Episcopal Dissidents, African Allies: The Anglican Communion and

519 Pages·2006·1.1 MB·English

Episcopal Dissidents, African Allies:
The Anglican Communion and the Globalization of Dissent
Dissertation written by Dr. Miranda K. Hassett
[email protected]
For the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
May 2004
Please do not cite in print without author’s consent.
A revised and shortened version of this text is under contract for publication
with Princeton University Press.
Reproduced online through http://anglicanhistory.org, January 2006.
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Abstract
In recent years, conservative dissidents within the Episcopal Church in the United States
have felt alienated by the Episcopal Church’s liberal policies, especially acceptance of
homosexuality. In response, these Episcopal dissidents have increasingly sought and received
help and support from Anglican bishops in the global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America).
In this dissertation, the development and dynamics of these transnational Anglican alliances are
examined anthropologically, on the basis of ethnographic research with Anglican communities
involved in such relationships in Uganda and the United States. These relationships are often
explained, by both supporters and critics, through narratives of increased global conflict between
liberal Northern Christianity and conservative Southern Christianity (with which conservative
Northerners are said to have a natural affinity). This work questions such narratives, first, by
presenting the situations, concerns, and motives of the Northern and Southern Anglicans
involved and calling into question assumptions of homogenous Southern conservatism or natural
affinities. Secondly, this work demonstrates that these alliances are the outcome of cooperative
globalizing endeavors undertaken beginning in the mid-1990s by Episcopal conservative
dissidents and a number of sympathetic Southern leaders. These allies have globalized Episcopal
conflicts by framing them in terms of discourses of Anglican globalism, and pursuing projects of
global intervention in the Episcopal Church, such as placing dissident Episcopal parishes under
the authority of African bishops. Chapter topics include the history and character of the Church
of Uganda and the Episcopal Church; the international meetings organized by conservative
Episcopalians to develop relations with Southern allies in preparation for the 1998 meeting of all
the world’s Anglican bishops; and the outcomes of that meeting, especially the passage of a non-
binding resolution affirming the conservative view on homosexuality. Subsequent chapters
examine the development of a conservative globalist vision of the Anglican Communion united
through networks of mutual moral accountability, and the increase in relationships linking
disaffected American conservatives with Southern bishops. Discourses about the characteristics
of Northern and Southern Christianity are analyzed, as are critics’ accusations concerning
monetary influences in these North/South alliances. The conclusion examines the growing
currency in public discourse of ideas about North/South Christian conflict, and questions such
ideas in light of the evidence presented here.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction 4
Chapter 2: Renewal and Conflict 31
Chapter 3: Taking Africa Seriously 77
Chapter 4: Lambeth 1998: Global South Rising 131
Chapter 5: From African/Asian Juggernaut
To Global Orthodox Majority 183
Chapter 6: More than Just Companions 231
Chapter 7: Who Wants to be in the Ugandan Communion? 300
Chapter 8: Integrity for Sale? 363
Chapter 9: The Next Anglicanism? 425
References Cited 460
Notes 490
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
A crisis in global Anglicanism?
In the autumn of 2003, as I was finishing my first draft of my dissertation, aspects of my
dissertation topic seemed to be in the news all around me. Whenever I told anyone–not just
clergy, not even just Episcopalians, but anyone–what I was writing on, he or she would nod and
say, “Oh, yes, I’ve been hearing about all that.” Inter-Anglican conflict and rumors of schism
were dominant themes in news sources related to the Episcopal Church in the United States, and
the worldwide Anglican Communion–the church body of which the Episcopal Church is the
American province. Even the secular press gave these conflicts considerable attention, during the
summer and fall of 2003. News agencies like NPR and the New York Times frequently carried
the latest Anglican news.
The first event that brought the Episcopal Church into the national spotlight to this
unprecedented degree was the ‘gay bishop’ controversy. At the Episcopal Church’s national
convention in August, a majority of the bishops and delegates confirmed Gene Robinson, an
openly-gay and partnered Episcopal priest, as bishop-elect of the diocese (or regional
jurisdiction) of New Hampshire. The Episcopal Church thus became the first mainline
denomination to publicly accept a partnered gay person in a high leadership position. The
prominence of the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion in the news continued with the
unfolding of reactions to Robinson’s election. Nearly three thousand conservative Episcopalians
who oppose acceptance of homosexuality in the church met in Texas in early October to discuss
how to proceed, given that they now regard the Episcopal Church as hopelessly separated from
Scriptural truth and morality. At the same time, the Archbishop of Canterbury, England, as
official head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, called a conference for the head bishops of
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the world’s 38 Anglican national or regional churches. The purpose of this conference was to
decide on an international response to the Episcopal Church’s controversial move–a response
which Episcopal conservatives hoped would require the Episcopal Church to turn away from
acceptance of homosexuality, or else be expelled from the worldwide Communion of Anglican
churches.
