Blessing for Study Only II

In this installment I will consider the scripture lessons proposed of the same-sex blessing rite. Recall that one of the innovations of the 1979 marriage rite was the inclusion of a lesson section; the 1928 rite had no provision for this, and the 1662 had a rather tacked-on section at the end which was constructed more along the lines of a homily.

One thing is evident immediately: there are a lot of options. Six OT, eight epistle, and five gospel lessons are offered, and no less than ten psalms may be chosen from. Further investigation shows that there is a degree of overlap with the lessons prescribed for marriage. By contrast, through the SSB rite (as we said in part I) is strongly influenced by the baptismal rite, there is almost nothing shared in the scriptural material; a single epistle reading is shared, and that is all.

I'll begin by considering the psalms. Marriage suggests the use of Psalm 67, 127, or 128. All three of these have some reference to fertility, with 127 and 128 both talking about the having of children as a blessing; it's quite safe to say, however, that verse 3a-- "Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house"-- is why 128 was not suggested for same-sex blessings. Psalm 65 is rather like 67, except longer and less felicitous; it's not obvious why it was added as a selection. Psalms 98, 100, 148 and 149 are generic in their thanksgiving and praise, and again it's not that clear why they should be suggested. They give an air of not being able to come up with something suitable. The excerpt from Psalm 85 perhaps has been chosen for verse 10 ("Mercy and truth have met together;/ righteousness and peace have kissed each other.") It is Psalm 133, however, which seems the most obvious choice:

Oh, how good and pleasant it is,* when brethren live together in unity!
It is like fine oil upon the head* that runs down the beard,
Upon the beard of Aaron,* and runs down the collar of his robe.
It is like the dew of Hermon* that falls upon the hills of Zion.
For there the LORD has ordained the blessing:* life for evermore.

Though perhaps it is less than apt at the union of two women.

Anyway...

I'm afraid the issue of what is appropriate or tasteful or unintentionally humorous is going to keep popping out. For example, the only common OT lesson is that from the Song of Songs, which conjoins two passages, the second of which is the very familiar "Set me as a seal upon thine heart" verses which are most likely the most popular readings at Episcopal weddings. The first, however, is love poetry, pure and simple, emphasizing that this is a sexual relationship we're contemplating. It's abundantly clear why the two Genesis passages didn't make the cut, as they are the foundational scripture for Judaeo-Christian marriage, and they firmly set forth the complementarity of the sexes as marriage's basis. The passage from Tobit is just as problematic, as it cites the Genesis passages to that end. So what do we get to replace these? Well, for starters we have the most famous couplet from Ruth. And it sounds good until you remember that Ruth is saying this to her mother-in-law, which is not exactly what you want in a sexual union. So then we have two versions of readings from 1 Samuel concerning the covenant between David and Jonathan. Here again we have this tension over sexuality. John Boswell was not the only person to impose a homoerotic interpretation on this friendship, but he was the one who really pushed interpreting that into a rite. I'll bravely say, however, that this is all an insertion into the text. The passage from Ecclesiastes is interesting, with its rather neutral "two is better than one" message; the threefold cord of the last line, however, lends itself to unintended mirth. Finally, there is a passage from Micah that makes no sense whatsoever: beating swords into plowshares is all very noble, but I can see nothing in the passage that has anything specific to do with the matter at hand.

When we turn to the epistles, we see that a fair number of the lessons are shared between marriage and SSBs. Yet here we observe a different oddity: nearly all the shared lessons are extended for SSBs. One of the marriage lessons didn't make the cut, and after reading the latter part of Ephesians 5, with its disquisition about wives submitting to husbands, it's easy to see why it went unused; and for that matter, one suspects it is seldom used for Episcopal weddings. The only lesson that was kept without alteration is a passage from Colossians 3, which even in the marriage rite stops short of another "submission" passage; that excised, it's a fairly generic passage about how Christians must live in agape.

As to the other three retained lessons: The reading from 1 Corinthians is the famous "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels" paean to life in agape, for some reason they have felt the need to prefix this with the end of 12:31: "And I will show you a still more excellent way." This does not strike me as a meaningful improvement, much less one necessitated by the change of context. Another reading from Ephesians, this time in chapter 3, was extended to include the doxology which ends the chapter; again, this does not seems necessary to the sense of the thing. The last of our retained lessons comes from 1 John, in the fourth chapter; in this case they have skipped from verse 16, where the marital lesson ends, to verse 21: "And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also." (KJV: I note that this passage in the NRSV neuters the Greek by translating adelphon as "brothers and sisters"). But this verse is pulled out of context, for it is the answer to the rhetorical question posed in verse 20: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"

Moving on to the new lessons: the Romans passage is sort of a Desiderata of the faith; it's generic but at least manages to fit in philadelphia. The Galatians passage is a puzzle because surely verse 24 is wont to prompt snickers: "And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts." The other 1 John reading is sort of the little brother to the first: nothing bad about it, but there would seem to be no reason to prefer it over one of the other readings. And finally, we have the reading from 2 Corinthians, which is shared with the baptismal readings. Honestly I have no idea why they included this, as it is plainly most relevant to baptism.

So then we move on to the five gospel readings. The first lesson, from Matthew, is the Beatitudes, and it conflates two of the marital readings. The first marriage passage stops at verse 10 ("Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"), and the second resumes at verse 13 and continues to verse 16, but SSB stops at verse 14 ("Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid"). Neither of these commends itself as a natural stopping point, because verses 11 and 12 continue the thought of verse 10, and the passage that begins at verse 14 has its conclusion at verse 16: "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." The other point is that this passage is a prophecy of the kingdom, not so much an instruction of how to live; it's not that clear why it's an option for marriage, much less SSBs. On the other hand, as a marital passage which doesn't mention matrimony, it is I suppose an obvious candidate to be retained.

Marriage offers a third Matthew reading, one that is a bit puzzling and which SSBs chose not to use: the parable of the house built on rock. I suppose the analogy is of the house to the marriage, but it's a bit thin. Other than that there's no obvious reason why this reading couldn't have been retained.

It's obvious, though, why the passage from Mark wasn't retained: it refers directly back into Genesis 2. But it is far from clear why a section of the sermon of the plain from Luke 6 was added.

Moving on to John: the reading from the final discourse is retained and, once again, lengthened. In the marriage rite it ends at verse 12: "This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you." But now it continues on for five more verses, including Jesus telling the disciples that he now calls the not servants, but friends. Once again I do not see the added value of the longer reading, nor do I see in being somehow more relevant to this context than to marriage.

A second reading from John is taken from the final prayer, particularly the section in which Jesus prays for the unity of the disciples in love. Now it think most people would read this as a prayer for the unity of the church, for it speaks of love within and encompassing the whole.

So if you've made it this far, you may have noticed a threefold pattern. Any passage that explicitly refers to marriage has been scrupulously avoided, because all of them set marriage in the context of the Genesis complementarity of the sexes. In the epistles and the gospels, this has meant use of passages which talk about love in a general way, or even talk about Christian life in very general terms. In the Old Testament, certain passages on specific friendship or kinship relationships are appealed to, but the interpretation needed to make these passages relevant is either a distortion of the text (Ruth, and to a lesser degree, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes) or hotly contested (1 Samuel). The liturgists have run up against a very real problem: not only is there no scriptural warrant for what they want to do, but every passage that justifies a sexual relationship presupposes a marriage between a man and a woman.

Blessing for Study Only I

Our friends at the SCLM have put out some same sex blessing materials, including a sample/proposed rite. I'm not really interested in discussing the supporting material here, if for no other reasons than (a) it's too big a chunk to bite off at once, and (b) I'm not up to moderating a comments-based discussion of whatever I may have to say. The sample rite, however, cries out for analysis. This I intend to carry out in three parts: the first, which you read here, will talk about the structure of the rite, while the second will discuss the scripture selections and the third the detailed wording of some passages.

I begin with some overall observations. It is possible to perform this rite without saying anything in common with the marriage rite, save the Lord's Prayer. Every single other passage either differs from its marital parallel, or provides for an alternative which the 1979 rites do not countenance. The latter is largely accounted for by the continuance of the anti-dominical heresies found in almost every new liturgy promulgated in the past decade or so: in every case where the word "Lord" would ordinarily be used, an alternative is provided which omits it, the only exception being in the litany. The converse of this is that nearly every element of the marriage rite is included, with one telling exception which I will discuss at the end.

While most elements of the marital rite are included, the order of those elements is quite different. Comparison of the 1662, 1928, and 1979 rites discloses a common structure which anyone who has watched a movie marriage scene will recognize. The core rite begins with a greeting which connects the rite of marriage with the union between Christ and the church. Then follows a charge to disclose impediments, the making of promises, the presentation of the bride (optional in 1979), the vows and the exchange of rings. The final part of the rite consists of a prayer in the form of a blessing, the proclamation of the wedding, and the blessing proper; this section varies somewhat in order. The 1928 version contains these elements alone; the 1662 and 1979 rites append a statement of the purposes of marriage to the greeting, and 1662 has a series of readings following the core rite as a kind of scriptural homily. All of these rites provide for following the rite with communion, though as is common with older books the exact way this is to be done is not spelled out.

