The server ate my post, so I'll try again. Pardon the spelling and grammar errors, but the "preview" function frequently swallows my whole post during editing.

The split in the Episcopal Church certainly will not be the last. The "gay issue" and all the attendant issues of modernity and changing expectations in life will eventually crack open even the hardest fundamentalist evengelical denominations. These wiil be splits not only through denominations, but through congregations. I doubt even Rome, with its iron lid of authoritarianism over a boiling pressure cooker, will come out intact. This issue already splits families, especially among conservatives. How many rightwing leaders have gay children? There's Randall Terry, who disowned his gay son; Phyllis Schlafly's son, Allen Keyes' daughter (who he disowned), and there is the famously vexing issue of Vice President Cheney's openly and unapologetically lesbian daughter with her spouse. And there are certainly others. The tempest in the Anglican Church will look like a tempest in an Anglican teapot compared to the conflicts that may come in the future.

The marriage between American religious conservatives and Africa is a marriage of convenience that will not last. The most enthusiastic constituency for the American Empire is white evangelicals. When African bishops (including ++Akinola) begin challenging that revered and cherished vision of Messianic America, then the wedding is off.

One of the most informative links you have bookmarked in a long time. A great deal here to think about. Pity, though, that almost everything is reported at second and third hand and that they did not include Global South panelists.

Interesting point regarding the difference between African leaders coming into Western Churches, and African Americans (I'll try and extend this to British black churches). The Africans are moving directly to influence and lead mainline Churches (and not just Anglican) and bypass the African ones. It is because they view the main Churches as theologically diseased. But it is also an institutional question. Black churches in this country vary but have a strong element of charismatic, even carry something of the superstitious-pagan, but some of these are very pro-Israel (something not mentioned in that conference) and form part of Christian Zionism (as seen on Revelation TV). They are also of themselves.

African involvement may well be the lever that breaks off the Conservative Evangelical party, and a few more dogmatic Open Evangelicals, plus its opportunists, from the all rest, but it will need party organisation too. The Methodists here are divided too on similar grounds, the URC (but less so), Baptists are and so on. Again it will come down to institutions. A split Anglican Church will, in its parts, be easier to approach other old denominations ecumenically, but they will almost have to divide up to join up.

So whilst the ideological splits are within denominations, and ideological agreements run across them, actually joining up and sorting it out are institutional issues and current denominations are a drag upon change. If the C of E is the first to go, it'll be interesting to see how the others attach or fail to attach, or splinter in their own ways first.

Thanks loads for the link to PJ stuff. Best overview of the topography shifting that I have yet read or heard. We are all riding the demographic tigers. Makes olden-style big tent Anglicanism a more telling contribution than ever before in these changing times. Pity so many wish to collapse the tents. Que viva, high/crazy, low/lazy, and broad/hazy.

As an historian Dr. Jenkins of the Pew Forum is a light eight. He described as cause for the Great Schism in 1044 as having centered on the issue of whether or not clergy should grow beards. Hence I take everything he says with a grain of salt.

The Great Schism of 1044? Actually, Jenkins says "the Eastern and Western churches had a tiff over such crucial theological issues as whether priests should wear beards", not that beards were THE defining issue. The 1054 date is pretty arbitrary. Runciman's history documents subsequent ongoing relations between the Eastern and Western Churches. The clincher was the 1099 crusader capture of Jerusalem; the subsequent ejectment of the Orthodox clergy, patriarchs included, in almost all crusader-held lands, and their replacement by Roman Catholic priests and bishops.

Grow beards? What about Papal authority and the filoque clause?
Andrew

"We could have a competition as to which remark is the least conducive to Christian charity. (Laughter.) I have a couple of candidates. Candidate one is Akinola's remark that the U.S. Episcopal Church is like a cancerous lump that has defied all treatment, and the time has come for it to be excised altogether. Candidate two is from one of the gay pressure groups within the Episcopal Church, when someone said: "All I can say to you African bishops, is why can't you go back to the jungle you came from and stop monkeying around with the church?" We'll have a vote afterwards as to which is the more offensive remark. (Laughter.)"

I don't TRUST Jenkins, and these "parallel quotes" are a perfect example of why.

He compares ++Akinola's *well-known and well-documented* raw prejudice, w/ an ANONYMOUS "somebody said somewhere" (And if you click on the link to the quote? It goes to CANA-ite Michael Gerson's partisan attack on TEC! But even *Gerson* doesn't include the "monkey" part of the quote---did Jenkins just make it up?)

But for the sake of argument, let's say that someone from a "gay pressure group" [and please note the BIAS in that characterization!] did say it. Is that person a bishop? Speaking for the record? I rather think not!

Jenkins postures himself as this prescient sage of Zeitgeist-change . . . when he is, instead, simply another anti-gay *partisan* of changes he WANTS to see. That the PEW Forum could give him such a stage (and that so many noteworthy journalists&pundits, like Richard Wolffe and E.J. Dionne, could sit in rapt attention to him), frankly says more about *them*, than about Jenkins' scholarship. Feh!

Good Grief! I'm agreeing with Lapinbizarre and Drdanfee on something!

Anyhow, this was a very informative article, though, like John Henry I take some of it with a grain of salt. Nonetheless--kudos for the article Simon. And, John Henry, I think the remark about the beards was intended as a joke.