As the implications of Robinson’s election and consecration continued to unfold, many
American Episcopalians and observers shared a sense that a moment of global crisis has arrived
in the Episcopal Church. The language surrounding all these meetings has emphasized that what
is at stake is not merely the peace and unity of one of the Anglican Communion’s member
churches, the Episcopal Church. What is at stake, instead, is the shape and character of the entire
worldwide Anglican Communion. Conservative Episcopalian leaders speaking at the Texas
meeting argued that the Episcopal Church has abandoned “the Global Anglican Tradition,” and
called for “a dramatic realignment of Anglicanism reaching both north and south of ECUSA,”
separating the “archbishops of the dynamic Global South and the archbishops of the
disintegrating Old West”(Anderson 2003; Virtue 2003e). Liberals in the church, too, see current
Episcopal Church conflicts in global terms. A piece on the progressive Anglican website
Everyvoice.net stated, “The threat of schism over the election of a gay bishop is like nothing the
Church has ever seen before. The response isn't just larger and more organized. It's also global”
(O’Connor 2003). The secular press, as well, has focused on the global implications of current
struggles in the Episcopal Church. An editorial in the Dallas Morning News, covering the Texas
meeting of conservatives, explained the global dimensions of this intra-Episcopal conflict
clearly: “[Conservatives] may be on the losing end of this particular issue within the Episcopal
Church, but their meeting is worth considering in the context of a worldwide struggle that may
transform Christianity in this century.”
Why has the controversy over Gene Robinson’s election as bishop drawn such a global
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response? Why do conflicts over doctrine and morality in the Episcopal Church attract the
attention and the intervention of Anglican leaders around the world? Past seasons of conflict in
the Episcopal Church’s history have not been ascribed such global significance. For example, in
the late 1970s a number of traditionalist Episcopalians broke away from the Episcopal Church in
response to the church’s revision of the Book of Common Prayer and decision to ordain women
to the priesthood. The dissidents of that era issued no global appeals and received no global
responses. Even as recently as the mid-1990s, such appeals to the wider Anglican world were not
yet among the rhetorical and practical resources of conservative dissidents within the Episcopal
Church. But in the past six years, conservative dissidents in the Episcopal Church have called
repeatedly on the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion to intervene in the Episcopal
Church, by forcing it to change its policies, or replacing it with a more orthodox American
Anglican province. What is more, these American dissidents have found sympathetic and more-
or-less willing allies among the bishops of the worldwide Communion, especially the global
South—Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Visions of global polarization
Current conflicts within the Episcopal Church are widely understood, not merely as internal
divisions to be handled within the United States, but as carrying a global significance that
demands the attention and action of Anglican leaders all over the world. Further, they accept a
particular interpretation of this global import: events in the Episcopal Church are of global
significance because they represent the triumph of the orthodox, zealous Christian South over
weak and degenerate Northern Christianity. Most accounts of recent events in the Episcopal
Church and Anglican Communion presume similar visions of a bifurcated world Christendom,
divided between the global North–Europe and North America in particular–and the global
South.1 Southern Anglicanism (and Christianity overall) is described as ‘dynamic,’ ‘exploding,’
‘aggressively conservative,’ ‘fundamentalist,’ ‘orthodox.’ This rising Southern Christianity
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constitutes the force with which Northern Christians must reckon–what Philip Jenkins calls “the
next Christendom.” Northern Anglicanism (and Christianity overall) is, for its part, characterized
as ‘liberal’, ‘progressive,’ ‘revisionist,’ ‘post-modern,’ ‘disintegrating’—in short, a waning breed
of Christianity, in danger of being either overrun or consigned to isolation and irrelevance.
Northern conservatives describe themselves as essentially ‘opting out’ of Northern Christendom,
on the basis of their presumed greater affinity with orthodox Southern Christians. In the 1980s
and early 1990s, the ‘Culture Wars’ language of orthodox/progressive polarization was often
invoked to name and explain ideological and other conflicts within the Episcopal Church.2
Today, though ‘Culture Wars’-type rhetoric is still often used in Episcopal Church debates, this
vision of societal polarization has been subsumed in a new vision of global moral polarization.
Conservative versus liberal is re-figured as South versus North–and by most accounts, the
South is winning. Both threats by American conservatives to involve Southern Anglican leaders
in disciplining the Episcopal Church, and threats by Southern Anglican leaders to confront the
Episcopal Church, are generally interpreted as signs of the orthodox global South’s
righteous/fundamentalist rebellion against revisionist/ progressive Northern Christian leaders.
Many received Philip Jenkins’ widely-read book and article on the rise of Southern Christianity
(2002) as the perfect description of this trend. The vision and language of ‘global shift,’ of rising
Southern Christendom and worldwide realignment, so pervades talk about and perceptions of
current events in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion that it is difficult to step
back and recall that this interpretation is not inherent to the events themselves. Indeed, the degree
to which this vision of the Anglican Communion now seems natural masks another perspective
from which it appears quite surprising. When American Episcopal conservatives and Southern
Anglican leaders first began to work collaboratively to oppose the Episcopal Church, many
observers expressed perplexity or cynicism at the startling convergence of interests between
these constituencies. American social conservatives, not generally known for their interest in
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including the marginalized, and Southern church leaders, with their sharp criticisms of Northern
culture and morality and demands for greater representation and power, seemed strange
bedfellows indeed.
