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Capping years of stealth planning, fundamentalist conservatives this past week fired wedge missiles into the Episcopal Church's tri-annual General Convention in an attempt to rupture the Anglican Communion. Though gussied up as a theological and moral issue concerning the role of homosexuals in ecclesiastical life, the attacks were part of a well-financed, neo-con agenda aimed at destroying the U.S. Episcopal Church and stifling the liberal voice of the country's established religions.
Ostensibly at issue was whether the Episcopal Church -- the U.S. branch of the world-wide Anglican Communion -- should formally confess its error in having approved the appointment of an openly gay bishop. Following the investiture of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, in 2003, conservative Anglicans in the United States, Africa and elsewhere, demanded an official repudiation of such appointments as contrary to Scripture.
In response, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as historical head of the Anglican Communion, commissioned an inquiry to look into the matter and to find "ways forward in this situation which can preserve our respect for one another and for the bonds that unite us." (Aug 2003) A year later (Oct 2004), the so-called Windsor Report found that developments in the Episcopal Church (USA) had strained the "bonds of affection" which united the Anglican Communion. Refraining from "judgement" but looking forward to a process of "healing and reconciliation", the report recommended that the Episcopal Church "express its regret" for the "consequences" of its actions and for having "breached" the "proper constraints" of Anglican unity. The report also recommended that the Church abide a moratorium on such ordinations until a general consensus had evolved, and that the bishops involved in approving Robinson's ordination recuse themselves from further "representative" actions.
Windsor was pretty strong stuff. It basically stated that the Episcopal Church in the United States had breached Anglican unity by approving ordinations and acts which were outside the existing consensus and that the Church should cease and desist from further such actions if it desired to remain within the Communion.
But this was not enough for the conservatives who denounced the Windsor Report as so much namby pamby hogwash. Diane Knippers of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, stated that the report had failed to lay down "clear standards" and that "every delay of sending clear signals simply allows revisionist theology to become more firmly entrenched in the Anglican Communion." Kippers added that "false teaching is an infection, we want to see it quarantined."
The American Anglican Council, an ad hoc grouping of conservative bishops, adopted the role of good cop. It welcomed the conclusions of the Windsor Report but only as establishing a "minimum" threshold of what was needed in the circumstances. It went on to call for the equivalent of a guilty plea by the Episcopal Church to the report's conclusions. This exercise in punitive "healing and reconciliation" was followed by a series of demands for doctrinal pledges of allegiance, acts of conformity and, lastly, that the Episcopal Church, as an institution, withdraw itself from the worldwide Anglican Council. In this way, the AAC deconstructed the Archbishop's call for "ways forward" together with "respect" into a suicide platform for the church errant.
If this battle over doctrine and morals were being waged by individual conservatives stating their points of view in open and candid debate, it could be accepted as a legitimate episode in the systole and diastole of people defining their faith together. However, that is not what is taking place. The so-called conservatives are in fact well-greased, neo-con attack groups funded by the likes of A.H. Ahmanson (Home Savings & Loan heir), Adolf Coors, and the Olin (Winchester Rifles) and Scaife foundations (Mellon banking and oil). The point is not that conservative philanthropists fund conservative causes but rather that their funding of these causes is part of a broader political agenda aimed at instituting obedient, religious conformity as an adjunct to predatory capitalism.
A quick recherche pour le banquier will show what's afoot.
The American Anglican Council was founded in 1996 with the stated purpose of opposing gay ordinations and unions. Former Reagan Justice Department officers Richard Campinelli and James Wooton were among the founders. Ahmanson is a major financial backer of the AAC, contributing half a million dollars in one year alone and listing the AAC as 5th on his list of over 15 principal, charitable recipients. AAC works with a variety of UK and African conservative advocacy missions to which Ahmanson also contributes heavily.
