In 1963, the first large-scale study of religion was undertaken by Charles Glock and Rodney Stark. What they found was a “New Denominationalism,” a fragmentation of the Protestant community. At issue were the core Christian beliefs: many were openly questioning “whether or not there is a God of the sort it makes any sense to worship” and “whether or not Jesus was merely a man.” It was clear, even then, that the majority of those who belonged to the United Church of Christ had given up their Christian beliefs. 29 Fast-forward to 2008 and it is not surprising that Barack Obama’s religious tutor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, belonged to this church. He is the kind of clergyman one would expect from a congregation of secularists.
In the 1960s, secularism had invaded the seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention as well. It was a time when professors were teaching that Lazarus wasn’t really dead—he simply fainted. No wonder when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, the Southern Baptist Convention praised it. It was not until 1978, when a Texas judge named Paul Pressler joined with two biblical writers, Paige Patterson and Bill Powell, that the effort to reclaim the Southern Baptist Convention began in earnest. 30 It has, of course, rebounded nicely, and that’s because the liberal saboteurs were shown the gate.
Why do they stay if they no longer believe? Why do they continue to corrupt the divinity schools if they don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus? Disillusionment? Anger? Reprisal? Nihilism? All are explanatory variables, but there is something else going on as well: they have a comfortable lifestyle and they know that if they check out, few would be interested in hiring them. Think of it. A religion teacher who is bored with teaching can always pursue another ministry within his congregation, but a religion teacher who no longer believes in God is homeless. So they park themselves in academia, home to many other unhappy campers. If they had any integrity they’d do the manly thing and leave. But they don’t.
What many of these former believers are doing is worse than those who are guilty of false advertising: what they are doing is cruel. What other word can be used to describe a Unitarian minister who has lost the faith and yet continues to pose as a hospital chaplain servicing the sick and dying of another religion? It did not matter to her that her patients “longed for greater assurance of an afterlife.” What mattered is that she cared. Unfortunately for her patients, she didn’t care enough to tell her boss that she no longer had the resources to deliver the expected services. 31
This Unitarian hospital chaplain is not an anomaly within her own ranks. For Unitarians, belief in God is optional. Indeed, this is one religion where it makes no sense to speak of the faithful since there is no common faith. Jesus, the Trinity, the Apostles Creed, the Virgin Mary, and other Christian beliefs are not what unites Unitarians. Reverend Barbara Wells, a Unitarian minister, opines that what unites them is the “message.” And that message is experiential: “They come to our church and they cry or they have that aha experience.” 32 Aha. But why do they come to church to cry when they could do it at home?
This is perplexing for Unitarians who actually do believe in God, men like David Burton and Dean Fisher. They are trying to introduce God to their colleagues, but it’s a tough sell. According to Burton, “at least half of Unitarians are now atheists.” Which leads him to say that “an atheistic church really is an oxymoron,” a conclusion that even those who come to church to cry cannot reasonably reject. 33 Indeed, the Unitarian crackup is so far along that in 2003 the First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn literally “celebrated” (their word) the Roe decision that legalized abortion on demand. 34
The following year, some Unitarians were celebrating free love. The Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory was established to promote “the philosophy and practice of loving or relating intimately to more than one other person at a time with honesty and integrity.” As Sally Amsbury of Oakland put it, “polyamory is never having to say you’ve broken up.” Sally should know: her sex life includes her husband and two “other significant others.” So popular is this form of debauchery that “other significant others” are fondly known as OSOs. In any event, when a Boston spokesman for the Association of Unitarian Universalists was asked about all this, he said that the views of the polyamorists are not necessarily endorsed by the denomination’s board of trustees. 35 Which means they probably are.
While it may be easy to dismiss Unitarians as a relatively small and ineffectual group, the same cannot be said of Episcopalians. Although they have lost a lot of members—to the point where there are more Muslims than Episcopalians in the United States—they still command the attention of all Protestants, as well as those who belong to other faiths. But unless they change course, they will go the way of the Unitarians.
