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The Anglican Communion and the Globalization of Dissent Dissertation Written by Dr Episcopal Dissidents, African Allies: The Anglican Communion and the Globalization of Dissent Dissertation written by Dr. Miranda K. Hassett [email protected] For the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill May 2004 Please do not cite in print without author’s consent. A revised and shortened version of this text is under contract for publication with Princeton University Press. Reproduced online through http://anglicanhistory.org, January 2006. 1 Abstract In recent years, conservative dissidents within the Episcopal Church in the United States have felt alienated by the Episcopal Church’s liberal policies, especially acceptance of homosexuality. In response, these Episcopal dissidents have increasingly sought and received help and support from Anglican bishops in the global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America). In this dissertation, the development and dynamics of these transnational Anglican alliances are examined anthropologically, on the basis of ethnographic research with Anglican communities involved in such relationships in Uganda and the United States. These relationships are often explained, by both supporters and critics, through narratives of increased global conflict between liberal Northern Christianity and conservative Southern Christianity (with which conservative Northerners are said to have a natural affinity). This work questions such narratives, first, by presenting the situations, concerns, and motives of the Northern and Southern Anglicans involved and calling into question assumptions of homogenous Southern conservatism or natural affinities. Secondly, this work demonstrates that these alliances are the outcome of cooperative globalizing endeavors undertaken beginning in the mid-1990s by Episcopal conservative dissidents and a number of sympathetic Southern leaders. These allies have globalized Episcopal conflicts by framing them in terms of discourses of Anglican globalism, and pursuing projects of global intervention in the Episcopal Church, such as placing dissident Episcopal parishes under the authority of African bishops. Chapter topics include the history and character of the Church of Uganda and the Episcopal Church; the international meetings organized by conservative Episcopalians to develop relations with Southern allies in preparation for the 1998 meeting of all the world’s Anglican bishops; and the outcomes of that meeting, especially the passage of a non- binding resolution affirming the conservative view on homosexuality. Subsequent chapters examine the development of a conservative globalist vision of the Anglican Communion united through networks of mutual moral accountability, and the increase in relationships linking disaffected American conservatives with Southern bishops. Discourses about the characteristics of Northern and Southern Christianity are analyzed, as are critics’ accusations concerning monetary influences in these North/South alliances. The conclusion examines the growing currency in public discourse of ideas about North/South Christian conflict, and questions such ideas in light of the evidence presented here. 2 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 4 Chapter 2: Renewal and Conflict 31 Chapter 3: Taking Africa Seriously 77 Chapter 4: Lambeth 1998: Global South Rising 131 Chapter 5: From African/Asian Juggernaut To Global Orthodox Majority 183 Chapter 6: More than Just Companions 231 Chapter 7: Who Wants to be in the Ugandan Communion? 300 Chapter 8: Integrity for Sale? 363 Chapter 9: The Next Anglicanism? 425 References Cited 460 Notes 490 3 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION A crisis in global Anglicanism? In the autumn of 2003, as I was finishing my first draft of my dissertation, aspects of my dissertation topic seemed to be in the news all around me. Whenever I told anyone–not just clergy, not even just Episcopalians, but anyone–what I was writing on, he or she would nod and say, “Oh, yes, I’ve been hearing about all that.” Inter-Anglican conflict and rumors of schism were dominant themes in news sources related to the Episcopal Church in the United States, and the worldwide Anglican Communion–the church body of which the Episcopal Church is the American province. Even the secular press gave these conflicts considerable attention, during the summer and fall of 2003. News agencies like NPR and the New York Times frequently carried the latest Anglican news. The first event that brought the Episcopal Church into the national spotlight to this unprecedented degree was the ‘gay bishop’ controversy. At the Episcopal Church’s national convention in August, a majority of the bishops and delegates confirmed Gene Robinson, an openly-gay and partnered Episcopal priest, as bishop-elect of the diocese (or regional jurisdiction) of New Hampshire. The Episcopal Church thus became the first mainline denomination to publicly accept a partnered gay person in a high leadership position. The prominence of the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion in the news continued with the unfolding of reactions to Robinson’s election. Nearly three thousand conservative Episcopalians who oppose acceptance of homosexuality in the church met in Texas in early October to discuss how to proceed, given that they now regard the Episcopal Church as hopelessly separated from Scriptural truth and morality. At the same time, the Archbishop of Canterbury, England, as official head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, called a conference for the head bishops of 4 the world’s 38 Anglican national or regional churches. The purpose of this conference was to decide on an international response to the Episcopal Church’s controversial move–a response which Episcopal conservatives hoped would require the Episcopal Church to turn away from acceptance of homosexuality, or else be expelled from the worldwide Communion of Anglican churches. As the implications of Robinson’s election and consecration continued to unfold, many American Episcopalians and observers shared a sense that a moment of global crisis has arrived in the Episcopal Church. The language surrounding all these meetings has emphasized that what is at stake is not merely the peace and unity of one of the Anglican Communion’s member churches, the Episcopal Church. What is at stake, instead, is the shape and character of the entire worldwide Anglican Communion. Conservative Episcopalian leaders speaking at the Texas meeting argued that the Episcopal Church has abandoned “the Global Anglican Tradition,” and called for “a dramatic realignment of Anglicanism reaching both north and south of ECUSA,” separating the “archbishops of the dynamic Global South and the archbishops of the disintegrating Old West”(Anderson 2003; Virtue 2003e). Liberals in the church, too, see current Episcopal Church conflicts in global terms. A piece on the progressive Anglican website Everyvoice.net stated, “The threat of schism over the election of a gay bishop is like nothing the Church has ever seen before. The response isn't just larger and more organized. It's also global” (O’Connor 2003). The secular press, as well, has focused on the global implications of current struggles in the Episcopal Church. An editorial in the Dallas Morning News, covering the Texas meeting of conservatives, explained the global dimensions of this intra-Episcopal conflict clearly: “[Conservatives] may be on the losing end of this particular issue within the Episcopal Church, but their meeting is worth considering in the context of a worldwide struggle that may transform Christianity in this century.” Why has the controversy over Gene Robinson’s election as bishop drawn such a global 5 response? Why do conflicts over doctrine and morality in the Episcopal Church attract the attention and the intervention of Anglican leaders around the world? Past seasons of conflict in the Episcopal Church’s history have not been ascribed such global significance. For example, in the late 1970s a number of traditionalist Episcopalians broke away from the Episcopal Church in response to the church’s revision of the Book of Common Prayer and decision to ordain women to the priesthood. The dissidents of that era issued no global appeals and received no global responses. Even as recently as the mid-1990s, such appeals to the wider Anglican world were not yet among the rhetorical and practical resources of conservative dissidents within the Episcopal Church. But in the past six years, conservative dissidents in the Episcopal Church have called repeatedly on the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion to intervene in the Episcopal Church, by forcing it to change its policies, or replacing it with a more orthodox American Anglican province. What is more, these American dissidents have found sympathetic and more- or-less willing allies among the bishops of the worldwide Communion, especially the global South—Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Visions of global polarization Current conflicts within the Episcopal Church are widely understood, not merely as internal divisions to be handled within the United States, but as carrying a global significance that demands the attention and action of Anglican leaders all over the world. Further, they accept a particular interpretation of this global import: events in the Episcopal Church are of global significance because they represent the triumph of the orthodox, zealous Christian South over weak and degenerate Northern Christianity. Most accounts of recent events in the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion presume similar visions of a bifurcated
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