Are there Episcopalians in foxholes? What in Heaven's name is happening to the Episcopal Church?

National Review, July 29, 1991 by Richard Brookhiser, William Oddie

ARE THERE EPISCOPALIANS IN FOXHOLES?

What in Heaven's name is happening to the Episcopal Church? Listening to Bishop Spong, and looking through the new Prayer Book, one might wonder how much Heaven has to do with it.

The Right Reverend John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark, may be the most famous Episcopalian in America outside of the Bush family, so when I found that he was to preach an Easter sermon in a church in his diocese, I went to listen. The church proved to be a small, postwar brick building in a medium-rent residential neighborhood. This was the first surprise, for we too often associate Episcopalians with the robber-baron power churches of the big cities or the hunt country. This was not a seventy-year-old structure trying to look seven hundred years old. Hence, it was typical, not stereotypical. When you drive along the back roads of America and see the pale blue and white metal signs with the cross of St. George and the message, "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You," this, in most cases, is the kind of church doing the welcoming.

The second surprise was Bishop Spong himself. Bishop Spong is famous for being a political and ecclesiastical windmill. If there is a breeze, it puffs his sails. Bishop Spong has denied the Virgin Birth and forsworn the right to preach to Buddhists or Moslems; he has ordained active homosexuals, and described St. Paul as a repressed one. The notion that all this represents mere trendiness is untrue: the bishop has a definite theology, of which more later; from it, all his headlines logically flow. But neither the theology nor the newsbreaks were on view Easter morning.

He spoke with a mild form of a mild Southern accent (he was born in North Carolina; his mother was a fundamentalist). For the most part, his message was one that was probably being delivered in half the churches in America that morning, and that is probably 19 centuries old: he was arguing the Resurrection's uniqueness from the change it wrought in the behavior of the disciples. "What happened on Easter that was strong enough to make them strong enough to die before they would again deny this Jesus? What does it take to turn cowards into heroes? I don't know that anyone can tell you exactly what happened on that day, but it was powerful and life-changing. . . . In the twentieth century, Easter calls you to go beyond the limits of human experience, to find the power of the experience that changed human history." Then a confirmation, communion, a hymn, and so home.

That one agnostic sentence (I don't know that anyone can tell you exactly what happened) was really the only time he tipped his hand. You had to be following the thread carefully to notice where it unraveled.

The Episcopal Church has been less able to hide its unravelment. In 1960, it had more than 3.25 million baptized members, and a contemporary reference book declared that "the recent pace" of half a million new members per decade "shows no sign of slowing down." By 1970, membership still stood at just over 3.25 million. By 1980, it was under 2.8 million. By 1989, the last year for which figures are available, it had sunk below 2.5 million. Today the flacks at Episcopal headquarters are happy if the pace of decay shows signs of slowing down.

The Episcopalians are not the only faltering church in the Anglican Communion. The Church of England draws little more than a million people to church on Sundays--fewer than their countrymen who go to Catholic Mass. Englishmen increasingly bypass the national church to hatch, match, and dispatch; from 1960 to 1982, the number of infant baptisms dropped by over a third. As Philip Larkin wondered, "When churches fall completely out of use/What shall we turn them into?"

This April, the Church of England made a bid to avoid Larkin's question by enthroning George Carey, Bishop of Bath and Wells, as the 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury. A teenage convert to Christianity, the 55-year-old Carey is a firm evangelical, who knows exactly what happened on Easter: "I believe that Jesus was crucified, buried, and that His cold, dead body was raised alive by God." He also believes that the most divisive issue facing the Church of England--the ordination of women, a step the Episcopal Church endorsed in 1976--must be decided in favor of ordination. In a Reader's Digest interview before his enthronement, he went so far as to call resistance to ordination "a most serious heresy." Since the remark implies that his 102 predecessors were heretics, Carey quickly apologized for his language--though not for his convictions. If that shot from the lip is an indication, Carey's primacy, which will last into the next millennium, may only replace stagnancy with turbulence.

When placed in its social context the Church of England's debility is not surprising. The general level of religious practice in Britain is low, as it is throughout the industrial Western world. That fact cannot explain the state of the Episcopal Church, however, for, as survey after survey shows, the United States bucks the secular trend. There are exceptions within the exception, of course: American churches that languish, even as others hold their own, or thrive. Why is the Episcopal Church among the basket cases?