Ahmanson himself favors the creation of a strong, centralized form of church governance, an evangelical approach to Biblical interpretation and the defense of traditional teachings on human sexuality. To this end, he is willing to effect a schism in the Anglican Communion. In the run up to the 2006 General Convention, the AAC and its allies worked to remove the Episcopal Church from the Communion and went so far as to threaten Archbishop Rowan Williams with schism if he refused to de-recognize the Episcopal Church and replace it with the Anglican Network, a grouping of conservative churches also funded by Ahmanson that towed the AAC line.
The American Anglican Council is in fact a retail designer offshoot of the broader scoped Institute on Religion and Democracy, founded 1981 as a counter to the World Council of Churches. The IRD targets all three mainline American denominations: The United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Episcopal Church. The IRD's goal, in its own words, is to "restructure" the governing structure of "theologically flawed" protestant denominations and to "discredit and diminish the Religious Left []".
In fact, the IRD's sights are broader still. Its founders were particularly outraged by liberation theology, the Catholic pastoral movement that sought social justice for the poor in Latin American. The IRD waged a media campaign in favor of Reagan's Contra strategies in Central America. The campaign included spreading false rumors about "left wing" religious charitable missions. These lies, which included allegations that the missisions were US government fronts, put the charity workers at personal risk and ultimately caused the missions to fail.
Richard Mellon Scaife is a major bank-roller of the IRD, donating $1.6 million between 1985 and 2001. In 2002, the Scaife Foundation forked over $225,000 to help launch the IRD's "Reforming America's Churches Project". Among the Project's stated goals is the elimination of the United Methodist Church's General Board, the squelching the church's justice and peace programs and the discrediting UMC pastors and bishops by instigating variously pretexted church heresy trials.
Other bank-rollers of the IRD are the John M. Olin Foundation, which backed the IRD in the amount of $489,000 "to counter the political influence of the Religious Left"; the Coors run Castle Rock Foundation, which donated $90,000 to "challenge the orthodoxy promoted by liberal religious leaders in the U.S."; and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, whose donors are linked to the John Birch Society, and which gave $1.5 million to IRD between 1985 and 2001.
What is critical to note is that the largesse of these reactionary money banks is not motivated by a single "hot button" issue. On the contrary, their targeting of so called "liberal churches" is simply a component part of a wider totalist political strategy.
The Bradley Foundation's stated objective is none other than to return the U.S. to the days before government regulated business and corporations were required to negotiate with labor unions. You know, the days when Pinkerton Guards and local police gunned down, truncheoned and imprisoned people for demanding such outrageous things as a 12 hour work day.
Mellon Scaife is a tad tonier. Over a 30 year period as of 1999, Scaife foundations have donated an approximate $620 million to conservative causes and institutions, including: the Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, the Free Congress Foundation, the Hudson Institute, Judicial Watch, American Spectator, and National Empowerment Television the ultraconservative cable network.
Ahmanson, Olin, Scaife, Bradley, and Coors are also heavy contributors to the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and right wing polemicists like Dinesh D'Souza and Charles Murray (The Bell Curve). Last but not least in the beneficiary list, is PNAC, the zio- and neo-con think tank that gave us info-war in cyberspace, preemptive aggression, shock and awe and Action Democracy in Irak.
The IRD itself can hardly be characterized as a bona fide religious organization but is rather a political organization that targets religious groups. The IRD's efforts, alone or in tandem with collaborators, include: pressing the Bush administration to take a harder line on North Korea (2003), supporting Republican tax cuts for the rich (2001), slashing of government services for the poor and disabled (2003), defunding reproductive choices, opposing land mine treaties (2001) and working to roll back environmental protections. The IRD was virtually the only "religious" group in America that backed the idea of a preemptive war on Iraq.