The 1979 version incorporates two innovations. The first is the inclusion of a series of prayers between the proclamation and the blessing, preceding the old blessing prayer. This is constructed in the style of older books but in fact lacks any precedent. The other innovation is a restoration of the lessons dropped in the 1928 version. The 1979 addition is in the absolutely stereotyped form common to all modern ECUSA sacramental rites: it begins with a collect and is followed by a series of readings, separated by psalms and anthems, and ending with a homily (made optional). Also per 1979 practice the lectionary provides for an OT lesson, an epistle, and a gospel reading, the latter presented as if for a eucharistic rite. This is all inserted after the promises and presentation, so that the core rite resumes with the vows; again as is standard for 1979, the rite ends with the peace, which is the suture line for joining this to the communion rite. This overall pattern is also found to a degree in the ordinal rites: the entrance rites for the latter also incorporate the section of promises and such before the collect.

The SSB rite, however, is constructed on the basis of the baptismal rite, not the marital rite; the elements of the latter are rearranged to match the corresponding element of baptism. Therefore the SSB rite begins with the conventional seasonal opening sentences, followed by a versicle and response section and the greeting. It then proceeds directly to the collect, skipping all the charge and promise section which in the marital rites precedes the collect. The next section follows the ECUSA lesson/psalm/gospel/sermon stereotyped plan, and then the rite proper resumes. Again, the order of the elements reflects that of baptism, beginning with the (optional) presentation, followed by the promises. The prayers are in the form of a litany, and they precede the vows; the Lord's Prayer is dropped in after the litany. The rings follow the vows immediately, per convention, and then the proclamation; then the rite continues with the blessing prayer and blessing proper, and as with everything ECUSAn, ends at the peace. This mirrors the baptismal order, in which the litany precedes the sacramental act.

And indeed, the references to the baptismal rite are constant in the theological discussion preceding the sample rite. I do not want to step up to discussing how well-founded this connection is; the fact remains that this is really the matrimonial rite recast in the shape of the baptismal rite. But that brings us to the two omissions from the 1979 marriage rite. Recall that the it begins with the greeting, a statement of the purposes of marriage, a charge to take marriage seriously and to reveal impediments, and the promises and presentation. Well, the SSB rite skips directly from the greeting to the collect, with the promises and presentation, as I said earlier, moved to follow the sermon and swapped in order. The other elements are simply dropped: there is no statement of purpose for the relationship blessed by this rite, and the charge is also entirely eliminated. I have no idea why the latter is missing, and the omission is odd considering that the vows contain the "forsaking all others" pledge on which the charge is predicated. the omission of the purpose statement is more telling. Perhaps one can construct an analogy of baptism with marriage, which is the consequence of their argument; but the fact remains that one can construct from scripture a rationale for marriage that makes no reference to baptism. Marriage indeed precedes and perhaps can be said to prefigure every other rite save the offering of sacrifice. This leaves the SSB rite in something of a paradox: it's constructed out of the parts of marriage, but in the way that it specifically appeals to anything else except marriage for a justification, the fact that it doesn't have the explicit warrant afforded to marriage is emphasized.

The Covenant: is it dead yet?

This bishop wants all of us to sign on to the proposed Anglican Covenant:



One really doesn't want to discourage him, but things aren't going too well for it. As usual, the folks at the Episcopal Cafe are all lining up to denounce it, and while they are at it, Rowan Williams for daring to suggest the thing in the first place. They even have a special guest appearance from Louie Crew, while Tobias Haller has devoted seven out of his last nine blog posts to discussing/denouncing it.

It doesn't get that much more support from the other end of the church-political spectrum (though anyone calling Williams "the Archdruid" has utterly squandered their moral credibility, at least as far as I'm concerned). The only people who seem to support it are a group of stubborn moderates-to-conservatives.

What dooms the covenant is that the sin has already been committed. The Americans press upon the communion as a whole their internal solution to these theological disputes: the progressives present a fait accompli, and everyone else is put in the position of having to either welcome the repudiation of the past, try to live with the unacceptable, or make some sort of break, the latter then being characterized as the only real sin in the matter. But simply as a reaction, I would not call it sin at all. In a sense all the covenant does is put the organization in the position of supporting the resisters instead of the radicals. And that's not going to fly because (a) the Church of England has lots of bishoprics who want to be numbered among the welcomers to the various innovations, (b) everyone in ECUSA understands that the existing pressure we exert on the communion is gong to be the first target of the "disciplinary" provisions in section 4, and (c) nobody in ECUSA cares about keeping the conservative provinces in the communion.

ECUSA's leadership is hopelessly disfunctional anyway. Here we are, looking at a proposed budget which is almost impossible to amend at GC, and even the liberals can see that defunding youth ministry in favor of the central offices is dumb. Meanwhile the state of Virginia is giving the separatist buildings back to the ECUSA diocese, which I am reasonably sure will not be able to keep them all open. And presumably GC will approve same sex marriages this summer, so as not to embarrass the bishops of Maryland and Washington when they permit those rites to go forward in January at the behest of the state.

After that, what is there left to do? Assuming that the Occupy movement lasts that long, no doubt there will be many in the hierarchy urging us to speed it on, and never mind that our church depends on all those upper middle incomes not just for money, but for our social milieu. They will urge us on in the battle against climate change, thought really there isn't a lot the church can do in this. And that is fortunate for it, as again in this one we are mostly the enemy whom we are to combat. Increasingly there is little reason to stay Anglican except as Anglicanism is defended from, well, itself; my church increasingly offers little in the way of religion, and as for the rest, the heathen do as much.

Our Goals for Lent

So the presiding bishop wants us to think about the Millennium Development Goals for Lent:

I invite you to use the Millennium Development Goals as your focus for Lenten study and discipline and prayer and fasting this year. I’m going to remind you that the Millennium Development Goals are about healing the worst of the world’s hunger. They’re about seeing that all children get access to primary education. They’re about empowering women. They’re about attending to issues of maternal health and child mortality. They’re about attending to issues of communicable disease like AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis. They’re about environmentally sustainable development, seeing that people have access to clean water and sanitation and that the conditions in slums are alleviated. And finally, they are about aid, foreign aid. They’re about trade relationships, and they’re about building partnerships for sustainable development in this world.

But they are also about obsessing about the sins of others, rather than our own sins. Look, I can give two reasons for leaving the MDGs to fend for themselves for a while, and neither of them is concerned with whether, as political points, they are even good ideas. The first reason is that old Mary/Martha thing. Much as my sympathies have always been with Martha, the Episcopal Church now has a serious problem with taking the Mary side for granted. As a church, we need to give people religious reasons for coming to us, and by and large, we haven't bothered with that; instead we have tended to take religion for granted, and spent all our effort on this work in the world stuff at a time when the powers that be are more resistant to us than ever. It's really about time we actually spent some effort trying to make more people into believers and getting more people baptized and into communion with us. That 3% a year loss needs to be the first focus of church action.

But beyond that problem in priorities, the emphasis on contemplation of social action, specifically action which we cannot carry out, means that we sit around for weeks congratulating ourselves on what right-thinking people we are. It is, in other words, an invitation to self-righteousness. That's not the way to keep a holy Lent.

Support the Right to Bear Armed Coffee

I've never spent much time at Starbuck's because I've never acquired the coffee habit. Therefore I couldn't really effectively boycott them, because the difference between the five or so cups of tea I've gotten from there and the sixth cup wouldn't exactly make a meaningful mark on their bottom line, though of course it wouldn't hurt my Daily Sanctimony Expression Requirement at all. But never fear: there's always some Episcopal organization ready to take up the cause for me:

Buttressing its commitment to non-violence, the Episcopal Peace Fellowship (EPF) is joining with gun victim groups both faith-based and secular to launch a boycott of Starbucks coffee shops on Valentine’s Day.

“While states have rightfully forbidden weapons inside taverns for decades, Starbucks is alone among major retail outlets in allowing customers to bring their gun(s) – open or concealed – into its coffee shops,” said the Rev. Jackie Lynn, EPF executive director. “We know guns and alcohol don’t mix. Why allow guns and caffeine?”

I hate to say this, but I can't really bring myself to care. There was a murder around these parts some years back in a coffee shop, and I think it was even a Starbucks. But you know, I don't think a sign on the door forbidding carrying a piece would have deterred them. Peace is a good thing; we should all work for peace, don't get me wrong. But our parody image as representatives of right- er, left-thinking upper middle class liberals is bad enough as it is. There aren't enough Episcopalians left to make such a boycott mean anything more than to confirm how out of touch we are with anything but our own sense of righteous self-worth.

Not That Kind of Relationship Either

Our buddies at the Standing Committee of Liturgy and Music, aka the Foxes Guarding the Henhouse, have a blog. And today we have, filed under the heading of "Resources for Same-Sex Blessings", we have a little discourse on being Called into Relationship. Long-time readers will know that I have a particular loathing for the word "relationship" when applied to sexuality. It tends to a sort of spineless, precious vacuity. For me, living in relationship means, in practice, working out who cleans up youngest's child's potty accidents and other moments of deeper intimacy still. It lacks the rosy sociological hues that adorn the word in isolation. But here we are, and the first phrase in the referenced post is "falling in love", and at the end of the first paragraph we find talk of "deciding to enter into a lifelong commitment with someone".

It is all so very indefinite. Younger folk may not realize that the 1979 BCP spells out in fair detail just exactly the covenant of marriage entails, in contrast to previous books: husband and wife are united into a family for mutual joy, for mutual aid and comfort, and for the procreation and raising of the next generation. People in the past, of course, had lots of other reasons for marriage beyond falling in love, or indeed fulfilling any of these three purposes. And people these days, falling love, are often wont to keep the escape hatch from Relationship wide open by avoiding or minimizing commitment.