Also, an interesting point on the possibility of jihad breaking out in Nigeria and elsewhere and what affect this would have on the West and on the Christian surge in the Third World. This is a very real possibility to anyone that keeps up with the news from, e.g., Nigeria, where atrocities against Christians are frequent and ongoing. However, unlike the author, I don't think it is going to do anything to seriously slow down Christian growth. It may end up accelerating it.

Steven

After all these many years, and even after this discussion, I remain unconvinced that this whole war is really about Biblical authority. We've had over 150 years of Biblical criticism and fundamentalist reaction; everything from the startling modernity of Bonhoeffer's correspondence to the new Creation Museum in Kentucky; and no one thought to split Anglicanism into warring factions until those damn queers popped up. What every one from Darwin to Dawkins failed to do was accomplished by a hairdresser and a sailor out on the town for a Saturday night fling.

And now heterosexuality becomes a central article of faith up there with the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and Salvation by Grace.

JCF makes a very strong point, which I missed, about Jenkins' anonymous gay-activist quote. The original, linked quote is from a piece by Michael Gerson, a highly partisan, seriously suspect source. From context, there is no means of verifying that the statement was made in the first place, and, absent any other source for the alleged quote, one is left with the assumption that Jenkins himself, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, invented and added the highly-offensive "stop monkeying around with the church" clause. This hopelessly compromises his objectivity and brings into question the validity of every point made in his presentation.

Counterlight - while I'm sure that many lower-level activists DO believe that this "war" is about Biblical authority, in relaity, as I've said before, it's very largely about power.

>>>The original, linked quote is from a piece by Michael Gerson, a highly partisan, seriously suspect source.

For those readers not in the U.S., Gerson is the propagandist who wrote Bush's State of the Union Address that included the infamous "sixteen words": "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

He also wrote those speeches that linked Saddam and Osama so closely that most of the public soon enough came to believe that Saddam was responsible for 9/11.

In short, the man should be standing trial in The Hague, not lecturing decent people on Christian morals. It says a lot about the Virginia Secessionists, none of it good, that they would choose such a man as their spokesman.

"Counterlight - while I'm sure that many lower-level activists DO believe that this "war" is about Biblical authority, in relaity, as I've said before, it's very largely about power."

Bizarre rabbit, you may well be right.

I think we should note that Christianity is rapidly becoming known as the "anti-gay" religion rather than the Resurrection religion among the larger public.
Bishop Tutu has something to say about this over at the BBC website, saying that Anglicanism has become "obsessed" over the sexuality issue at the expense of so many other urgent issues, especially in Africa.

Simon, this piece is a goldmine of information. I would of course take it with a pinch of salt because the speaker is not from the Global South himself, but he does give us a lot of very intriguing information to think about.

re the alleged "back to the jungle" quote, I too have been investingating it. no article I've yet seen has given a name. one article attributed it to a White, gay male activist. I know that Bishop John Spong once made a remark that was considered very condescending, but he did not say to go back to the jungle.

Yes, yes, in the realignment zeal to purge queer folks - but of course that really just means, drive them back underground into silence and invisibility like the long decades before now (while trying to rip off their time, energy, and talents in the world and in church life) - the conservatives are wittingly or unwittingly transmitting a definite pop media vision of themselves to the larger population.

This conservative Anglican vision or identity is still emerging, but some clear pop media elements of it can be noted. These may now include, (1) Following Jesus as a straight fertility cult - we are moved much closer to the LDS theology of the biological straight family?, plus (2) Showing your holiness by trash talking gays - a rather nice fit with many USA junior high playgrounds I would guess, so to that extent, a negative reach out evangelion to junior high students?, plus (3) having been anointed by God to own everything and control all the planet's ideological or methodological oxygen, thanks to the penal sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. In all these pop media themes, this realignment campaign offers direct competition to aspects of extremely conservative Wahabbi Islam, so no wonder so many rightwing thinking believers discern that a contest is already going on.

If traditional big tent Anglicanism cannot offer an alternative to this penal religious contest, then surely we need to pray that Elizabeth I is resurrected or reincarnated or something. Alas. Lord have mercy.

P.S. MacIyalla is now at long last visiting USA and will speak in several different places in the near future. He will then go to UK.

At: http://www.dailyoffice.org. Mouse click the left side button that says, Support MacIyalla. Most of all with prayers, and even give money if you have some to donate. His visit is grassroots organized, rising up from the very undersides of the Nigerian Anglican Church to percolate among us. Just the sort of thing the Latin American liberation theologians tended to envision or value as a good news pathway - especially for the poor. Small wonder the Vatican finally dissed them. Small wonder Akinola through Canon Tunde disses MacIyalla. Remember he does not really exist. Just like TEC. Eeeek, pagans.

In a comment posted on Saturday I suggested that "Jenkins himself .... invented and added the highly-offensive 'stop monkeying around with the church' clause". I did this the basis of the quote's not appearing in the Michael Gerson piece that Philip Jenkins cited as his source. Since then, I have found the following quote on AlterNet (note that AlterNet is not a "conservative" site):

"At a May 2002 gathering of queer religious activists in New York City, a white, gay Episcopalian summarized the Anglican world’s problems as that of Africans “monkeying around” in the rest of the church. To the shock of some in the room, he finished his presentation by saying, 'All I have to say to these bishops is: Go back to the jungle where you came from'.”

http://www.alternet.org/rights/21350/

If this was an un-cited source of Jenkins' quote, then the quote was apparently not invented by Professor Jenkins. This would in no way invalidate JCF's point about the undocumented nature of the alleged statement.