. Now we focus on identity, with expensive medical procedures (there’s the cash flow, as was and is the case with the porn industry.) It’s a tacit admission that the sexual revolution has failed, and its attractiveness to young people (along with declining sexual activity) is an indication that they realise the jig is up for “free love.” It’s admitting the sexual revolution has failed without admitting it.

    The first victim of this is, ironically, the LGB community. They’ve been telling us that they’re “born this way,” but the trans people tell us that no one is born any way, that we’re “assigned” a gender at birth subject to subsequent alteration. They’ve put themselves into the same kind of tight place as the feminists did. But things can play out differently. In the U.S., a relatively large community of religious conservatives have forced the LGB and T (along with the other alphabet letters) into an unnatural alliance, at least for the moment. In the UK, where religious conservatives are nearly invisible, things are different, especially with the lesbians and their “TERF wars.”

    Until we find a way to cast aside our sexo-centricity and attain a more balanced view of things, which includes productive output for our mental health, prosperity and protection from foreign invaders, we will stumble from one disaster to another until we succumb to the last one.

  • The shadow of Pax Romana —Unherd

    To his army of ardent followers, Tom Holland has a unique ability to bring antiquity alive. An award-winning British historian, biographer and …

    The shadow of Pax Romana

  • The Question of a Weltanschauung (Worldview) by Sigmund Freud (1932) — Books and Boots

    The Question of a Weltanschauung by Sigmund Freud (1932)

    This is the last in Books and Boots’ series on Sigmund Freud, where Freud presents one of his most wide-ranging polemics against Christianity. Reviewing that polemic leads the author to find Freud wanting in his critique, to say the last. Although he gives his own reasons, I have a different take on why Freud’s rabidly secular view will always come up short.

    Freud himself admitted that science cannot furnish a Weltanschauung (worldview) because it is not complete. That simple observation eludes people, which is why it comes up again and again in our society. You see it on social media and it was certainly in evidence with the New Atheists twenty years ago, in the early days of this website. To put it simply, science can tell us how and why for the immediate cause but cannot address the issue of either ultimate cause, purpose or goal. That has to come from somewhere else.

    That last point is crucial because Freud and others would like society to be directed in a scientific way to the best outcome for humanity. But what is the best outcome for humanity? The environmental movement has placed a special urgency to this question because it ultimately challenges our right to exist. Would mass suicide and handing the planet back to the animals be the best thing? Our compulsive amour-propre may push back against such a solution, but amour-propre is no excuse in the face of “science.”

    It is also ironic–or maybe predictable–that the era of the zenith of Freud’s influence was, in this country at least, a Luddite nervous breakdown, one from which we have never fully recovered. It was an era which sought return to primitive life, to get away from the repressive necessities of civilisation. But, as Freud observed, without the repressions there’s no civilisation, and we’re too addicted to the benefits of that civilisation to part with them.

    But enough of secular people chasing their tails…the whole business of worldview brings up a favourite topic in Christian circles, namely that of a “Biblical Worldview.” There are all kinds of ways to teaching this and then to disseminate it in society, such as the “Seven Mountains” business. While the essentials of this worldview are fairly straightforward, the details and the implementation method are complicated. To start with, let’s talk organisation (or lack thereof): do we aim towards a state church as we did at the start, or do we somehow rely on a combination of the morass of denominations, non-denominational churches and parachurch organisations under our Constitutional structure to win the day? And then there are hermeneutic issues. Do we enforce New Earth Creationism as Ken Ham insists, or do we let old-earthers like the late Pat Robertson have a seat at the table?

    But there’s one thing for sure: those reborn in Jesus Christ have the best cure for amour-propre out there, and that’s the start to solving our problems.

    , ,

  • Future of an Illusion and other writings on religion by Sigmund Freud — Books & Boots

    Future of an Illusion and other writings on religion by Sigmund Freud

    Another (maybe the last) in this series. It shows that, even for people sympathetic with Freud’s project, his atheism doesn’t have as strong of a case as he–or those who continue to make that case–thought it did. Includes a summary of a dialogue with Oskar Pfister, a Swiss pastor’s son who made a case for Christianity. One interesting takeaway from the whole narrative:

    Given Freud’s lifelong animus against religion, it’s surprising that, when he finally got round to writing a complete book on the subject, it turned out to be such a surprisingly bad and unsystematic text. It trots through various arguments for atheism, buttressed by bits of psychoanalytic theory, but is surprisingly ramshackle and unconvincing.

    For me, the Voice of the Believer wins, especially when you consider that, as Freud was writing, some European nations stood poised to experiment with just the sort of alternative, non-religious, pseudo-scientific ideologies to bind society together which Freud appears to recommend: Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany.

  • Prayer Walking — Northern Plains Anglican

    Prayer Walking

  • Break the Church? What Choice Did We Have?

    Daniel Martins’ long piece on the road from GC 2003 until the formation of the ACNA–and beyond–ends in this way:

    A priest I know wrote many years ago (and I paraphrase here), “There are two cardinal rules: You don’t change the faith, and you don’t break the church.” The Episcopal Church, in redefining marriage, has changed the faith. Those who departed to form the ACNA have broken the church. Both have grieved the Holy Spirit, and undermined the witness of the gospel. Two decades on, this is the sad legacy of 2003.