But the reality of marriage for the Episcopal classes is a lot more complex. Well-educated people are, in fact, getting married at close to traditional rates. Which is to say, more of them are in marriages at any given time: the divorce rate, on a per-marriage basis, is still very high, though it has dropped from its early 1980s peak. People in the lower, uneducated classes are the ones avoiding marriage: over 60% of mothers who have not graduated from high school are unmarried, and graduating from high school only pushes that rate down to 40%. Marriage is conspicuously delayed: the age at which 60% of the population is married has risen from 25 to 30, and there is no age at which the ratio reaches the historic peak of 80%. (One should keep in mind that the proportion of religious celibates was once much higher as well.)

And yet we are told that "a lifelong committed relationship with another person is a vocation", with the implication that it isn't for everyone. Well, OK, except that it would appear, what with the getting pregnant and all, that it is the vocation for the majority. It may not be normative, but it is normal. I would guess that it is still the case that over 80% of the population has children, in which case that same 80% should either be committed to abstinence, or be committed to life with the other parent, modulo various family-breaking and wrecking facts such as death, abuse, or gross infidelity. Conversely, the statement that "culturally, marriage has instead become a rite of passage into adulthood" is flatly and utterly wrong. That may have been true in 1960, when 80% of the population was married before age 25; it isn't even vaguely true now. Maybe sex is that rite of passage, or perhaps drinking, or having a child; getting married, though, is something which these days which these days tends to wait until people have been adults for some time.

And of course, the background of all of this is same-sex "relationships". OK, well, let's call the same sex marriages, in the interest of full equality. So, do we have any statistics on the unions that are now being performed in a few states? Well, Canada has some data, and among other info they report that the age upon first marriage is 13% higher for same sex than for heterosexual marriages, with the average age for lesbian marriages was 41.6 (it was higher for gay males). One can safely say that the need to marry in order to have children is not a factor; nor, one dares to suggest, do they first sample the joys of sex and companionship at such an age. No, forty is the traditional age at which the wear of time begins to make itself felt. Now this number is no doubt elevated because many elderly couples have not heretofore been able to avail themselves of the facilities of the law, but still, the age difference is striking.

The use of vocation as a category here, therefore, is suspect. One gathers that perhaps people increasingly see marriage as a sort of social tool: a means of creating the expectation of approval for a sexual state, or a way to pry benefits out of employers and the state. But they do not couple (so to speak) sex with marriage. On the contrary, they are still "guided" by the church's injunction to keep sex within the boundary of marriage; and on the one hand, they rebel against this as a burden, and on the other, they brandish marriage as a demand for societal approval of the sex they are having. If the choices are marriage or continence, well, people are not choosing the latter. And the church is having a very hard time telling them that they need to choose the latter.

Indeed, the sense I get is that, with all the panic about how this church is aging into irrelevancy, the obvious answer-- that Episcopalians needs to get married, have kids, and raise them in the church-- simply isn't on the table. If we're going to talk about this in terms of vocation, then we need to talk about that vocation the way the Roman Catholics do: that people should think first in terms of finding a mate and producing offspring. The continued obsession with homosexuality is an irrelevant sideshow to this, yet we keep getting musings such as that which I've quoted in which the childless union is, by omission, made the norm, and having children is treated (again by omission) as an unusual opinion instead of as the core case. There is so much talk of "covenantal life" in the passage that one might think that discussion concerns whether one should own a house under the sway of a homeowner's association (which is indeed not for everyone). People don't get married for so abstract a reason, and life in marriage is anything but that abstract. Talk of same sex unions and marriages needs to step up to the same level of anti-abstraction.

Statistical Day of Reckoning

The statistics nerds among us look forward with a mixture of longing and dread to the days when Kirk Hadaway and his crew release the annual numbers. Longing, because he gives us a lot of material to work with; dread, because of the inevitably bad news those numbers deliver. Well, for the latest Executive council meeting, they delivered a presentation which pulls together the usual summary numbers, plus other data not routinely released. Some lowlights:

• Every church statistic is in the negative over the past decade: "we do not have a measure that is moving in a positive direction."


• Membership has fallen since the mid-sixties, when we had over three million members. Now we have less than two thirds that.


• Membership losses have accelerated since the early years of this century, and since 2004 shrinking congregations have outnumbered those showing growth by a considerable margin. Only 25% of congregations grew in 2010.


• Attendance has fallen steadily since 2000 after being rock steady through the 1990s (ASA data doesn't go back further than that, unfortunately). In 2010 only 17% of congregations recorded growth in attendance.


• Trends in other denominations are also bad. The UMC and other mainline Prots have been in decline for 25 years; in the past three years the SBC has also slipped into the red.


• "For every parish that has opened in the past 10 years, 2.5 parishes have closed." Most new churches have been planted in the south.


• We are old. Only 10% of our membership is young adults, compared with 20% of the US population; conversely, the oldest cohort holds 30% of our membership, as compared with 13% of the population at large.


• Our clergy are old too. The average age at ordination is 46. Over the past three years we have not ordained enough people to keep pace with retirements.


• Plate and pledge, adjusted for inflation, have steadily declined since the beginning of the century.


• 72% of ECUSA congregations are in financial distress, far worse than the 58% of US congregations as a whole.

The reader will not be surprised to learn that this report has been met with consternation, not to mention a certain panicky urge to do something about it. The question, of course, is where the decline is coming from. Some possibilities:

• Not enough kids. Hadaway's older analysis identified the drop in the white birth rate as a major source. However, this report is now a decade old, and it precedes the pattern of acceleration seen in the decade since. Also, this is a factor we will just have to live with.


• People leave. This is not a negligible contributor. My analyses in the past seem to show this as perhaps the dominant factor; in any case, losses in the four departing dioceses account for 19% of the drop in domestic membership since 2007.


• People don't join us. In our heyday it was commonly claimed that 50% of adult Episcopalians were converts. It's hard to pry that out of the data because of the many converts who don't show up in the offices, particularly as the expectation to be confirmed has just about disappeared.


• We are not retaining our kids. This is everyone's favorite reason, but if adult conversions were what sustained us before, it follows that this was never one of our strong points.


• Society is becoming more irreligious, and people these days don't join institutions. These are perhaps contributors, but again we don't have a way to track them.

I'm going to save my opinions on what to do for a later post. However I hope in any case that some of the complacency has been shaken off.

Conceding the Field to Fundamentalism

One of Facebook's least endearing behavioral features is how it kicks up "Bullhorns for Everyone!" to a new level. There are numerous "friends" whom I've eventually silenced in my Facebook feed because of their constant stream of political cheap shots and other announcements of their fealty to True Causes. One would think that politics and religion are, to the Anglican upper class, not seen as fit subjects for the internet parlor.

And yet we have this making the Facebook rounds: another entry in the annals of "worshipping the Lord with a slight air of superiority," and not an especially innocent one at that. Whatever truth there is to Mark Noll's notorious opening observation in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, namely that "there is not much of an evangelical mind", for Episcopalians the scandal is our infatuation with our own supposedly superior theological sophistication. The sad truth, unfortunately, is that for some decades now the church has been dominated by two parties, each of which has largely taken its cues from secular sources. So on the establishment side, we have the continued drive to make the church safe for upper middle class liberals, and most especially their sexual appetites; the church rebels, on the other hand, seem as responsive to the words of the economic prophet von Mises as they are to the gospel. In the meantime, a somewhat beleaguered band of Anglicans resists, often futilely, with the sophomoric attempts at theology which appear to drive changes to the liturgy, not to mention yet another semi-official rebellion against the idea of even having a standard liturgy.

Perhaps the only church more prone to theological snobbery than us is the Church of Rome, or at least its more traditionalist partisans. We are bad enough: "fundamentalist" might as well mean "theological redneck", the way it appears in so much rhetoric, such as in this one-liner. Real fundamentalism, as Tony Clavier reminds us and as any student of theological history should be aware, came out of the Presbyterians, as a response to the, well, theological snobbery of the textual criticism faction. It has little to do with us, even if one of our episcopal heretics felt moved to try to rescue us from it. Instead, as everyone knows, "fundamentalist" means "narrow-minded, stupid, backward, mean-spirited literalist", or "someone who tells me I shouldn't have an abortion", or even "someone who takes their religion seriously enough to blow up themselves up for it." As Bryan Owen points out, it signifies the social class distinction between us and the Southern Baptists, whom we are prone to treat as nasty and brutish if not short. On top of all this is the presumption that we are in imitatio Christi through our resistance, as though there isn't something pharisaic in the fastidiousness with which we emasculate the liturgy and vote meaninglessly at church conventions to affirm this or that other secular cause over which the church has no influence, having spent it all decades ago. Indeed, if there is any favorable linkage to be made between us and the Pharisees, it is that we perhaps most resemble that exalted pair, Nicodemus and Joseph, who saw to the burial of Our Lord.

It is inevitable that we serve as a refuge for those fleeing what they perceive as the theological tyrannies and idiocies of other churches. If it is our only virtue, however, then we are lacking in virtue at all. Half a century ago we could point to a distinctly Anglican tradition of doing theology, in the academy, the sanctuary, and in the world; but of late we are increasingly reduced to that wretched "inclusion" and an increasingly limp and pale costume drama of a liturgy. And obviously we cannot include any fundamentalists; indeed, the campaign to drive them away is perhaps only beginning to fade a bit due to its manifest success.