The liberal Episcopalian seminaries have been devastated. In 2008, plans to eliminate the Master of Divinity program at the Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, were announced; faculty contracts were discontinued in 2009. At about the same time, the Rochester, New York, satellite of Bexley Hall Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, said it had to close, and the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had to sell its seven buildings to nearby Lesley University for $33.5 million just to stabilize its finances. Things will only get worse under Rev. Katherine Ragsdale: before she took over as president of the Cambridge school in July 2009, she wrote a piece saying “abortion is a blessing.” 36 Overall, the Episcopal seminary system declined by 25 percent between 2005 and 2008, with no end in sight. 37 Things are so desperate that men are being ordained who have never been to seminary. 38
It may be an exaggeration to say that heresy has been mainstreamed in the Episcopalian Church, but the fact that it is a debatable proposition suggests how far standards have fallen. No institution can survive when termites are welcomed, but this is one lesson the elite in the Episcopalian Church have yet to learn.
Heresy Celebrated
When Bishop James Pike bragged that the “Church’s classical way of stating what is represented by the doctrine of the Trinity is… not essential to the Christian faith,” the only penalty he endured was a silly admonition that he should “consider himself censured.” 39 This was a joke, given that Pike, who was dean of St. John the Divine in New York City, was hailed as a hero by some of his fellow bishops. Nothing could tarnish his status—not his alcoholism, his three marriages, or his multiple affairs. Even his role in leading Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State against John F. Kennedy—because the Massachusetts senator was a Catholic—failed to tarnish his image.
What seemed to have mattered more to Pike was that he was given celebrity status by New York’s secular elite. Indeed, he was just the kind of clergyman that those who believe in nothing adore: Pike rejected the Trinity and original sin, and he scoffed at the Virgin Birth. Not surprisingly, he appeared on the cover of Time, and it was no small wonder that he was praised for being “refreshing,” “outspoken,” and “brilliant.” 40 No one doubts that he had an effect. “Sometime after the 1960s,” observes Jody Bottum, “everyone in the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church became Bishop Pike—with the perverse effect that Pike’s ostensible rebellion turned, at last, into the norm.” 41 And it’s been downhill ever since.
Since the sixteenth century, Episcopalians have used the Book of Common Prayer as their guiding light. But when the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States convened in 1976, the prayer book was bashed for being too punitive, too preoccupied with “sin.” Even though the Book of Common Prayer was not a formal catechism, it still represented orthodoxy, and it was precisely because it did so that dissident bishops hated it. Wild times ensued: after witnessing the slap on the wrist given to Pike for his heresy and the equally lame response to three retired bishops who illegitimately ordained female priests, the elite guard pushed the feminist envelope by canonizing the ordination of women. Bishop Paul Moore of New York took notice and a year later ordained a practicing lesbian. After a brief uproar, he apologized, but in the end h
e got what the dissidents wanted: the issue of ordaining openly gay persons was now on the table.
