The Lead

The new religion correspondent at the Guardian, Riazat Butt, has mixed feelings about the slow fracture of the Anglican Communion. In a column in Religious Intelligence, she says that on the one hand, she admires the openness of debating in public about scripture, sexuality and more. At the same time, she just wishes we'd just get on with it.

Talking is something that Anglicans are good at. But I kind of wish they’d do something else. For at least four years the threat of a schism has been hanging over the communion and people write about walking apart and falling off fences but the key word here is threat. Unless I’m deaf I’ve not heard the crack of a rupture so it leaves me thinking that this much-hyped schism, which by all accounts should have happened months ago, is the longest and slowest break-up in history.

She comes to this conclusion:

I’ve not been at the party that long but a clear pattern is emerging. Every week I read about more Americans fleeing to what they perceive to be more tolerable climes and more bishops seething in their mitres as the Archbishop of Canterbury fails to satisfy someone’s demands.

All in all, she'd love some closure:

In the absence of international Anglican Top Trumps I would like some closure, not fudging, from all sides. If you’re going to break up, please do it now so we can move on. There’s nothing worse than being in a relationship that isn’t moving forward. The hardest ultimatums fail to get the desired response, leaving one party resorting to increasingly dramatic gestures. You’re tied to each other, you can’t remember why, but you’ve been together for so long you’re almost too scared to go it alone. How long can you keep threatening to leave someone?

Read the rest.

Comments (4)

As a student of history I had to chuckle over this line: "the longest and slowest break-up in history"

Hardly.

She may mean, the longest and slowest that I've tried to watch daily on my computer screen...

The events unfolding are unfolding as they do and, if anything, they're unfolding a lot faster than they used to because of our virtually instantaneous global communication technology. The fact of the matter is that these things are *supposed* to take time, because time allows for two important components that often get overlooked in the point-n-click age--reflection and discernment... I fear the instantaneous speed with which letters are mailed to the world and minutely parsed; where response times measured by news cycle does little to cultivate reflection or discernment.

Posted by Derek Olsen | November 27, 2007 8:47 AM

I take your point, Derek. But I find myself more in agreement with Riazat Butt. I suppose I am more pessimistic about reconciliation. If this conversation is getting us nowhere why stay in this mutually destructive relationship?

There's wisdom in your saying these things are supposed to take time. I agree technological change has speed up and at the same time degraded communication. But it has also speed up the rate at which we are mutually destructive.

Posted by John B. Chilton | November 27, 2007 10:57 AM

I had a somewhat different take on this. I thought what she was doing was calling the schismatics bluff, saying: Ok guys, you keep saying there is going to be a schim, that you're mad as hell and can't take it anymore, and that you really, really mean it. Yet, here you still are. What's up with that?

The schismatics understand that if a schism actually occurs, there will be a burst of media coverage, after which they will fade into obscurity, at least as far as the Western media is concerned. And as they are fighting a political as well as a theolgoical battle, which depends on generating negative publicity for the Episcopal Church, they can't afford that.

Hence, the notion that schism is imminent, but still avoidable if only the Episcopal Church will reverse course, must be sustained for as long as possible.

Posted by Jim Naughton | November 27, 2007 12:11 PM

There is something genuinely unhealthy about repeatedly threatening to leave unless the other changes, but then never leaving. As couples therapists say "you can't change the other, you can only change yourself."

The conservatives aren't going to just walk out. They want something out of whatever the parallel is to a divorce settlement. Who gets to keep the house (the property) and custody of the kids (membership in the Anglican Communion).

Past schisms in The Episcopal Church have been walkout groups that faded into obscurity -- but these had no leverage. What's different is the alliance with the Global South, and the belief some maintain that entities like CANA/AMiA are part of the Anglican Communion despite what the ABC says or does (no invite to Lambeth).

Now is the Global South or some part of it going to leave the Anglican Communion? That's a bluff I'd call.

Posted by John B. Chilton | November 27, 2007 1:45 PM

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