Ahmanson, who is himself a nominal Episcopalian, is a believer in Christian Reconstructionism, a hard-line Calvinist movement that advocates replacing American democracy with a fundamentalist theocracy under strict biblical codes. In this vein, Ahmanson, funds the promotion of Intelligent Design and has advocated stoning as penalty for adultery and homosexuality. Needless to say, as always, there is a silvery lining: Ahmanson also asserts that minimum wage laws go against Bible
There is an idiotic tendency in the United States to think that political views are "OK" when they are personally and sincerely held. Somehow, the fact that Ahmanson may truly believe that Deuteronomy should be incorporated into the United States Code makes it alright. But this is to confuse the right to say what one wants with the merits of what is said; and this confusion simply serves to avoid examining the merits. Hitler may truly and sincerely have believed in his Aryan theories; he may even have had a legal right to advocate them in the "market place of ideas" -- but that certainly does not mean that the rest of us should ignore the defects of the idea or the role it played in a larger political (and military) agenda.
Ahmanson's Christian Deconstructionism is not simply a "personal religious choice" or a "personal opinion about gays". It is the religious wedge of a broader and truly reactionary geo-political and economic agenda. Ahmanson and his fellow FundiCon bank-rollers have set out to destroy the Episcopal Church, and bring the Methodists and Presbyterians to heel in order to promote a totalitarian christo-capitalist state -- in short, in order to destroy Liberalism.
This destructive agenda brings us to a political crucible; for, at bedrock, the United States is a liberal nation. Over the past 40 years fundamentalists and neo-cons have so successfully distorted that foundational political fact that people have been brainwashed into thinking of "liberal" as a mere life-style or policy option. This is absolutely wrong. Liberalism is not an option within a system; it is the system.
Once it is accepted that the United States can be not-liberal, as an option, then the United States as we have known it ceases to be. The way is then clear for the United States to become a fundamentalist, conservative corporate police state rigidly adhering to "authoritative" truths and marginalizing anyone who does not fit the approved mold.
To understand why these groups are gunning for the Episcopal Church, it is necessary to recount what it means to say that the Episcopal Church is a bastion of liberalism and how the Episcopalian brand of liberalism is interwoven into America's very constitutional fabric.
Throughout its 200 year history, the Episcopal Church has been a key voice of liberalism in the United States. This liberalism was less a position on any given topic than a necessary concomitant to the Anglican tradition of accommodation and tolerance. The Church of England --- from which the Episcopal Church derives -- was built on theological and political compromises which sought to still the blood stained waters of the Protestant Reformation. Thus, while its ceremonial and organization remained evocatively Catholic, it gave explicit recognition to Calvinist doctrines on predestination while yet striking a middle and equivocal ground on the theologics of the Eucharist. Although the English Reformation was not without violence and upheaval, the overall and commendable attitude was that it was better to mince words than people.
In ecclesisastical parlance, this accommodating attitude became known as latitudinarianism. This latitudinarian propensity was so intrinsic that there even emerged three flavors of Anglicanism: low, broad and high. Those parishes which were "low church" hewed to such Protestant norms as sermonizing, simplicity of style and only an occasional eucharist. High churches were at the other end of the spectrum, offering a more elaborate liturgy and frequent communion. There were even "spikey" Anglo-Catholics who were more Catholic than the Pope, except for the fact that they didn't have one. Under this wide tent, people were content to call themselves "Anglicans" without too much inquisition and recognizing that they somehow shared a common ground. The fact that this common ground was something felt in the heart rather than explainable from the head was seen as a plus rather than a minus.
Particularly in the United States, this latitudinarianism has significant political implications that lie at the root of our constitutional system of government. From a purely historical point of view, the compromises that went into the making of the Church of England went hand in hand with a complex of political accommodations that went into the making of post feudal Britain. Broadly speaking, these compromises formed part of what the English call "The Settlement" -- that unwritten arrangement of Things English that has provided inexhaustible grist for the likes of Evelyn Waugh and Monty Python. In fact, Waugh's son once wrote that England was not divided into classes, really, but into those who understood "The Total Joke" and those who didn't. The pillars of this joke, according to Waugh, were the Monarchy, the House of Lords, the Tory Party and the Church of England -- all of which was a way of saying that the English Constitution (unwritten) was an intricate array of "Yes, buts" followed by "and anyways..."