The thing we need to resist isn't fundamentalism. It's the unbelief, the irreligion, the "spirituality" that is becoming the default religion of the social classes we so disproportionately represent. For all their faults, the fundamentalists now do a better job of calling the apostasy of Christendom to account. We can hardly be bothered; indeed, we seem more inclined to cater to the irreligious, for challenging them to real membership in the body would be, well, a failure of inclusion. And that's reflected in our own theological congress, where the only criterion that seems to matter is whether it would offend someone of vague or no spirituality who is committed to staying in that state. Can anything be more fatal to evangelism? We seemingly cannot call to the unchurched, but only to those who are on their way out the church door.

It is time for us to repent. We need to cease this stupid war against our fellow Christians and return to doing what we ought to be able to do best: harvesting those outside the church whom these other churches fail to collect. We need to appeal to the unchurched and apostate, and give them a reason to join us, not just to be comfortable visitors. And we need to look inward at our snobbery, and root it out mercilessly. Then we can consider again whether what we do is the work Christ set us to do.

Negotiating the Book

As I remarked last time, the pressure on the 1979 BCP is growing in the land of liturgical revisionism. And generally, the pressure is bad. Here's an example from some prayers used recently:

That we may discover God's Word in every sound of our world, God's touch in every embrace, and God's redeeming love in the love of others, let us pray to the Lord.
People: Lord, have mercy

One can belabor the faults of this: that it is precious, vacuous, wordy, and proud of its political correctness, and that it fails to satisfy the rubrics for the prayer of the people as they are set forth in the BCP. More to the point, however, is that so very much of what I'm seeing here is not prayerbook revision at all. One can of course criticize the 1979 book on that same basis: Rite II is not, for the most part, a revision of the 1928 and earlier books so much as it is a wholly new rite which uses some of the same material as the old. However I would say that this project was, for the most part, more successful than the Prayer Book Society let on.

But this time around it seems to me that the accusations of theological innovation, dubious in 1979, are not dubious at all this time around. There is, for instance, the continuing insistence on inserting a phrase in the confession of sin, having us confess our sins against ourselves. Can we really do so? Well, isn't a lot of discussion required on that before we stick in such a change? The same thing goes for the emasculation of the God-language which is a signature feature of every attempt going forward; it is quite controversial.

But even beyond that, here it is, thirty years after the most radical rewrite of the liturgy effort, and it seems to me that so much of the material being proffered owes nothing at all to older liturgies except that the structure of the 1979 rite, for whatever reason, seems to be almost immutable. When the rewrites do address the actual current BCP text, the changes almost never have to do with fixing infelicitous phrasing or the like; they are almost always introductions of theological novelties. And on top of that, in practice, doing what the book actually says has in some districts become increasingly uncommon. There are places where one can expect a straight up Rite II with hymns from the 1982 hymnal and nothing either omitted or added; one can even find places where they still kneel at the prayers, and perhaps where they even still stand for the psalm (though I haven't seen the last in a couple of decades). But increasingly the Anglican traveller is well-advised to become a connoisseur of parish websites, looking for the tell-tale signs that the BCP liturgy will be tampered with to some lesser or greater degree, for expediency or because the rector does not want to say what the book says to say. And increasingly one finds on church websites doubts about anything and everything that we might do, all to be set aside in the name of Inclusion.

That someone who is an Anglican might find this excluding is entirely the point. And the signs are disturbing. Derek Olsen throws down the gauntlet, saying that commitment to the 1979 BCP is non-negotiable, and on the one hand the various concurrences (from, among others, Bryan Owen and Tony Hunt, as well as the many comments on the article itself, and a separate opinion from Tony Clavier) are gratifying, giving hope that preservation and true revision of our book may prevail, I also have to fear that, in spite of the vigorous opposition, the church establishment will see to it that this opposition is dismissed as regressive and that problem liturgies will be pushed through because they are objected to. And I would assume that, should this not come to pass, the current pattern of widespread disobedience as to the rubrics and liturgical canons will see even more tolerance (and implicit promotion) in this or that diocese and parish. Obedience, after all, is only for traditionalist and conservative dissidents; progressives are authorized by their sense of righteous progress to break any rule that stands between them and Inclusion. It indeed hardly seems necessary to develop liturgies for same-sex marriages, for instance, given that they are already being performed without benefit of canon.

The Idol of Inclusion, it appears, demands as a sacrifice any kind of institutional character; and our liturgies, it seems to me, are about all that is left beyond mere organizational bonds which hold us in a common religious consciousness. It is time to topple this false god. Christianity is not about inclusion, but about incorporation; and in our church, incorporation is through being bound in common worship. And in that worship is bound, not just across place, but through time. I cannot say it enough: anamnesis is the core of Christian worship, and constant change and constant deviation work against memory. When our church cannot remember what to pray from one town to the next and from one week to the next, we forget who we are. We are not here merely to make people feel good about coming in the door; we are here to change those who enter into Christians. And for us Anglican Christians, part of that change is being bound into the cycle of liturgy that dates back to our founding as a separate church, and which has roots as deep as liturgy goes back in time, all the way back to that upper room and through every sanctuary since.

Ordinariately, Part 1

As the ordinariate continues to take form and the new year rolls over, we have the usual annual outbursts of triumphalism from the various sides.

Things are more muted from the ECUSA establishment side, possibly because the likelihood of triumph in the courts is set against the relentless decline in numbers. And then there are these issues:

• The obsession with homosexuality: In the Diocese of Delaware they started off the new year with a civil union in church, notwithstanding that I don't see where the canons or the prayer book actually authorize any such service. But hey, Delaware wasn't the first to jump the gun. Of course, it's a very safe bet that the next General Convention will push that authorization through, now that threefour dioceses have been chased off. Which takes us to:


• Inclusion and the march of heresy: A big topic in the past year has been the push for Communion WithOut Baptism, or more accurately described, the offering of communion to non-Christians. Now, the restriction of communion to those within the church can be traced straight back to St. Paul, and really the arguments seem to boil down to the rather thin belief that we might offend someone if we say that communion is reserved for members of the church. So as usual, inclusion means not standing for anything besides, well, inclusion, which really means only including other people who don't have standards either. This is ultimately the route to driving off anyone who has an any connection to the tradition of the church, so I don't see this reversing the decline. And it puts even more people in the position of struggling with the hierarchy. And looking further afield:


• The covenant and the communion: In spite of its rejection by most liberal churches and dioceses in the communion, the liberal organs continue to obsess about the Anglican Covenant. They hammer away at the autonomy of the national church while at the same time it is quite clear that the national polity will be used to direct the church away from traditional, orthodox positions. The response from abroad is becoming increasingly negative, as witness the recent disinvitation of our presiding bishop by the Episcopal Church of Sudan. It's hard to see how the communion can hold together. But that's OK for an ECUSA loyalist, because:


• It's General Convention time again, and that means that no Episcopalian's liturgy is safe. Or for that matter, pretty much any church teaching. It's been long acknowledged that GC is highly dysfunctional, and in spite of the many complaints about, for example, Holy Women, Holy Men, it's hard to see how the many questionable commemorations it proposes will fail ratification. The principle proposals for reforming it seem to me designed to make this sort of process failure even more the norm, by expediting the innovations coming out of the bishops and removing the brakes that the deputies had hitherto applied to them. And beyond that, the materials I've seen towards prayer book revision have been wretched: vapid and polemic at the same time. The best thing that GC could do about most issues this year would be nothing at all, except to repudiate 815's policy of refusing to deal with departing congregations. But that's unlikely to happen, because of:


• The contempt: the continuing rock-headed hatred of both extremes for each other has meant entrenchment in their respective sins. It doesn't help at all how they are in thrall to their politics. The notion that we could act like Anglicans and try to live together is out the window, at least in the places of power. And power seems very much at the core of the matter. And never mind:


• The declining numbers. Even after losing the threefour dioceses, we are seeing a decline of some 3% a year in membership and attendance.

There is an obvious message here: what we are doing now is not working. And fixing that is not a priority of our leadership. The temptation to do something alienating at GC is strong, to the end of making at least some people in the church feel good about how right-thinking they are. Actually making the church a place of worship according to the principles our own documents set forth is not only not on the agenda; the current rule seems to that principles themselves are a bad thing, because they are not inclusive. Instead there is a sort of suppressed institutional panic. The one thing that cannot happen is that the church establishment admit that they must make some concessions to the rest of the church, lest they keep driving their existing membership away as they did the three dissenting dioceses; but they realize they must do something to arrest the fall. Thus any kind of alienating change is acceptable, but conceding that they need to respect the orthodoxy said every Sunday: that is not acceptable.

The Queen of Great Britain's Christmas Message

Verbum Caro Factus Est

Meanwhile, in Atheist Land

Now that Christopher Hitchens has died and people have ceased to care much about Richard Dawkins's strident atheism, apparently others have decided they need to take up the slack. Thus we are presented, in the NYT, with a fairly tame and tired defense of atheistic morality, courtesy of one Louise M. Antony, who "teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst." She does not give me a lot of confidence in the quality of instruction there, as she skips over the whole 19th-20th century demolition of natural law with nary a mention of so crucial a figure as our old buddy Friedrich Nietzsche. On the strength of this recommendation I've taken up reading Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II by Michael Burleigh, and while I would agree that, thus far, he goes a little easy on the allies (an early section on Churchill leans to the hagiographic) the relentless listing of the atrocity-based methods of Nazi and Communist rule laves me with little doubt about their moral systems. Yes, atheists can be moral, and that's mostly because most atheists in the USA at least take their moral compass from the hands of those Enlightenment moralists who fused Christian and old pagan virtue; one doubts, however, that Marx was enamored of the Stoics. The years passed, and we all saw that, in the end, almost anything could be justified, or indeed justification set aside entirely. Natural law worked only as long as all more or less agreed on its basic principles, and in time, that agreement failed.