My own original interest in studying these alliances was motivated in large part by a desire to
understand how these very different constituencies had managed to come together and forge
common positions and goals. Though when I began this work, these alliances still appeared
anomalous rather than obvious to most observers, today the wide circulation of the discourse of
the imminent triumph of conservative Southern Christianity has so naturalized these alliances
between conservative Northerners and Southern Anglicans that many no longer question how
these alliances came about or make sense. Throughout these broader shifts in how these alliances
are seen, however, the central task of my research and writing has remained the same: to develop
and present an account of the development and dynamics of these global inter-Anglican
alliances, and their implications for global-scale debates within the Episcopal Church and the
Anglican Communion. In this dissertation, I offer a critical perspective on the premise that the
Anglican Communion has reached a moment of crisis in North/South relations. I argue that the
globalization of Episcopal Church conflicts is not due to the natural and inevitable rise to global
prominence of a monolithically orthodox and zealous Southern Christian force. Rather, the
global significance ubiquitously ascribed to events in the Episcopal Church today is primarily
due to the cooperative globalizing work of American conservative dissidents and a number of
sympathetic Southern Anglican leaders, from the mid-1990s to the present.
Since 1996, conservative American Episcopalians, alienated from the Episcopal Church, have
strengthened their ties with Southern Anglican leaders and churches, soliciting these leaders’
assistance in their struggles. At the same time, these American conservatives have re-framed
their understanding and talk about Episcopal Church conflicts in terms of the global Anglican
Communion. These groups now see themselves as natural allies of Southern Christians, riding
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the wave of the rise of Southern Christianity to a renewed and realigned global Anglicanism that
reflects their values and convictions. Simultaneously, many Southern Anglican leaders, inspired
by the idea that they might be the vehicles for renewal and reform of the Northern church, have
made common cause with Northern conservatives and come to share their view of world
Christianity divided between apostate North and orthodox South. In this work, I examine the
development of these alliances and their corresponding discourses and ideologies, in order to
offer an account of how the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion have arrived at the
point where conflicts within the Episcopal Church are almost universally perceived and
described as of global significance. In examining this case of Episcopal and Anglican
globalization, I am laying out a history of discursive and concrete projects which, in spite of its
recentness, seems now in danger of being forgotten as current global alliances and visions
become increasingly widespread and naturalized.
This dissertation offers a critical analysis of the processes and projects of globalization
undertaken since the mid-1990s by disaffected American conservative Episcopalians and their
Southern sympathizers and allies. This ‘globalization’ consists of an increased trend towards
describing events in the Episcopal Church as of worldwide relevance, especially in terms of a
particular understanding of the Christian world as bifurcated between Northern and Southern
Christianities. This ‘globalization,’ furthermore, is not merely manifest in descriptions and other
talk, but also in the growing involvement of Anglican leaders from outside the United States in
Episcopal Church conflicts. This globalization consists not merely in the exporting of American
conflicts to the rest of the world, but has involved cooperation and collaboration between
Northern and Southern Anglicans in developing shared identities and agendas which articulate,
in complex but important ways, with the particular concerns, ideas, and situations of Anglicans
in Africa as well as in the United States.3
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Anglican globalization in context
This Anglican/Episcopal globalization has emerged in the context of widespread excitement
around the concept and vocabulary of the global (Tsing 2000:327). Corresponding with the
popularity of global language and the tremendous proliferation of globalisms–Tsing’s term for
“endorsements of the importance of the global”–in contemporary economy, politics, culture and
religion, there has been a proliferation of scholarly interest in the global and globalization (Tsing
2000:330). Gille and O Riain find that there were twenty-nine sociological studies which listed
“globalization” as a keyword between 1985 and 1990, 410 in 1995 alone, and 985 in 1998,
suggesting a dramatic increase in sociological attention to this subject (Gille and O Riain
2002:272). Similar trends could doubtless be tracked in anthropology; Susan Brin Hyatt, in a
review essay on anthropological studies of globalization, remarks, “Based on a partial survey of
current work in anthropology, one might almost be tempted to argue that ‘globalization’ has
become the master trope that now threatens to supplant the bedrock concept so crucial to the
practice of anthropology, ‘culture’” (Hyatt 2001:206 ). Tsing takes this scholarly enthusiasm as
her departure point, arguing that scholars have become too much a part of the phenomenon they
should be studying—that very proliferation of global discourses and projects. She proposes
analytical principles and departure points for a more effective and critical scholarly approaches
to globalization.
The program which Tsing outlines, and which I take up in this work, is perhaps aptly named
by Susan Hyatt in the review essay cited above, which she entitles “Writing Against
Globalization.” Hyatt suggests that we might take cues for a critical approach to globalization
from the ways some anthropologists have questioned the concept of ‘culture.’ She writes,
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