Primates and Politics

Earlier today, the Episcopal Church (the offshoot of the Church of England in America), meeting in its triennial general convention, elected the Bishop of Nevada to be the Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church USA, to serve for nine years. Three years ago, the church made history, and many enemies, by electing an openly gay man in a committed relationship, Gene Robinson, to be the Bishop of New Hampshire. The Nevada Bishop's sexuality is not the issue. It's her sex. Jeffert Schori becomes the first female primate in the Anglican communion. Thirty years ago, the Episcopal church began ordaining women. Today, the Anglican churches in Canada, USA, and New Zealand ordain women as priests and bishops.

Conservatives within the church hate this. For those, this is the theological equivalent of throwing gas on an open flame. It may seem a trivial issue to most, in part because mainline protestant churches are not sexy and rarely on TV. Imagine if the Catholics made a woman pope. That's how big this is. It exposes a deep cultural chasm.

It also makes you reflect on what it means that, outside of reform Jews and a few Christian churches, women are systematically shut out of religious authority in virtually every place in the world. Women's liberation in the late 20th century was just the beginning. Steps, such as that taken by my fellow Christians at the general convention in Ohio, part of the journey for women to be treated as full human beings, are always met by anger, fear, and hatred from conservatives. That hatred, fear, and anger is what defines them as conservative, as I see it. Expect to see that anger spill over the airwaves and the net in the coming days and weeks.

I suppose the issue I want to raise is that the culture wars in America are not, as Pat Buchanan described them, between secular humanists on the one hand, and the faithful and traditionalists on the other. Rather, there are two very different views of humanity in contest, with religion and atheism on both sides, although in varying proportions. Indeed, the issue for me is that while religious fundamentalists dominate the latter, the truth is that the divide is not religious/secular, but liberal/reactionary. Progressives, both religious and secular, believe in human rights, peace, inclusion, tolerance, and speaking truth to power. Reactionaries believe in order, tradition, and the rightness of existing power relationships. I hope all liberals, including many among the Citizens hostile to religion, might look on this new Primate (yes, it's a funny name) and appreciate anew that the problems we face as society will not be solved by attacking and destroying religion -- ask the Chinese or Russians, but by confronting tyranny.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it "When we look at modern man we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance, we've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the earth as brothers and sisters."