In March 2005, I predicted that the battle within the Anglican Church over women and gay clergy would blow its worldwide communion asunder. Back then, influential dioceses in the United States and overseas, especially in Latin America and Africa, where Anglicans compete with Catholics to win souls, threatened to secede over this issue.
They claimed ordaining women and gays as bishops (let alone consecrating gay marriages) was tantamount to a “Satanic attack” on the Church.
Many overseas dioceses made good on their threat immediately. But the news of this Anglican apocalypse didn’t dawn on the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion) until yesterday, when seven parishes in my home state of Virginia defected as well.
But, truth be told, here’s what really confounded Episcopalian loyalists: these White Virginians abandoned their White leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams of England, to pledge allegiance to a Black leader, Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria.
The racial irony is breathtaking.
Williams recognizes Akinola as a charismatic and formidable adversary. He’s conceded that Akinola advocates such an appealing — even if ignorant and parochial — interpretation of Holy Scripture (homosexuality is “unnatural and un-African”) that the Church may have to:
…create a two-tier system of membership, with branches that ordain partnered gays given a lesser status.
We deplore the act of those bishops who have taken part in the consecration, which has now divided the church in violation of their obligation to guard the faith and unity of the church.
Therefore, the internecine struggle that has beset every other established church now looms for the Episcopal Church. No one doubts that the Virginia secessions constitute the breach in the levee that will flood the 77 million-member Anglican Communion with defections.
The property’s the thing: Williams may be unable to prevent Akinola from stealing Anglican souls, but he’s determined to prevent him from stealing Church property. He’s decreed that if these unruly secessionists want to join Akinola’s church, they’ll have to purchase separate facilities to worship their God.
Therefore, it seems very likely that the fight to save souls for Christ will be a mere undercard to the main event: the mother of all battles between Anglican factions to procure Church property for themselves (especially the multi-million dollar holdings in the US).
UPDATE
I’ve received a number of emails today asking which leader I support in this internecine battle. Frankly, iPINIONS does not have a dog in this fight. I’ll simply reiterate what I lamented years ago when this row over women and gays first erupted:
What’s ironic and disappointing is that Archbishop Peter Akinola and Archbishop Drexel Gomez are misleading African and Caribbean Blacks into using perverse religious and cultural rationalizations to discriminate against women and gays. After all, White bigots used similar rationalizations to discriminate against Blacks not so long ago.
If pressed, however, I’d support Williams and bid good riddance to the Virginia parishes and any others pledging allegiance to a self-righteous leader who presumes God’s ordination upon his bigoted religious practices. And I wonder how these Virginians—now so devoted to interracial worship with Africans — would feel about interracial marriages with them.
The hypocrisy of racism wrapped in righteousness never ceases to amaze.
For more context on how this Anglican Church split broke along racial lines, the pattern was clear from the beginning.
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