Faith Matters: Will Barbie Save The Episcopal Church?

Walter Russell Read questions the Episcopal Church’s attempts at “evangelism”…

… I think Anglican witness will continue in the United States. The future of the Episcopal Church is harder to predict. The looming expulsion from the Anglican Communion — a perfectly avoidable disaster which a competently led and effectively organized church could have avoided without sacrifice of principle — is likely to be a more deeply damaging blow than our befuddled leadership can quite grasp. There are many people in the pews who do not hold extreme theological views (either liberal or conservative) and have been shamed and grieved by the fecklessness and failure of their church for many years. They have endured the foppish incompetence and the self indulgent follies of the church bureaucracies and political establishment out of loyalty to a larger idea. Losing the bond with Canterbury will be a heavy blow for those hundreds of thousands of faithful Anglicans. If that wider identity and historical connection is lost, the disintegration of the remaining bits of the Episcopal church will perceptibly speed up. No branch can flourish cut off from the vine, and this particular Episcopal vine is already in trouble.

To look at the Episcopal church today and to love it and care about its future is to know what Jeremiah must have felt wandering the doomed streets of Jerusalem. The framework of the country was falling apart, the enemy was approaching and the inexorable doom stepped closer day by day. But inside the walls, the hypocrisy, folly, pretense and denial reigned on. Love of the city, rage at the rulers, sorrow and pity must have warred in his heart as he begged and pleaded that they turn, even now, to face the real horror of what they had done.

What a heritage we had, and what a waste we have made of it.

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the country’s leading students of American foreign policy. His father, Loren Mead, is an Episcopal priest in Washington, D.C. His entire article may be found here. It is well worth the read.