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post we have yet another tired atheist trope, this time in the declaration that "Celebration, despite their protests, does not belong solely to the pious." Here the question is why the irreligious should celebrate Christmas, to which this particular pious person must reply, "Madame, you may celebrate, but you do not observe Christmas." We of course must be trotted through all the tired old saws about how it's really a co-opted pagan holiday anyway (which may or may not be true) and how it's about family and stuff, and one longs for Linus to set Charlie Brown straight again for another year. As with nearly everything about Christian holidays, it's all about anamnesis, the annual recollection of the miracle of the incarnation, how God hallowed human flesh to the utmost and set us on the road to Calvary and redemption. All that family stuff is nice if your family is pleasant and hell if they aren't, and giving presents can likewise cut either way depending upon how you feel about shopping. But it's all supplementary to the real observance of the feast. Our atheist is sentimental; we are faithful. There is a great and unbridgeable gulf between the two.

Pantheist Broadcasting Service

So here I am in the living room, having made my squash and shrimp bisque (recipe to follow), and I've turned on WETA, the local PBS station. And they're showing Journey of the Universe, which at first seems to be some sort of Grand Science Survey a la Carl Sagan's old Cosmos series. However, the film's thesis, it appears, is founded in an expression of religion: Brian Swimme, the scientist you see on screen, is frequently identified as a pantheist, and the theologian you don't see, at least in the first episode, is Mary Evelyn Tucker, who is strongly connected to evolutionary and environmental theology.

Swimme's earlier book, The Universe Is a Green Dragon, expresses the view that there is a teleology to cosmic history. You can read this excerpt to get a flavor of the thing. What is striking isn't so much the religious spin he puts on the facts of cosmology, but that PBS is so willing to present this stuff in this way. It's hard to imagine John Polkinghorne stood up in front of the camera to present his very Anglican and very Christian view of the same topics, and not just because he isn't as handsome as Swimme, or for that matter as Deepak Chopra, whose Hindu-esque/new-age take on Christianity also saw PBS airtime. It's rather obvious that the public television people are uncomfortable with letting Christianity express itself on their airwaves, except as a historical relic (any number of "historical Jesus" programs) or as the source of aesthetic outpourings (Sister Wendy and various musical presentations). But they aren't uncomfortable with religion when it makes nothing more than impersonal demands which happen to already line up with their subculture's mores.

In the case of the program at hand, those demands are environmentalist, and never mind the irony that Tucker herself admits elsewhere that pantheist religion has a poor environmental record. Environmentalism traces rather plainly into Christianity: it is from thence that the obligation to manage Creation rightly springs, even though the expression comes at a certain distance. It's rather ironic that Swimme's theses can be taken in a decidedly anti-environmentalist direction, considering the emphasis he puts on the inexorability of evolutionary development. It is surely the case that we can screw up the earth enough so that we cannot live on it, but not enough so that nothing can live on it, in which case one assumes that Life will try again and replace us with something which it hopes will be less destructive. Personally I find Pokinghorne's anthropic analysis to make far more religious sense: if the universe "wants" sentient beings, there's no particular reason for it to want them. And there's no strong cosmological argument against the possibility that, absent the Apocalypse, humanity will live and die alone on this planet, with nothing to show the rest of the universe except a tiny handful of space probes which may well travel on into the void unnoticed, and an electronic whisper into the ether that goes unheard before it is silenced. Is that what the universe really wants?

Two Days, One Not Infamous

There's a limit to how much an Anglican should spend on the new Roman mass translation that English-speaking Catholics switched to on Lent 1 of this year. It's not as bad as the old, pedestrian version, with its occasional egregious misrepresentation of scripture, but it isn't good either: nobody noticed that one needs to use English syntax as well as English vocabulary (and never mind "consubstantial"), and the problems with the Latin text are faithfully reproduced. It perhaps represents a break from the ecclesioclasm of a generation back, but to suggest that it is going to break Catholics of rushing through mass as quickly as possible so they can get to their Sunday shopping, or that they are going to start having kids in sufficiency to supply the altar with priests and the schools with nuns: I don't see that happening. An Anglican converting, I suspect, is going to be stuck with most of the same RC theological and practical issues.

My traddie acquaintances are all for it, of course, topped with some degree of longing for Tridentine Latin. Not that they are SSPX/V sedevacantists; they aren't that rebellious. But it is striking the degree to which an anti-establishment contrarianism colors them, and I have to suspect that the fact of them having all been betrayed by the Episcopal Church enters into this. Of course our grip on the establishment was broken back in the sixties, much as we continue to delude ourselves otherwise; we are really incapable of putting pressure on the political establishment anymore, and we have become increasing divided in our subservience to social liberal interests on the one side and neocons on the other. But the liberal capture of church polity continues to make the faithful life difficult, and it is understandable that people give up and go elsewhere.

Once elsewhere, though, the craziness bursts forth. One of the things that I find striking is how often this sort of conversion is accompanied by an attachment to political revisionism as well, and aside from the occasional Marxist, there seems to be a strong attraction to American right wingery: paleoconservatism, or its cousin libertarianism. And that leads to a striking susceptibility to crank theories. So every December 7th rolls around, and one of these guys puts up his inevitable post advocating the old theory that FDR deliberately provoked the Pearl Harbor attack in order to pull the USA into the war. The centerpiece of this conspiracy theory is Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit, which any genuine historian finds faulty to the core. It's easy to find fault with Stennitt's claims: the McCollum memo does not support his interpretation, and his claims about allied code reading simply are not true. A set of fringe theorists making questionable claims is not good enough reason to abandon the orthodox theory: that while we did put pressure on the Japanese, their military considered us a threat anyway and might just as well have attacked without the pressuring; that the surprise at Pearl Harbor was paradoxically made possible by the fact that the chain of command did not ensure readiness because the expectation of attack was so high, they presumed that obvious preparation would be made; that FDR did want to go to war against Germany, but was surprised that Germany would make this possible by (for once) honoring treaties and declaring war on the US on Japan's behalf.

Not surprisingly, these people don't like JFK and are willing believe in assassination conspiracies about him. The fact, unfortunately, is that JFK was the model of a modern American Catholic, and these traddies are not. Maybe they're conservative, maybe they aren't, but they take the more classically Catholic position that the pope is a point of loyalty, not someone to be obeyed. One also imagines that the average American Catholic is of a more pragmatic view on politics, and is not wedded to the hyper-Enlightenment rationality of libertarianism, which really doesn't take sin seriously enough. It is entirely germane that that the doctrines of American conservatism are more powerful than the teaching of the church, so that when the Vatican insists on the obligations of societies, through their governments, fulfill their obligation to take care of the poor, the traddies go through contortions to push this away from the teaching authority which they would otherwise ascribe to the church.

I've not been able to turn off my Protestantism anyway. But it seems to me that there is something fundamentally wrong with a viewpoint which is controlled by a doctrine of fringiness.

A Glance at the Door

Advent 1 came, and the Roman Catholics switched to their more accurate but excessively Latinate new rite, and we quite predictably started off with Helmsley (warning: way over-the-top arrangement), and for whatever reason did two verses of Veni Immanuel instead of the Kyrie, and truncated the sequence hymn, and finally we got to the prayers. And here I was put on the spot: I was called upon the previous week to chant them, but what I was given was none of the forms from the BCP. It was some text from who knows where, gassy and trite, constructed of theological cliches. It failed to satisfy the rubrics, which specify a list of subjects about which prayers are to be made, and it indulged in the presently fashionable practice of refusing to use pronouns for the Godhead. This at least I dealt with by singing in English instead of Theocant, for which sin I was taken to task at coffee hour by a lay adherent of this practice. There was nothing to be done, however, for the failure to observe the rubrics; I toyed with the idea of inserting some scraps of Form I but decided it would be too conspicuous a demonstration.

I had wanted to avoid participating in this at all, but what with Thanksgiving and the general chaos of my life I never got around to demurring until too late. I did find myself telling my remonstrator that I would not be chanting the text again, not because of the emasculation, but because of the rubrical violation. But an attempt to briefly touch upon why I do not accept the neuterist theory of god-language ended up with the other person gleefully proclaiming herself to be a heretic, and then justifying this with "broad church", as if the label were accurate rather than ironic. For of course, broad churchmanship is that most strongly associated with theological adventurism and an inability to live within the canons.

The priest said nothing to me, but then he and I never talk about anything substantial. It is the first time I have had a priest who made me wary of theological discourse. The search for a new rector fills me with deep unease, as I sense that there is a will to steer the parish further from the Zion of Al Kimel's day, and into the surrounding hills where we can be made safe for Inclusivity. I am also beginning to wonder how much longer I will be able to say the words of the liturgy. I stopped attempting to follow the BCP revision materials because they have been uniformly terrible: simultaneously pedestrian and overwritten, and full of every manner of theological innovation. But we cannot talk about these things in any orderly fashion, for fear of offending someone other than a creedal Christian. Inclusivity means never being able to do theology, because theology is exclusive. It really bugs me that nobody seems to be able to simply do what is before them on the page; if the variety of official rites already weakens the unitive significance of a common liturgy, how much more so when, increasingly, priests present the laity with words which are not ours.