After Bishop Pike faded from the news, the Right Reverend John Spong, bishop of Newark, picked up where Pike left off. It’s not clear what Christian teaching, if any, Spong believes in, but at any rate we do know that the retired bishop’s contribution to the decline of the Episcopal Church is legion. Any clergyman who could write a book titled Why Christianity Must Change or Die calling on Christians to reject Christianity in order to save it belongs in the books Guinness World Records or Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
If we can’t be sure what Spong believes, we can be certain what he doesn’t believe. We know, for example, that he does not believe that God is a supernatural being; he rejects Jesus as the earthly incarnation of God; he denies that Jesus performed miracles; he labels the Virgin Birth pure mythology; he derides the Easter celebration of Jesus rising from the dead; he finds it implausible to believe that Jesus ascended into heaven; and, for good measure, he thinks it ludicrous that the Bible is the word of God. Spong posted his litany of nonbeliefs on the Internet, much to the delight of radical secularists. Dave Shiflett gets it right when he says that Spong was “tolerated and indeed celebrated by his colleagues, and in the media, because he could be counted on for excellent quotations delivered with the certitude he found odious in his theological opponents.” 42 The damage he did is not a matter of dispute. Between 1972 and 2005, the Episcopal Diocese of Newark lost nearly 24,000 congregants, or 46 percent of its membership; this was nearly three times the average decline in the Episcopal Church nationwide. 43
While Pike and Spong are theological deviants, they are hardly alone. In 1991, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church defeated a resolution that would have prohibited its clergy from practicing adultery. Three years later, 71 bishops said they would ordain practicing homosexuals and bless gay unions, even though church policy did not yet sanction such things. At about the same time, Bishop Spong publicly declared St. Paul to be a repressed and frustrated homosexual. 44 And while all this was going on, Gene Robinson, a man who dumped his wife and children to live with another man, was ordained a bishop. He “got married” in 2008 to his pal, boasting, “I always wanted to be a June bride.” 45 Unconventionally, the couple decided against a wedding cake and took only two days to enjoy their honeymoon. Perhaps that’s because they had been going together for 20 years. 46
When Robinson was ordained in 2003, I asked a staff member to prepare a report on how this was being received on the editorial pages of the nation’s major newspapers. The tally showed there were 14 editorials that strongly praised the decision; five said it was the business of the Episcopal Church to decide; and two were opposed. No newspaper loved it more than the Los Angeles Times.
Within the Episcopal Church, Robinson’s ordination split the bishops. Those bishops who support him are so upset with their colleagues who are opposed to him that many refuse to take Holy Communion with their peers at House of Bishops meetings in the United States. 47 Now, when the Eucharist is rejected by the clergy as a means of protest, there is no greater testimony to the collapse of faith in the Episcopalian community than this. Their nihilism is unbounded.
Ken Woodward, a veteran contributor to Newsweek, says that among Episcopalians, it is estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of the clergy is gay or lesbian in dioceses such as New York and San Francisco. “In these and other cities,” Woodward writes, “it is not at all difficult to find congregations in which everyone on one side of the Communion rail is gay while the folks in the pews are split between homosexuals and heterosexuals.” So unusual is the situation that Woodward was told by a woman priest that “If my husband needed counseling from a priest, he’d be hard-put to find one that was neither a woman or a gay man.” 48 That so many gays should be found in a church that allows the clergy to marry suggests that it is not celibacy per se that accounts for the large number of gay priests in the Catholic Church.
By the summer of 2006, the Episcopal Church was spinning out of control. “Propelling the Episcopal Church in the United States closer to a possible schism with the global Anglican Communion,” reported the New York Times, “the Episcopal Diocese of Newark nominated a gay priest on Wednesday as one of four men to be considered for bishop.” What made this such an in-your-face move was the fact that the nominations came the day after the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of Anglicans the world over, introduced a measure that would require the Episcopal Church to either renounce gay bishops and the blessings of gay unions or forfeit their membership in the Anglican Communion. 49 But it’s too late to simply issue a warning: the nutty elite in America is forcing a schism.
In 2008, matters came to a head. Angered over the embrace of practicing homosexuals in their ranks, Anglican conservatives, led by African archbishops, declared they would segregate themselves from their secular-minded colleagues. They maintained, quite reasonably, that too many Anglicans in the United States and Europe were following a “false gospel” that plays fast and loose with Scripture. So they voted to form a new power bloc within the Anglican community. 50
In 2009, the chasm in the Episcopal Church grew wider. The Anglican Church in North America is the name of the new rival denomination headed by Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan. “We’re going through Reformation times, and in Reformation times things aren’t neat and clean,” Duncan said. 51 The dioceses of San Joaquin, California; Quincy, Illinois; Fort Worth, Texas; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are the core members of the new province. The gay rights agenda had gotten too out of hand for the religious conservatives to handle.
