Cross purposes: gay bishops, Henry VIII, and the split in the Episcopal Church.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed
• Position: Going to Heaven - Book review

Going to Heaven By Elizabeth Adams $14.95, Soft Skull Press

To people outside the Episcopal church of the United States of America (ECUSA), the recent saga of internal and external recriminations over the ordination of Gene Robinson, an openly and non-celibate gay priest, as bishop of New Hampshire, is usually understood in the familiar secular language of liberalism and conservatism, of progress and tradition, and of moralism and relativism, with observers taking sides on the basis of their own political or cultural views. Non-Episcopalian U.S. conservatives, in particular, have made great hay over the international reaction among the broader Anglican Communion to the lopsided approval of Robinson's ordination by Episcopal bishops, treating it as another example of the self-destruction of mainstream Protestants in the thrall of secular liberalism or radicalism. They derive special delight from the "irony" that Third World Anglican leaders, presumably the favorites of liberals on political matters, have led the charge against the alleged apostasy of American "moral relativists."

Within the ECUSA (of which I am a member), it all looks very different. Robinson's ordination has to be understood in terms of the long-standing tolerance of diversity among varying regional and local churches, reinforced by American Anglicans' practice of electing bishops from the ground up. And in a broader sense, many Episcopalians view the whole conflict as another incident in Anglicanism's complex history as a via media (or middle way) between the Catholic Church and evangelical Protestant denominations. This history dates all the way back to the Anglican Church's founding under Henry VIII and his Tudor heirs. It has involved a centuries-old tension within Anglicanism between those who have wished to keep the church's rites and theology closer to Rome--the Anglo-Catholics--and those who have wanted the church to pattern itself upon evangelical Protestant churches.

It's no secret that most if not all self-conscious Anglo-Catholics seem relatively tolerant about gay or lesbian priests or bishops, in line with their emphasis on liturgy and their non-literalist approach to Scripture. By the same token, it's no accident that the hostility to Bishop Robinson, and to any formal tolerance of active homosexuality, is strongest among self-conscious evangelicals who increasingly insist on a literalist interpretation of scriptural condemnations of homosexuality.

The big...