Politically speaking, the Settlement of 1688, which established a constitutional monarchy within a restricting framework of individual rights, independent courts and a popularly elected parliament , ultimately became the point of departure for the "Great Compromises" that went into the making of the U.S. Constitution. But what counted more than the pieces of the puzzle -- those "three branches" and two parties everyone learns about in grade school -- was the by then established habit of puzzling together over things in common.
More than the Settlement, what the English are most proud of is English -- the pleasure and use of that sonorous, infinitely malleable, majestic language that gave us the Cloverdale Psalms, Shakespeare, the Bill of Rights and the Gettysburg Address. Beneath the Settlement's arrangement of the pieces, lay a cultivated habit of compromising and a willingness not simply to "talk things out" but to understand ourselves as "we who talk about things in a certain kind of way." This more than anything else, is the salient essence of English and American liberalism.
Let us ask, on what basis we call ourselves Americans? What do Catholics and Buddhists, Republicans and Democrats, football lovers and bridge players have in common? What is it that enables us to say we are "one" notwithstanding the vast catalogue of our often vehement differences?
The essence of "being American" is not some diminished lower common denominator of the few, unimportant things we all agree upon or do. Nor is it a trite and phantasmagorical "celebration of diversity". What unites us is that we have agreed to talk about things in a certain way through our press, from our pulpits, in city councils, legislatures, congress and in our courts. There are rules about how we talk. There are stock phrases, buzz words and fudgy terms that we use to signify importance, urgency, patience or the need to agree while not being quite sure we do.
Viewed this way, it can be seen the Constitution is not simply an organizational chart for government but, more profoundly, the organizational chart for an ongoing conversation. It is a conversation that is necessarily latitudinarian because were it not it so, it would be no more than the responsive cadences of those self trumpetting "people's democracies" that define themselves by their unity of mind and purpose. In contrast, our Constitution (not unlike Anglican doctrine) was not the singular product of a triumphant party that had won the day but the cobbling of a multitude of factions neither of whom could accomplish anything on its own.
Perhaps the most salient political example of this latitudinarian tradition can be seen in the judicial custom and practice of publishing dissenting opinions. Why should dissenting opinions be published at all given that by virtue of being dissents they do not reflect what the law is? Why in the world do we go to the expense and confusion of publishing what the law is not?
We do so because if the Anglican tradition adheres to any one operative directive it is that "there are many witnesses to what The Word is". One man's view may be out of synch. It may even be crazy....or, who knows, one day it may be seen to have been correct after all. "We see now darkly" and so we make room for dissenters, rather than cast them out. Is this logical? Not in the least. But as Justice Holmes said, "the life of the Law is not logic but experience." The historical experience that molded the Church of England and, at the same time, give birth to the English Constitution was the practice and habit of finding ways to accommodate; and this custom and practice became the true fundament of the American Experience.
The one time, we failed to accommodate was during the terrible time of the Civil War when the country was unable to heed Lincoln's appeal not to "break our bonds of affection" or to forget "the mystic chords of memory" that held us together. As Lincoln warned, if we could not continue our conversational disagreement as one nation we would necessarily split and become enemies, which is what happened. But for all that and although the passions stirred were the deepest and most violent our nation has experienced, two institutions were not torn asunder: the Post Office and the Episcopal Church.
Liberalism, as we have understood it for 200 years, presupposes differences as a fact of life. Fundamentalism aims to eradicate them. In the wake of the Windsor Report the Episcopalian "liberals" wanted to continue talking about differences, preferably in as fuzzy terms as possible. To the fundi-con wedge groups this was a weasling, delaying anathema. The fundi-cons are absolutely wrong. Fuzzy talking is the very core of Anglicanism.
Likewise, factional and disputatious talking is also the very core of Americanism. As Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 10, one would no sooner abolish liberty because people wrangle loudly and stupidly over trivial things than one would abolish air because it also gives life to a conflagration.