    His account of the events that led up to the formation of the ACNA, the expensive and torturous (and unnecessary) litigation over the property is an interesting one, but I think it leaves out a few things.

    The first one is that what happened to the Episcopal Church long antedates the crisis detonated by V. Gene Robinson in 2003. It goes back to at least the 1960’s and the church’s failure to deal with serious problems such as James Pike. As I noted in this piece, the Episcopal Church blinked because it was more concerned about its image than in defending the faith that was entrusted to it. And that was in the 1960’s.

    After all that–the erosion of belief in the objective reality of God and the Scriptures, WO, and last but not least that dreadful 1979 BCP–things settled down in an Episcopal Church that had already shrunk from its 1960’s high water mark. Martins, by his own admission, says that “While there were many openly gay and lesbian priests in the Episcopal Church by 2003 (though not without significant controversy from the 1970s to the 1990s), no bishop had been so open when elected.” Why he wouldn’t expect the next stop to be taken–and succeed–is hard to understand. But succeed it did.

    I thought at the time–and still do–that it’s a sad commentary on a the Episcopal Church that had been on the track as long as it has–and longer than people like Martins cared to admit–had so little substantive pushback, either by those who left or those who stayed, until 2003. To some extent how far to port that things were in the Episcopal Church depended upon where you were and at what level you operated. Parishes went on as they were for years (a few still are) unbothered about what was going on “upstairs.”

    But to say that the people who ultimately formed the ACNA–to say nothing of other groups or even the Continuing Churches which barely made a dent in the 1970’s–were guilty of “breaking the church” is a stretch. There were those who were moving in for vainglory or a purple shirt. As Greg Griffith noted nine years ago when he and his family swam the Tiber:

    …the promise of the orthodox Anglican movement outside of The Episcopal Church never materialized either. Populated as that movement is by many good people, it has the institutional feeling of something held together by duct tape and baling wire. It is beset by infighting and consecration fever, and in several of its highest leadership positions are people of atrocious judgement and character.

    But that’s the nature of church politics. The Episcopal Church ultimately broke itself. To blame those who departed for “breaking the church” in this circumstance is unfair.

    Since were on the subject of “breaking the church,” how about those of us lay people who, when faced with the choices given us–and without the option of starting a new denomination–we had two choices: stay and experience the rot of our faith or leave and try to grow in grace somewhere else. It would take someone deep into what we call in the Church of God “preacher religion” to completely discount the schismatic nature of leaving a church, but it is in reality a chip in the glass. When it happens often enough–and the Episcopal Church has seen that over the least half century plus–we have a large breakage. But again we come back to who really caused it.

    At the time I began my own exit from the Episcopal Church, I wasn’t told I was breaking the church, but I got some interesting responses. One of the rectors at Bethesda, sagely noting that the church was about people (the truth of this didn’t come through to me until I worked here) then informed me that I needed to forgive, effectively casting it as a personality conflict. While there were certainly elements of that, I was on a quest for answers in life and a church which would furnish them, and honestly the Episcopal ministers on either end (church or prep school) were not furnishing them.

    After I began the Tiber swim, things shifted. To some extent going to the Roman Catholic Church from the Episcopal one is playing a trump card, as I pen in this dialogue from my fiction:

    “Is there any question about the validity of the sacraments of the Roman church?” Julian asked.

    “There’s never a question there—it’s ours that seem to always be in doubt,” Desmond answered.  The Bishop glared sourly at Desmond.

    “No, dear Julian, there isn’t,” the Bishop admitted.

    But then I started getting the usual Episcopal canard: “You’re not allowed to think as a Roman Catholic.” (I’ve heard my fellow Palm Beacher George Conger repeat that on occasion.) Growing up in a very authoritarian home, that wasn’t much of a change of scenery, but I found Catholicism has a very deep intellectual tradition and furnished answers to many of my questions. It also never seems to occur to Episcopalians that Anglican Fudge and fence-riding aren’t very good alternatives to serious answers.

    But I digress…many things have occurred to all of us since that time. I joined the Anglican blogosphere because I sensed that, finally, someone in the Episcopal church wanted to really stand up for the faith and do something about it. That fact that it ended in the formation of the ACNA–and the jury is still out even after all this time as to whether that body will fulfil its mission–was in my mind unavoidable if dreadfully unpleasant. Again, to accuse people in this circumstance of “breaking the church” is unfair, although the process is certainly painful, as the Episcopalians and Anglicans know and the Methodists are finding out.

    In the years I’ve been active in this world I’ve had the chance to meet online many people, some of whom a) have stuck it out in the Episcopal Church and b) retained their orthodoxy. It’s too bad these people (or people like them) weren’t in my life when I was making the decisions I did; I would have liked to have them as Rector and still would under different circumstances. When messy situations arise like this, people are forced to make all kinds of hard decisions. Ultimately the bar of eternity is where we account for those. But had the Episcopal Church focused more on that destination, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now, would we?

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