I had started on the road to a resignation that, though there was little hope of reversing the trend towards a fraudulent latitudinarianism, I at least could hope to stay with my church to the end of my days. Now it seems this is not to be. And on top of this, my parish is failing quickly. Attendance is off 40% from a decade ago, and is less than half of our peak in 2007; we have run a deficit for at least half the year. The surrounding parishes are not encouraging, and nearly every problem I've mentioned here is emphasized in The Other Diocese. To no small degree it is bloody-minded loyalty which keeps me in an Episcopal pew, but I have no loyalty to liturgies which are not ours; and I cannot have any loyalty to a bishop who cannot say the creed without crossed fingers and who willy-nilly ignores the canons and rubrics.

And thus, I look over at the door, and contemplate the possibility of passing through that gateway, out of this church.

Time to Quash This

Diocesan conventions are the warm-up for General Convention, at least when it comes to the resolutions. Of late a couple of interesting cases have come up, neither of which bodes all that well.

Down in Atlanta they haven't had their convention yet, so this list of proposed resolutions at least theoretically could go down to uniform defeat. That won't happen: boilerplate in support of suicide prevention, immigrants (legal or not), parental leave, health insurance, and against bad immigration law, human trafficking, and the death penalty are likely to be ineffectual; but if one were to publicly come out against passing them, for whatever reason, it would look bad. It's the second to last proposal, however, that has caught a lot of eyes: the Rev. Benno D. Pattison, rector of Epiphany, Atlanta, proposes to "appoint a committee of discernment overseen by our Bishop, to consider these matters as a means to honor the contributions of Pelagius and reclaim his voice in our tradition." Now Pelagianism doesn't have a good rep, even as the various historical revisionists argue whether he actually held the views assembled under that heading. One has to wonder whether this is as much about rehabilitating the heresy as it is pardoning the man. It's easy to ridicule, and the usual places wasted no time in doing so. Update: Over at Catholicity and Covenant it is pointed out that the Pelagians are denounced by name in Article 9.

All of this is a sideshow, for the real menace comes from Connecticut. Its convention seems to have spent less time on fluff self-affirmations and more on administrative housework. But they managed to push through a couple of resolutions that will cause some trouble. You will not be surprised to learn that they now allow clergy in the diocese to act as agents of the state in performing same-sex marriages. It can be assumed that all liberal dioceses will eventually take such action, so it's not surprising that Conn. is taking steps now, though the Usual loud types will go on about it. Far more troublesome is a resolution declaring "a year for theological and catechetical reflection, dialogue, discussion, conversation and listening among parishes of this diocese on “Communion of the Unbaptized” [welcoming all, baptized or not, to Holy Communion]". Readers may remember that the reaction to Derek Olsen's series against this was not all that well-received in some parts. That was simple discussion, but as Rev. Dr. Mom says in Derek's post on the resolution, "dialogue" is a word that should raise a red flag to anyone committed to orthodox positions:

And I’m afraid that you are correct about conversation meaning “we’re going to talk until you see that you’re wrong.” In the forum held the evening before resolutions came to the floor, there were lots of comments that implied that CWOB was a foregone conclusion and we should all get with the program.

It's pretty obvious what the pattern will be, unless the laity step in to quash it: there will be a great deal of talking in which the innovators will use the word "inclusion" in every sentence and utterly ignore the orthodox position; it will be implied that defenders of the orthodox doctrine are hateful snobs; the innovators will declare that the Holy Spirit has moved everyone to a consensus for CWOB; and eventually heavy pressure will be placed upon those upholding the traditional and scriptural teaching on the matter. Even if the laity manage to quash this (because this is the sort of thing that comes out of the clerisy), it's likely to be the case that priests will get away with CWOB invitations, and attempts to discipline them will likely bring us to a Tennis-like declaration that it's not part of our core doctrine.

Somewhere along the line here, the liberals who say they are orthodox are going to have to stand up and be counted. CWOB is so fundamentally opposed to orthodox Christian thinking about salvation, the church, and the sacraments that it has to be stopped. They are going to have to summon up the nerve to tell the radicals that we already have a means to inclusion that we've been given from the beginning. It's called baptism, and for those who never crack a prayer book, it starts on page 299.

Trumps

Fleming Rutledge, one might expect if you've ever read any of her preaching, is no fan of Marcus Borg. And especially she is not a fan of a catchphrase he has taken up: "Jesus trumps the Bible." Now it may occur to you that she is criticizing this out of context, but, well, let's have it in his own words:

And because Christians find the primary revelation of God in a person and not in a book, Jesus is more central than the Bible. Jesus trumps the bible; when they disagree, Jesus wins. Yet, of course, we know about him primarily through the Bible, and in particular through the New Testament. (The Heart of Christianity, p. 81)

He then appeals to the central modernist paradigm, for the next section of the book begins with an exposition of images of God, taking for granted that a traditionalist image is unacceptable:

The first reason that a historical-metaphorical approach matters is that an earlier image of Jesus and the image of the Christian life that goes with it have become unpersuasive to millions of people in the last century. (p. 81)

And that leads right to the issue I invariably have at this point: why and how should we care about their disbelief?

Here I and Rutledge take a slight divergence, though I think it is one of emphasis rather than a difference of opinion. Her reaction to hearing Borg speak focuses on the problem of actually constructing this alternate image, particularly on the distinction Borg makes between a pre- and post-Easter Jesus. She is absolutely right in denying this distinction, and her grounds for that denial is spot on-- and really, right up the alley that Borg is trying to argue. We don't have any pre-Easter documents about Jesus, not unless you want to work with the Old Testament, which I'm pretty sure contains a lot of the material that Jesus is supposed to trump (and I'll bet that Paul's exposition of sexual morality is another). The gospels, though, are emphatically post-Easter documents, and it is they that we go to for word of the pre-Easter Jesus. Thus we see that Jesus through post-Easter eyes; the texts themselves work against such a separation.

But it seems to me that beyond this, the key phrase is towards the end of the first section I quoted: "we know about him primarily through the Bible." Phrased that way, it carries the implication that there is some other source. But what is that source? Well, there is the church, but given his devaluation of tradition I would say that her teachings aren't what he had in mind. Borg, at least in this book, takes a while to tip his hand, but several pages later, having stumbled over the Chalcedonian problem of the natures of Christ with giving it a mention, he finally get to his new authority, in analyzing the messianic titles and language of Jesus:

First, this language is post-Easter. A strong majority of mainline scholars think it unlikely that Jesus said these things about himself; he probably did not speak of himself as the Messiah, the Son of God, the Light of the World, and so forth. Rather, this is the voice of the community in the years and decades after Easter. (pp. 86-87)

A quick check in an online bible search discloses that Jesus does say exactly that he is the Son of God and the Light of the World, so clearly we must conclude from this that the wisdom of the scholars, some of the scholars at least, is greater than the text of the Bible. I don't think much of this, and neither does Rutledge: "It has been shown over and over again that attempts to construct a “historical Jesus” or “real Jesus” apart from the faith-based witness of Scripture end in failure because such attempts are grounded, not in the text, but in the bias of those who undertake them." Indeed, that qualifier "mainline" is necessary because a survey shows a distinct lack of consensus on the matter: one could indeed assume that Borg identifies the mainline precisely in its agreement with this thesis.

If an unexamined life isn't worth living (an exaggeration, I would say), then unexamined scholarship is worse than worthless. It's impossible for me to read the "mainline" material and not come away with the conclusion that it's largely worthless because it begs the question. It already knows that Jesus cannot be a miracle worker, cannot be aware (somehow) of his divinity, cannot indeed be divinely born of a virgin. OK, so where's the proof of all these "cannots"? Well, Borg, at least in close proximity to the passages I've quoted, doesn't say, but one gets the sense that the scriptural God is distasteful. But like all good modernists, he fails to put his own predilections on the spot. If the problem with traditional Christianity is that it doesn't "work" for everybody (and within it's own schema, that's not a problem ), the problem with the modernists is that they won't admit that their scheme doesn't work for everyone either, and that the traditionalist scheme does work for probably the majority of Christendom. The relativism that they try to paper over this with doesn't wash: they really believe that the traditional teachings are wrong for everyone. So the big issue in this is really the whole problem of doubt, the unexamined and taken-for-granted doubt that is at the root of the modernist program. It is that doubt which is the true teaching of the moderns, and it is a teaching that does not move me, for I do not doubt, not on their terms.

Not That We Work for the Guy

When I go to the church website, I almost never look at what's on the front page, because 99% of the time my next act is to click on "A-Z Directory" on the way to the "Research and Statistics" subsection. So it failed to catch my eye that this was prominently displayed:



The cadence is that familiar prayer book style, but if you will turn in your 1979 BCP to page 821, you will see that the standard "you/who/do/through" form as shown on the website is missing the last part, for the prayer continues: "through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." Not surprisingly, though, the Forces of Ridicule at StandFirm noticed it. And while I think the "He Who Must Not Be Named" dig is overmuch, one does have to wonder what possessed someone to leave that bit behind when they laid the text on the front page of the website.

