That Would Be 1982, BTW*

On Thursday a group of conservative religious leaders, including New York's Roman Catholic archbishop, Methodists, Lutherans, Southern Baptists, and the former Episcopal bishop who is now "archbishop" of the "Anglican Church in North America," published an open letter against gay marriage. They warn the like-minded that the government will try to make them knuckle under, not by forcing them to perform marriage ceremonies for gays and lesbians, which the signatories consider unlikely, but by punishing churches that deny benefits to gay couples, state-licensed adoption agencies that won't place children with the same-gender married, and state-accredited marital counselors who won't provide services to them.

Fred Clark, a Baptist Gen X blogger, doesn't just worry about how this kind of message from Christian institutions alienates gays and lesbians. He's afraid that eventually, it will alienate everybody. He writes:

Public statements like this exist only to take sides, draw lines and build walls. This letter serves no prophetic or pastoral purpose. But it is — unintentionally — useful and helpful for identifying the dead-enders determined to make exclusion and condemnation the hallmarks of their communities.

This pronouncement is an explicit “Unwelcome” sign hung on all of their churches.... [T]hat cramped inhospitality applies not just to the GLBT folks they’re demonizing here, but to “all Americans who dare to differ” with the letter’s signatories.

So in a sense what these signatories have just done is they have turned to nearly every American born since, say, Thriller came out*, pointed a long crooked finger and declared, “We don’t want your kind in our congregations.”

The Islamification Of Christianity

In an audacious act of shepherd stealing, the Pope has just made it easier for Anglicans, including married priests, to join the Roman Catholic church without having to abandon their beloved liturgical practices. Predictably, in their coverage of Benedict XVI's startling move the media are focusing on the rifts in the Anglican Communion over the role of gay and lesbian people in the church. But the Pope's not exploiting angst about the status of homosexuals as much as he's wooing those who still can't accept the absolute equality of women in Christ, which as far as I'm concerned is really at the root of the church's sexuality crisis. As the New York Times reports:

The move could have the deepest impact in England, where large numbers of traditionalist Anglicans have protested the Church of England’s embrace of liberal theological reforms like consecrating female bishops.

And:

[T]he Rev. Rod Thomas, the chairman of Reform, a traditionalist Anglican group [in England], said, “I think it will be a trickle of people, not a flood.”

But he said that a flood could in fact develop if the Church of England did not allow traditionalists to opt out of a recent church decision that women could be consecrated as bishops.

There's even more evidence that the Pope's initial play, at least, is to redeem wayward Christians whose 16th century forebears committed the original sin of breaking away from Rome under Henry VIII and Elizabeth the Great. Many U.S. schismatics have already aligned with the "Anglican Church in North America," which prohibits female bishops just as the Catholics do. So while its leaders applauded the Vatican's announcement as evidence of the depth of the Anglican Communion's crisis, there's no immediate evidence that they're planning to run home to Papa themselves. Says one former Episcopal bishop, Martyn Minns:

I don’t want to be a Roman Catholic...There was a Reformation, you remember.

I don't know enough about Bishop Minns to speculate about his attitude toward the Roman Catholic church. But many American Protestants retain an almost visceral anti-Catholicism. Growing up in the Episcopal church in Detroit, I never even heard the word "priest" used to describe ordained people. We always called them "ministers." Besides, with the Catholic church you get all that stuff about birth control, abortion, banning the death penalty, and world peace, about which at least some conservative Anglicans are as divided as everyone else. So for the time being, it appears the action in this latest episode in the English Reformation will unfold where it all started, with the Vatican hoping to swell its ranks with those who just can't abide a woman in a miter.

As for women in the rectory, for eight centuries the Catholic church insisted that priestly celibacy was a salvation issue, but evidently no longer, since the new rules are expected to increase the number of married Catholic priests (aka married former Anglicans). It doesn't seem fair that the priests who played by the rules all along will be the last to get somebody to cuddle up with on a cold winter's night. At least they may not have to wait for long. Knowledgeable Catholic friends have told me for years that in the teeth of the priest shortage, the celibacy requirement wouldn't last more than a decade into the 21st century.

What the mother church will never abide, my friends say, is Mothers instead of Fathers behind the altar. So here's Benedict's vision: Straight, sexually active male clerics, with women and gays continuing as second-class citizens. Call it the Islamification of Christianity.

Warren Piece In The Church

Pastor Rick Warren is expected to speak at a June 23 meeting of "the Anglican Church in North America."