The new head of the Episcopal Church is a trained marine biologist. The Episcopal Church is tearing itself apart. This is not a coincidence.
Katherine Jefferts-Schori used to study squid for a living. (Hey PZ, she's one of you!) But somewhere along the way, she succumbed to temptation and left her scientific exploration in favor of a more spiritual journey. Last year, she became the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, which to those unfamiliar with American ways of worship, is what the Anglican Church calls itself in the U.S.
She is not your typical Protestant. She's the first woman to get the top job, she's a reformer and she wants to take her congregation places it has never gone before -- ordaining more gays and women, for instance. This is not going down well in places like Virginia. According to Laurie Goldstein of the New York Times, there's a lot of unhappy Episcopalians in Virginia:
If all eight Virginia churches vote to separate, the Diocese of Virginia, the largest Episcopal diocese in the country, will lose about 10 percent of its 90,000 members. In addition, four churches in Virginia have already voted to secede, and two more are expected to vote soon, said Patrick N. Getlein, secretary of the diocese.
Two weeks ago, the entire diocese in San Joaquin, Calif., voted to sever its ties with the Episcopal Church, a decision it would have to confirm in a second vote next year. Six or more American dioceses say they are considering such a move.
And so on and so forth. To repeat, the fact that the new head of the EC is a former biologist, one who was actually doing quite well her chosen field, is very much part of the problem. Some elements within Christianity are trying very hard to play catch up with the modern world. Others are working just as hard to pull it back into the dark ages. My question for Jefferts-Schori is, why bother?
Here is the new No. 1 bishop, in her own words:
The vast preponderance of scientific evidence, including geology, paleontology, archaeology, genetics and natural history, indicates that Darwin was in large part correct in his original hypothesis.
I simply find it a rejection of the goodness of God's gifts to say that all of this evidence is to be refused because it does not seem to accord with a literal reading of one of the stories in Genesis. Making any kind of faith decision is based on accumulating the best evidence one can find -- what one's senses and reason indicate, what the rest of the community has believed over time, and what the community judges most accurate today.
That is not to say that the tradition or community understanding is always correct, as we might note in the aftermath of Galileo's discoveries. When the various sources of authority seem to be in tension, we must use all our rational and spiritual faculties to discern the direction in which a preponderance of the evidence points. To do otherwise is to repudiate the very gifts God has given us.
All of which sounds nice enough. Gotta love that dedication to following the evidence wherever it leads. But the logical end of this line of reasoning, as Darwin himself discovered, is a rejection of revealed wisdom itself. And I suspect that a lot of Episcopalians are suspicious not just of someone who embraces rather than condemns homosexuals into the fold, but of a scientist -- a Darwinist -- leading them in prayer. Where will she lead them?
One of Canada's best religious writers, Tom Harpur, followed the opposite path to Jefferts-Schori. He used to be an Anglican priest in Ontario, before becoming religion editor at the Toronto Star. At first his columns were conventional tributes to the power of faith, but Harpur's also a Rhodes scholar, and eventually his intellectual curiosity got the better of him and his readers were treated to a years-long conversion to something akin to agnosticism. His latest book is "The Pagan Christ, in which, according to his website,
he digs deep into the origins of Christianity and how the early Christian church covered up all attempts to reveal the Bible as myth.
What began as a universal belief system has become a ritualistic institution headed by ultraconservative literalists. As he reconsiders a lifetime of worship and study, Harpur reveals a cosmic faith built on these truths that the modern church has renounced. His message is clear: our blind faith in literalism is killing Christianity. Only with a return to an inclusive religion where Christ lives within each of us will we gain a true understanding of who we are and who we are intended to become.
It is will be interesting to see how successful Jefferts-Schori will be as she tries to hold together her flock while still championing the power of reason. On the one hand, a scientist leading one of the country's largest churches could be seen as a good thing. But ambiguous wave function of cognitive dissonance will eventually collapse under scrutiny. And I think there are many Episcopalians out there who know it.
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I grew up in the Episcopal Church, and back in the 1950s one of our priests was a nuclear physicists (Dr William G Pollard). Episcopalians are pretty good at that science stuff. It's the gay that's making those bigots in Virginia leave ... they're the spiritual cousins of those who started gibbering when women were ordained. Straight Southern whites, mostly men ... they get scared so easily.
I was about to say the same as The Ridger. Science has never been a problem for the Episcopal church to my knowledge, and in fact the Church was the second (right behind the Catholics under JP2) to re-iterate a commitment to science as knowledge and to evolution (in a vaguely theistic-evolution interpretation - much like JP2, the assertion is that God creates the individual soul; this is, of course, an easy cop-out since the "soul" is such a vague entity as to not even be scientifically definable, much less testable).
Really, this all comes down to "morality", bigotry, and community "standards".
The Episcopal church is generally a moderate one bouncing between somewhat-liberal and somewhat-conservative directions but generally staying the course with the movement of the nation as a whole. Generally, most Episcopalians are apathetic about politics. That the churches in question got 92 and 90 %s voting to leave implies to me that most of the people who would have voted to stay left those churches already just because the vote idea was even proposed in the first place.
It's not like there's a shortage. There's at least 30 Episcopal/Anglican churches in Fairfax/Alexandria/Arlington, most within 5 miles of another, some much closer. The Falls Church has 4 within 3 miles (Arlington and Annandale); Truro has 3 within 3 miles Fairfax and Burke.
Liberals and moderates likely had already left those two large conservative churches and moved to nearby ones, and in most cases, they did so years ago, long before the gay bishop problem ever showed up. Similarly, conservatives have left moderate churches in the area continuously over the years, often trying to turn a new church project like St. Peters in the Woods (Burke) or Potomac Falls (Sterling) into more conservative directions while their membership numbers are just starting out. If those efforts fail (as in St. Peters in the Woods), they end up just moving on to the conservative churches of Truro, Falls Church, or Apostles (which is voting on this issue as well) anyways.
In the case of Potomac Falls, a splinter from Sterling's first Episcopal Church (and still residing in an elementary school as most churches do in their early years), it appears they've succeeded.
In effect, they formed their conservative majority in those places out of dissatisfaction with being the minority anywhere else they went. The split was inevitable; that it was a gay bishop that was the final straw is almost a foot note in the politics of the church.
Disclaimer: I came from one of those more liberal churches, Good Shepherd, Burke, which is the place where current VA Suffragan Bishop David C Jones (a signatory of The Clergy Project) was Rector for over 20 years.
Isn't it wonderful how religion brings people together?