Meanwhile, various people can, I suppose, sleep a little more easily, knowing that the Executive Council has rejected the Anglican Covenant and is putting it before General Convention next year, expecting the same rejection. I suppose someone felt that they had to go through the motions, but everyone knew several years back that the the church establishment was never going to submit to any sort of outside discipline, especially since the cause and nature of said discipline has been known since 2003. I don't need to spell out the hypocrisy of it all over again, but it seems to me that there's another wrinkle to it that may not have caught everyone's notice.

At the moment the anti-Lawrence effort is still in some early stage of bureaucratic digestion. I think it would be a very bad thing for Lawrence to be deposed through this process, but if the expulsion were to succeed, and GC specifically denounces the covenant, then the way would be open for deposing every bishop and seizing control of every diocese which signed on to it.

I really do not recall the part where Jesus said to act like this, and I do remember the part where he said not to.

UPDATE: Word came late yesterday that the prayer has been fixed. I still wonder how it was put up wrong, but there is only so much malice one is entitled to presume.

Finding Lawrence a Griddle

Nobody should be surprised that the conservative Anglican blogosphere is ringing with the news that charges have been brought against Bishop Lawrence of South Carolina. The list of charges and evidence runs to sixty-three pages, and much of it is either obviously rubbish or represents a very curious perspective on the accusers. For instance, charges 9 through 11 are basically accusing him of associating with undesirables and holding views not in line with the progressive agenda; there's nothing wrong with this, not considering how the progressives came to power.

The most serious charges are the first five, which step directly up to the polity issues in the church today. These are what manifestly stand behind how many of the liberals understand the issue: they think that Lawrence intends to follow Fort Worth, San Joaquin, and Pittsburgh in leaving the denomination. That seems to me to explain half the reason for the timing of this, the other half being the Title IV changes which took effect in the summer and which set up the process for prosecuting Lawrence. The other half the reason, I am guessing, is that the course of legal decisions in the state is presenting the risk that the hierarchy up north might not prevail in a lawsuit over possession of properties; the strategy for preventing those losses, therefore, would be to place a bishop acceptable to the progressives on the throne preemptively.

The question of strategy inevitably leads to the question of who is pressing the charges, and while this is not being disclosed, all sign point back to the Episcopal Forum of South Carolina, an AAC-style parachurch group which has strong connections to St. Mark's Chapel, a extra-diocesan church plant which Lawrence has refused to acknowledge as a mission (that's Charge 8). The congregation was started by a retired priest not resident in the diocese (thus protecting him from Lawrence's discipline), and it's not to hard to figure out that part of rationale is to devil the bishop in some manner, perhaps in the manner of making one of the present charges possible. At any rate there is a great lack of transparency, particularly as to the PB's participation. One of the complaints about the new canon is the poor process it presents, and indeed, if you believe various analyses, KJS is already supposed to have become involved by this point.

But one gathers, based on the history of these things, that process isn't going to matter much. After all, the deposition of Duncan proceeded in the face of lacking the requisite approval of the consulted bishops. Unless there is a major revolt by the moderates, Lawrence will be subjected to something of a kangaroo court and be removed, and the diocese is highly likely to leave anyway at that point. And as a lot of people have said, the church really cannot afford to lose the only domestic diocese that is showing substantial gains in membership and attendance.

Summer Ends, But Not the Doldrums

Things have gotten slack in the Anglican blogging world, so that the best I can observe about actual events is that the Diocese of New York coadjutor slate is made up of what seems to be the standard set of candidates for a liberal diocese these days:

• one white guy shaved bald (bonus points for the goatee)
• one white woman with an upper-crusty big hairdo
• one black guy (also covering the foreign-born slot)
• one lesbian
• one guy who actually looks like a traditional bishop candidate and happens to be a bishop now

It's hard to get excited about it: everyone except the last makes the ritual obeisance to the Spirit of Inclusion, so I would guess that the bishop will remain bishop of where he is now instead of being enthroned in Harlem. I assume if they elect the lesbian that the Stand Firm people will be briefly distracted from the string of neo-con/Libertarian political posts and will make their ritual denunciations, and that the diocese will move on to uncanonically marrying homosexuals out in the open instead of behind church doors (if indeed they are bothering to be so circumspect now). I cannot imagine in any case that much will change, no matter who is elected: numbers in the diocese will continue to decline as before, in a smog of upper-middle self-congratulation.

Meanwhile the ordinariate is receiving a second ECUSA parish. It is simply pitiful to hear the goings-on about this from the traddy Roman side, as though the influx of a small number of Continuing parishes is going to have any effect in the great sea of American liturgical indifference. It is at least encouraging to see new churches and renovations which pay any attention to artistic merit, but the level of churchmanship still seems stuck at "wham/bam/thank you--" well, not "ma'am" but you get the idea. About the only thing I can hope for is that the infection of RC liturgical notions can be halted.

Speaking of which: so here it is Sunday morning, and guitar and hymnal services have been combined for the summer, and the organist can't be there this week. So we sing one of the listed hymns and the doxology, unaccompanied, and then nerve is lost on the final hymn and it gets replaced with a Cursillo thing which most people don't know. And you know what? The congregation sings far more enthusiastically on the unaccompanied hymns than it does on the guitar songs. Now this was trending to an older crowd, but I'm going to guess that if the kids aren't singing the hymns, they aren't singing the guitar songs either.

And thus ends a rather rambling blog post.

On the Other Hand

If I came upon a service in which the "creed" which Bryan Owen quotes here was recited, I'd get up and walk out. Conspicuously.

How Can Anyone Say "Credo"?

One should not be surprised to find over at the Episcopal Cafe this sort of routine liberal paean to unorthodoxy, I suppose. Personally I think that someone who is expressing these sentiments ought not to be a candidate for ordination.

Meanwhile (courtesy of Bryan Owen) we have a superb essay from Matt Gunter on the centrality of the creeds and their importance as a focus for Christian belief. I would like to elaborate on two points he raises, and then address one of my own.

First, in answer to the question, But, isn't one's faith about one's relationship with the living God and with God's children. Can’t we just say Love God and love your neighbor and leave it at that? , he writes in part:

It is inadequate to appeal to a simplistic pietism, whether in its more conservative or more liberal versions, that says "Don't bother me with doctrine, just give me Jesus". We have no access to Jesus other than the Gospels which are soaked in interpretation (doctrine) of who Jesus is and why it matters. And the creeds are the Christian guide to understanding God in light of Jesus.

To this I would add two things. The word "relationship" is (as this mathematician constantly finds himself pointing out) only the context of the issue; the need is of course to put oneself into right relationship with God. And if you take John 3:16 seriously, an important, perhaps crucial component of that relationship is beliecing the right thing about Jesus. A Christian needs to be able to answer the challenge "who do you say that I am?" correctly.

And where do we get the answers to that question? Well, the church remembers them. I seemingly cannot emphasize the centrality of anamnesis enough in this: the church is our conduit back the the historical truth of Jesus. The creed, besides its own content, stands as a synecdoche for the recollected truth of the Church. The all-too-obvious problem with a lot of the doubting is that it reflects listening to what the World says about Jesus. And not just the World, but a world which has turned away from Jesus and rejects Him, that is, the world of modernist, Enlightenment-driven skepticism. It doesn't seem reasonable to me to prefer a voice which has rejected Jesus over that which is specifically commissioned to recollect Him.

Second, he raises the question, "But isn’t the language of the Creed poetic, rich in metaphors?" I would like to rephrase his answer more forcefully. Some of it is metaphorical, but some of it is not. He says:

To say that all language about God acting in history, e.g., the virginal conception, the incarnation, and the bodily resurrection as historical, physical events, is metaphorical and only true in some spiritual sense is to try to be more spiritual than the God we know though Jesus has deigned to be.

I would put this more strongly. Those who first said the creed did not mean anything in the least bit metaphorical when they said that "Jesus[...] was crucified, died, and was buried." If a person says otherwise, they are not telling the truth. So if we say those same words, but mean them "poetically", we deny that Jesus was so executed; we essentially falsify them. So we move to the surrounding words. Nobody at Nicea held that the statements in Matthew and Luke concerning the Virgin Birth to be metaphorical in the sense that they accepted the assertion that Jesus was born through the normal biological processes in which some actual human male fathered him. Nobody then understood the phrase "rose from the dead" as implying that the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in the gospels didn't relate an encounter that was physical in the only sense that matters. (Indeed, the passages in John seem specifically intended to argue against any such interpretation.)

Metaphor is not a "get out of meaning free" card in any case. The utility of figures of speech presupposes that some figure conveys the meaning adequately, and that others do not. But the intent, after all, belongs to the speaker. Gnosticism may have been fading by the 400s, but there is not any doubt that the bishops were intent on excluding gnostic readings of scripture. No bishop at Nicea, not even Arius, wanted to leave open the possibility that Jesus remained dead or that he had an ordinary, earthly, biological father. Saying the creed "metaphorically" so as to assert those things is an act of intellectual dishonesty: it proclaims a unity of belief which the creed's formulators absolutely rejected. Not only that, but the need for metaphor is entirely lacking. One does not need figures of speech to relate the heterodox theories about Jesus, so one might as well speak what one believes in a manner which does not invite the false interpretation that one accepts the orthodox interpretation.

