There is something by now familiar, even reassuring, about what happens in my church every third summer. I am an Episcopalian, and I can reliably look forward to popular news coverage of the church’s General Convention — a legislative body made up of a House of Bishops and a lay House of Deputies — latest decision on issues of the connection between sexuality and the sacraments. This week was no different, and in the New York Times on Sunday, Ross Douthat summarized the conservative view of my troubled church with a column headlined “Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?” It is not hard to figure out the conclusion Douthat arrives at in his column, which includes this pronouncement: “the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t get from a purely secular liberalism.” The occasion for this round of Episcopal debate is the passage of an optional rite to bless same-sex unions. Dioceses (rather like states within the communion) can choose whether to allow priests to perform the rite. It that sense, the vote fits well within a religious tradition that was forged amid political and theological conflict over the nature of power in the 16th century. Anglicanism has always been about the attempt — sometimes successful, sometimes less so — to find a via media, or middle way, between stricter sacramentalism of Roman Catholicism and stricter scriptural literalism of other Protestant denominations. Anglicanism is driven in large measure by the same principle that Walter Bagehot identified as essential to the British constitution: the enduring effort to “muddle through.” (MORE: Have We Evolved To Be Religious?) The question of the hour is whether the Episcopal Church can continue to muddle into a sixth century, or whether falling levels of membership suggest inevitable decline. Critics such as Douthat link the church’s progressive stand on sexuality — the consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and now the vote on the same-sex rite — to its troubled numbers. “It still has priests and bishops,![]()
