Threat of Anglican Schism Fizzles

[DeSwiss]

Threat of Anglican Schism Fizzles

TIME
Wednesday, Jun. 25, 2008
By DAVID VAN BIEMA

The would-be Anglican rebels gathered with storm clouds brewing around them. But now, even though the conservative Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFcon) has not concluded its meeting in Jerusalem, the secession it threatened to bring to the 78 million-member Anglican Communion looks like a confused bust. This all comes as a bit of surprise to the press, which — with ample encouragement from the Church's right — had been framing GAFcon as a decisive step toward schism in the Anglican Communion, the third biggest global religious fellowship. GAFcon seems to be falling apart on several fronts. First came the venue problems: the conference ping-ponged embarrassingly at the last minute from Jerusalem to Jordan and back to Jerusalem.

Then there was attendance. The clerics at GAFcon were really supposed to sit out the Communion's once-a-decade Lambeth Conference in July. But it turns out several key conservatives did not even show up at GAFcon (or simply made brief appearances) and will go on to the church-wide meeting in Canterbury in July. Meanwhile, conservative Southeast Asian bishops have fallen out with some GAFcon leaders. The conservative conference now seems reduced mostly to Africans and some first-world ideologues, not all of whom are as gung-ho as Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, the meeting's prime mover. Cheered on by several influential U.S. churchmen, Akinola has ridden high for several years as the point man for the ambitions of Anglicanism's populous, conservative "Global South" movement and for widespread outrage at the consecration of openly gay bishop V. Gene Robinson by the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A.

GAFcon's message was scrambled from the get-go. An opening statement by Akinola castigated "apostates" within the Communion and included the firebreathing line, "There is no more any hope, therefore, for a unified Communion." But he subsequently admitted in a speech, "We have no other place to go, nor is it our intention to start another church." Sydney Australia Archbishop Peter Jensen, a rising conservative, told reporters in Jerusalem yesterday that GAFcon "is a coalition of people who would not necessarily work together. Will it work? We don't know." Other speakers have been similarly vague.

Jim Naughton, an outspoken canon with the liberal Episcopalian Diocese of Washington, D.C., had been predicting a GAFcon meltdown for months. He feels that Akinola began losing influence at last year's meeting of Anglican archbishops in Dar es Salaam in February 2007. There Akinola pressed for formal approval of a new, conservative branch of U.S Anglicanism competing with Episcopalianism, a prototype of which he has already created. The move was seen as a harsh slap at the Communion and had the effect of reminding each primate that if schism occurred he too could be subject to such competition on his own turf. "People began to see that and fear," Naughton says.

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[charlie]

1. The sweet sound

of Ahmanson, Scaife, Coors, and Olin's money going right down the toilet. I'd love to hear this tune a whole lot more often.

[wryter2000]

4. Lordy

I didn't know Ahmanson and those others were involved in this. I didn't think they'd even consider the Episcopal church for their machinations.

[charlie]

6. A list of institutions

those authoritarian shit stirrers consider to be outside their purview would be blank. They're the idle rich, trust fund babies with nothing better to do than impose their bent whims on others. They've also been bankrolling efforts to fracture Methodists and Presbyterians.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. I'm convinced that those trust fund babies don't give a damn about homosexuality

What they really hate is the mainstream churches speaking out against the Iraq War, for the environment, and for the needs of the poor and needy over the greed of the rich. However, they couldn't get enough people riled up about those topics, so they've picked up on sexual issues, knowing that the combined forces of men who are conflicted about their own sexuality and traditionally brought-up people who suffer from "future shock" are enough to create quite a lot of turmoil.

Uptightness about sexuality is only the means to winning support for robber baron economics and fascist politics, just as in the political world.

Also, I think that one reason the talk of schism is dying down is that the Third World provinces are realizing that the "wicked" First World provinces are their main financial support.

[charlie]

11. Definitely, I agree

I doubt there's a decadent indulgence most of them aren't already jaded with. There can't be any genuine outrage over ordinary sex from that bunch. But, pollution of God's natural order of the divinely favored with notions of mercy for vulgarians is something worth getting steamed about.

(What really sticks in my craw is that by almost any measure, Ahmanson and Scaife are brattish wastrels. Neither of them has ever generated net income for themselves, ie, held a real job or created a self-sustaining business. Scaife receives such obscene returns on his endowments that he can blow $10-30 million a year on that Pittsburgh rag alone and not put a dent in his lifestyle or his other rightwing projects. Like Dubya, they're not real movers, real visionaries, just spoiled poseurs with the juice to make their capricious fantasies happen. And when these boy-men play at being epochal titans, the rest of us get flattened.)

[CatholicEdHead]

12. I agree, that is also happening in the Catholic Church

where a few rich, conservative Catholics invest in their own media networks and present themselves as official Church mouthpieces.

[CatholicEdHead]

17. ABC.au's Religion Report did a good show on this

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2291093.htm#transcript

There was more than a whiff of anti-colonial grapeshot in what was said in Jerusalem, and it's not entirely clear where GAFCON stands in relation to the Archbishop of Canterbury, now that it's all over. They say they aren't in schism but in the statement they released at the end of the meeting they also state that they 'do not accept that Anglican identity is determined through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury'.