As a Catholic, it is none of my business what the Episcopal Church does, but I do sympathize with the legions of faithful Episcopalians who want their church back. The faithful do not deserve to have their religion sabotaged by elitists who are out to upend the church, and this is as true among Catholics as it is Protestants. Indeed, it is one of the reasons why an uncommon alliance of traditionalists across faith communities is happening. We’re all fed up with the mutineers on board.
My reservations about questioning the internal decisions made by another religion did not, however, stop me from protesting an obscene depiction of Our Blessed Mother at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. No one has a right to blaspheme the mother of Jesus, and it is not an internal matter when it happens publicly. My exchange with the Right Reverend Mark S. Sisk, Bishop of New York, provides good insight into the thinking of the Episcopalian elite.
My involvement began when I learned that Bishop Sisk had received a complaint from someone about the work of Diane Victor; her piece The Eight Marys was part of the Season South Africa exhibit at the cathedral. The complainant described Victor’s work as follows: “Blood cascading from between her legs, as a wire hanger dangled from her left hand. Another scene had a dog precariously positioned under her raised skirt. Mary then appears as a wash woman with clothespins attached to her naked torso. One final image is a Pieta representation where both are nude and Jesus is lying across Mary’s lap with his penis intentionally and prominently as a focal point.” In response to this complaint, Bishop Sisk said that the work did not violate the cathedral’s criteria. Explicitly, he said that it was not deemed “blasphemous or demeaning to religion.”
I reiterated all this in my letter of February 3, 2005, to Bishop Sisk, saying, “I have one question for you: Would you object if an artist portrayed your own mother the way the Virgin Mary was shown in this exhibit?” I then told him I would share his response with the Catholic community. A month later, I received a letter from Thomas P. Miller, who said he was writing on behalf of Bishop Sisk. It was a beauty.
Miller said that “the artist’s figures are not meant to be representations of the Holy Mother.” So what are they? “They are self-portraits in reference to the artist’s own struggle as a woman to come to terms with traditional religious iconography,” he said. The art, he stressed, was supposed to express “t
he dynamic spirit of a democratic South Africa.” Somehow I managed to miss that point.
Miller was a master at dishing out the baloney. Just read this paragraph and decide for yourself: “Diane Victor’s personal struggle as an artist and as a woman may be difficult to look at, but that very difficulty might serve to remind us of our call to be stewards of divine mercy in a deference to God’s judgment. In a Cathedral filled with beautiful and transcendent images, we are reminded that, like Jesus and in Christ’s name, we are called to reach out beyond our comfort to the unlovely and unloved. Mary’s Song promises that God looks with favor on the lowly, who will be lifted up, as the proud will be scattered and the powerful brought down. In this light, the Victor portraits reach for Mary’s advocacy and offer hope even for what is most disturbing among us.” Whew!
Why is it that these deranged artists are always struggling? And what explains why she is struggling as a woman? Is it a struggle for her to accept her sex? If so, she needs treatment, something any man of the cloth who purports to be troubled by the “unlovely” should have counseled. As for this business about “the Victor portraits… offer hope even for what is most disturbing among us,” someone needs to tell this struggling artist that nothing is more disturbing than her own work.
I’ve deliberately saved the best for last. After being told that I didn’t quite understand Victor’s masterpiece, I was then congratulated: “Your questioning of ‘The Eight Marys’ has helped us to think more incisively about this important mission and reminded us of the importance of critical dialogue in the arts as well as religion.” 52
A House Divided
The saboteurs in the Protestant community have succeeded to such an extent that it makes no sociological sense to refer to this constellation of denominations as a community. The difference between the mainline denominations and evangelicals, for example, is so profound that the latter have more in common with Roman Catholic traditionalists and Orthodox Jews than they do with the mainliners. This was underscored in 2006 by a huge survey of religion undertaken by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion and the university’s department of sociology.
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