Our history of accomodating talk within sensed but indefinable bounds is the common essence of both Anglicanism and Americanism. In non-English speaking countries, the word "liberal" refers to the political economy of capitalism with a secondary meaning of "generous" and "tolerant". In the United States the meanings are just the reverse: "liberal" primarily means lax, tolerant, giving and forgiving. It was the homiletics of this usage, rather than the dialectics of social democracy, that Franklin Roosevelt, himself an Episcopalian, used to build what once passed for the U.S. social safety net. Unfortunately, his identification of liberalism with a specific policy, also gave Reaganites, fundamentalists and neo-cons the excuse they needed to launch a war of defamation against the one word that most truly defined what America is. They twisted meanings in order to equate "liberal" with loose, libertine, wacky and perverse. That accomplished, it was easy enough to attack social programs as crazy, indulgent, give-aways to the undeserving. In so doing they struck lethal blows not simply at social programs or cultural fads, but at the words and concepts that are absolutely indispensable to understanding what America is truly about.
The view I have propounded, sees the defining essence of American Liberalism, as having its historical roots in the accommodating, conversational process that gave form to Church of England. However, the view that a Faith is defined by the evolving customs and usages of the faithful together is itself an idea firmly rooted in Thomist theology, which holds that the Traditions of the Church over time are a source of divine unfolding co-equal with Sacred Scripture itself. This view, transposed to the secular sphere, is equally the essence of Anglo-American law. The Constitution may be a quasi-sacred scripture of sorts, but constitutional law is a certain ongoing, adversarial, conversation about it.
This living and peremuting traditionalism is utterly rejected by fundamentalist Protestants. They reject any source of faith or truth or justice that is not in a written text; and in lieu of an experience, with all its lack of clarity, conflicts and fudging, the life of the Church is reduced to a collection of mandates. Of course few words under the sun are unambiguous in the manner of "1" or "3" and so what the Bible "demands" must be pronounced by someone. Far from being any foundation to a conversation, that "biblical demand" leaves someone dictating and the rest obeying. To live that kind of faith is anyone's personal choice, but as a public matter and as a political paradigm it is as antithetical to American Liberalism as those self-proclaimed "democracies" of one folk, one mind, one leader.
As presented by the mainstream media, the controversies over the ordination of a gay bishop and the blessing of homosexual unions appear to be routine and almost clich?d protests by morally rigid, conservative, traditionalists versus morally lax, liberals. However, to accept that contextualization is to tacitly accept the very fundamentalist intellectual construct at issue. The Episcopal Church is fundamentally a liberal institution that has always rejected the persecution and exclusion which inevitably attends biblical literalism and doctrinal finality. What is really at issue is not the ordination of a gay man as a bishop or the blessing of gay unions, but whether the Episcopal Church will remain a bastion of liberalism or be reduced to a redundant conservative, fundamentalist tag-along.
Sadly enough, the FundiCon wedge attack launched at the General Convention comes close to being a win/win strategy for them. If the so called "liberals" knuckle under, they are destroyed. If they fight back aggressively, they risk further painting themselves into a corner as caricature, flakey, out-of-bound liberals. It will take skill and dogged determination to shift the debate away from specific issues on to the true question of Anglicanism's essentially liberal nature.
While the proximate outcome of this battle is of concern to Episcopalians, the rest of us should harbor no illusions. The Episcopal Church stands as an impediment to the FundiCon agenda for America, and the attack at the Convention should be seen in its true political light as a proxy attack on America's essential liberal nature. America is Liberal or it is not.
©WCG, 2006.
Some Links of Interest
http://thewitness.org/agw/webster101504.html (Power Money Control)
http://www.post-gazette.com/printer.asp 99/23/2003 (Region Funds Episcopalian's Move to Divide)
http://www.zionsherald.org/Jan2004_specialreport.html
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/windsor2004/
Episcopal News Service (May 2006) "Following the Money"
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