Another telling detail that may help us understand what has really being going on behind GAFCON is that the new movement which has emerged from the meeting intends to be known as the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. That word 'confessing' is the giveaway, because it suggests that this is part of the neo-orthodox Confessing movement which has emerged within a number of Protestant churches in recent years.

The Confessing movement is not to be confused with the Confessing church of Pastor Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer which stood against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. The Confessing movement is a non-denominational movement which h stands against liberalism and modernism.

Ahmanson belongs to a parish at Newport Beach in California, which was among the first breakaway parishes to place itself under the authority of a Ugandan bishop. He's very close to the Chief Executive of the conservative American Anglican Council. He's a member of the secretive Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye , the author of the 'Left Behind' novels, whose membership is a who's who of American neo-conservatives and theo-conservatives, Paul Weyrich, Phillis Schafly, Oliver North, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and James Dobson of Focus on the Family. He also bankrolls the Discovery Institute which is the home of the Intelligent Design movement.


Also:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2292216.htm#transcript

Ahmanson belongs to a parish at Newport Beach in California, which was among the first breakaway parishes to place itself under the authority of a Ugandan bishop. He's very close to the Chief Executive of the conservative American Anglican Council. He's a member of the secretive Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye , the author of the 'Left Behind' novels, whose membership is a who's who of American neo-conservatives and theo-conservatives, Paul Weyrich, Phillis Schafly, Oliver North, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and James Dobson of Focus on the Family. He also bankrolls the Discovery Institute which is the home of the Intelligent Design movement.

Well Jim Naughton is a canon in the Diocese of Washington, D.C. He wrote a very interesting report on all of this called 'Following the Money' that shows how Ahmanson has been bankrolling all of these movements, and the conservative African bishops such as Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria. I asked him to tell us about Howard F. Ahmanson.
....
Jim Naughton: Well he inherited a savings and loan fortune from his father, and at some point, I think in his late teens or early 20s, had an intense religious experience after which he became a Christian Reconstructionist. Now I don't know how familiar that term is to everyone, but it's basically the movement led by a theologian named Rushdoony on the West Coast of the United States, and the notion was that what you wanted to do to achieve a perfect society was to bring back the laws of ancient Israel and make those the laws of your home country.
....
Jim Naughton: Right. And whipping Catholics and children and all that sort of thing. It is pretty scary stuff. And in the mid-1980s Ahmanson said 'What I want to do is bring back the laws of ancient Israel and then have that be the law of the United States of America'. The other interesting thing about him was that he's poured millions of dollars into political campaigns in the United States, and one of the other facts that just kind of caught my attention was that at some point, his views became so well-known and so toxic that Republican political candidates started returning his donations. And one of the things that just really kind of crosses the T's and dots the I's if you will, is that after the incident where candidates started giving him his money back, he and his wife, who used to be a religion reporter for the Orange County newspapers in California, they sat down and did a lengthy interview with the Orange County newspaper, and in that interview he was asked about his opinion on homosexuals, and he said (and this was him trying to soften his image) he said he no longer thought it was necessary to stone homosexuals but that if you came upon a society that was living by the laws of ancient Israel, where they did stone homosexuals, you couldn't say that that was necessarily immoral. And that was the softening of his view.....

[JerseygirlCT]

8. LOL. Exactly! We should throw in some

big lawsuit losses here in the states, too. That would do nicely for dessert, don't you think?

[tanyev]

2. GAFFEcon

:P

[wryter2000]

3. I'm so glad to hear this

I was raised Episcopalian, and I'm so proud of some of the things the American church has been doing. I'm glad to see the forces of intolerance losing out.

[muntrv]

5. Excellent. Now work on real matters like fighting poverty and feeding

the hungry.

[JerseygirlCT]

9. That's the irony, of course

Many of these big mouths come from countries where the needs are dire. But they'd rather spend their time dressing in fancy robes and parading around proclaiming their hate for some of God's people. Meanwhile, much of the money that is coming in to help with the problems of poverty and famine is coming from those "evil" liberal Episcopal churches in the US.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. See, the trust fund brats are backing the bigots precisely BECAUSE

they don't want the Church to take a "preferential option for the poor."

[JerseygirlCT]

7. Ha! I thought this would happen. But it's nice to see it

fulfilled... or NOT fulfilled.

Bunch of blowhard bigots. And no, Peter, you're not going to be made the pope any time soon.

Now if we could just see some positive movement at Lambeth from the majority of the communion who don't have phobic fears of gay cooties or female cooties, you know? And a late invite to Gene Robinson would be nice.

[knitter4democracy]

14. Good. The right thing is happening, then.

They are Anglican. They need to stay in Communion and really pray over why they feel the need to split off and what they're so upset about. Those bigots also need to stop looking to our church as the answer (some have). We don't need more bigots.

[kwassa]

15. Ahmanson was a delegate at Gafcon

according to Ruth Gledhill in the Times of London.

http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2008/06/whats-going-on.html#more

All that money, and they still lose.

Like bad comedy.

[Occam Bandage]

16. sehr gut.