Finally, my own point: there isn't anything unreasonable about the expectation that people who cannot say the words ought either to find another job (if they are clerics) or another church (if they are not), or they should allow themselves to be instructed by the church and fix the defects in their theology. All of this is very much about the church as an institution, and it seems inevitably to trace back to power, and thence to politics. In my own church the creeds are connected directly to sacramental participation (as the Apostle's Creed is prerequisite to baptism) and to sacramental order (as the Nicene Creed appears in the order for consecration of a bishop). They are what we, individually and corporately, believe. Liberals within the church have long looked to the institution as a source of moral authority to push moral causes; but regardless of the other reasons why that authority has been eroded, the fundamental hypocrisy of clerics standing up and saying, "we believe, but I do not believe," also weakens the church's authority. A reasonable person, a not especially sophisticated reasonable person can see that the emperor lacks clothing: such a cleric does not teach with the church's authority, but only with his own. One can readily progress to the inferred teaching that the church has no real authority in the first place.

Blue Pencilling the Creed

From a comment in the Lead:

Today, in a class that explores our faith and our ministries, I gave the class a copy of the Nicene Creed and a pencil. The directions for the exercise: draw a line through any part of this creed you do not believe. Not a single person failed to strike out about a third to half. One left only, I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. The composition of the group: a retired professor of theology and church history, 2 clergy, 4 Episcopalians, 2 ELCA Lutherans, 1 Presbyterian. The simple fact is, that on any given Sunday, if you asked a congregation how many present believe the entire Nicene Creed as it is written, my best estimate is fewer than 25% would say so.

I really think that a deacon should not be encouraging people to strike out portions of the creed; or at least, if he do so, then he ought to be challenging them as to why they think they feel entitled to reject them. Well, since he's in another diocese and a deacon to boot, I don't suppose I have to worry about refusing communion with him.

Not a Prophet

I am not a prophet. I am sure that most of you already knew that, but I just wanted to get that straight from the start.

Harold Camping is not a prophet either. For those of you who may have forgotten him, or who have never heard of him, he was the radio preacher who predicted that the world would end on May 21st. He had also predicted the end would come in 1988, and in 1994, and now he has moved the date to October 21st. After three failures I think it is safe to say that he is not a prophet.

Hananiah, in our first lesson, was a false prophet. Some people claim that Harold Camping's stroke which he suffered about three weeks ago is akin to Hananiah's fate, but since I am not a prophet, I cannot offer an opinion on that. Jeremiah, in this long passage of which I have subjected you to as little as I thought would make sense, has put on himself a yoke at the command of the LORD, as a symbol of Nebuchadnezzar's subjugation of Judah, a yoke which will eventually be broken, but not yet. We do not know why Hananiah takes it upon himself to say otherwise, but his words, his acts do not prevail against the true word which comes of God.

Prophecy is repeating the word of God; false prophecy is daring to speak in the name of God, but putting your own words in His mouth. There is an appalling lot of the latter going about. Either that, or we've gotten extremely fortunate: when I was writing this I typed “prophetic voice” and “episcopal” into Google, and it told me it had found fifty-four thousand results. And just for fairness' sake, I put in “catholic” instead of “episcopal” and got two hundred and eight thousand. The new version of the church calendar that has gone into trial use seems to identify political activists as “prophetic voices”, or in the case of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, unabashedly designates them as “liberators and prophets”. Personally, I am skeptical. However worthy the cause, I am not convinced that all who uphold it do so as messengers of God.. Our allies are not all Balaam, driven by the LORD to speak His word and to lay blessings upon Israel.

No, I do not think we have entered a new age of prophecy; I think we have entered a new age of hubris. God seems to have an awful lot to say about politics, and especially about the economy and about taxes and regulation and public policy. It cannot all be true, and I am inclined to believe that little of it is true. “Render unto Caesar what is due Caesar,” Jesus said, referring to a denarius with Caesar's profile upon it, and yet he did not say whether that very denarius truly belonged to Caesar. If Jesus could be so cryptic, how plain-spoken are those who claim to follow him.

And last week you heard an anthem to the trinity; but what only we in the choir saw was that there was a second set of words, words which did not pray to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. They could not bring themselves to say “Father”, so they addressed their first prayer to the “Creator”, setting themselves against the ancient judgement that creation was the act not only of the Father, but was accomplished through the Son and the Spirit as well, Just as redemption comes from and through all three persons of the Godhead. But this refusal to say the words of scripture is also a kind of false prophecy, speaking our words rather than His.

Now, I do not number myself among those conservative Protestants who hold that there is no new prophecy. But I myself am not a prophet, nor even a dresser of sycamore trees (as Amos said of himself). I am a man, baptized, who sings in the choir and who has been allowed to speak a sermon. God does not dictate these words to me in the night. Perhaps they are spoken in accordance to His will, or perhaps not; that is why I pray as I do before I preach. I believe that I have been called to speak to you; I have believed so for some decades; but the words are mine. And I am given to assume that this is true of most preachers, and of political activists, and of all the rest who speak in the name of the Godhead or in the name of the truth which is His being.

And yet Jesus in today's gospel also speaks of prophets. He speaks of the grace which those who repeat his message pass on to those who heed them. Jesus says these words to the disciples, in preparation for sending them out to preach among the Jews; earlier in this chapter he gives them instructions, and then teaching and advice for their journey. In this passage we must remember that the prophets and righteous ones being welcomed are the disciples themselves. He reassures them, and he reassures us: the disciples, and those who speak the Word in this age, but also those who hear them, and in hearing them hear God. When we speak the Word, we speak for the Word, and those who hear that Word hear the Word Himself, Jesus the Christ. And those who uplift those who speak that word are blessed, because they welcome the Christ as they welcome his ministers. And therefore we must hold ourselves open to hearing that word, and open to those who bring it to us. Though we must turn a deaf ear upon that which is false, we must not shut ourselves off entirely.

So keep a glass of cold water at hand for Christ's ministers-- or better still, welcome them by keeping your pledge up-to-date for the summer!

Third Time the Charm

Word has reached me that Al Kimel has been ordained again, this time in a complicated three-way arrangement between the OCA, ROCOR, and the Antiochians, the latter being where he is going to function as a western rite priest.

His second ordination hurt, and though he had cut off communication between us, word did get back to him and he eventually published an apologia if not an apology. Now, I have little use for the argument he made, and if I have not formally forgiven him, time has put the hurt in the past. But it is all vacated, so that when he said

I have never, of course, denied the presence of God within Anglicanism nor have I denied God’s use of my priestly ministry during my twenty-five years as a priest in the Episcopal Church. I rejoice that many of those whom I have been privileged to serve testify that I have been a vessel of God’s love and holy presence in their lives. It is unfortunate that Charlie has interpreted my conversion to Catholicism as a denial of such grace. Perhaps even more unfortunate is his apparent misunderstanding of the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church on the reality of God’s grace within the Churches of the Reformation.

... my unwillingness to rely on his exposition of that "authentic teaching" is now made all the more easier by his abandonment of that authority for yet a third church. I've said it so many times, but it bears saying again: there is something fundamentally Protestant, and deeply unfaithful, about wandering from church to church based on one's own theological discernment. I regard this as one of the most spiritually dangerous practices out there, and I've seen so many people who have been deeply hurt by it, some to the point of apostasy. ECUSA may be the Whore of Babylon, but she's my whore, and I was called to her; I may eventually be driven elsewhere, but it won't because I went church shopping, nor because I divorced her in favor of another.

Your Anglican Covenant at Work

The Moral Perils of the Consumer Church

The stuff appearing in The Lead on the Episcopal Cafe is often mostly useful in tracking clericalist interest in (a) homosexuality and (b) making sure that the rest of the communion can't tell them what to do, but other little tidbits do manage to squeeze their way in. So in a collection of various links they come up with the following story from the Financial Post: Fair-trade coffee producers often end up poorer.

What's going on here? Well, here we have upper-middles, SWPLs if you like, who want to make sure that they aren't exploiting anyone in the addiction to caffeine, nor contributing to world pesticide and fertilizer usage. So we have all this certification corporate bureaucracy to assure them that their choice of Organic Gumutindo from Uganda is more virtuous than (say) Maxwell House or Safeway store brand grown who knows where. Well. Really poor farmers can't afford pesticides or fertilizer, so what they grow is organic by default. They also can't afford the certification fees required so that they can get that all-reassuring claim to be organic. Meanwhile the fair trade label typically involves membership in a cooperative or some other corporation whose administrative mouths need to be fed too, thus siphoning off profit which otherwise could go to the farmer. And you should not be surprised to learn that the certification and cooperative organizations are not free of corruption. The upshot of this is that on the average small farmers who stay away from the whole fair-trade/organic market are actually seeing better income than those who participate.

So in the end, what we have here is a little industry whose whole purpose is the assuage the guilty consciences of the exploitative classes--by exploiting the very people that are supposed to be helped by the program! It's like a Marxist parody made real. It's also a testimony to the upper-middle worship of credentials, but that's a whole 'nother class of sinning.

And so here we are, expected to "seek and serve Christ in all persons", to "strive for justice and peace among all people," and to "respect the dignity of every human being," in short, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and instead we get a program which isn't about that. It's about reassuring us that we are good people, or at least superior to the Baptists. Our church doesn't really have a place for the poor and troubled but it's oh so easy to find room for fair trade programs and other "think locally, act globally" ineffectualities. Lawrence Solomon writes above of trying to explain to the representative of some church group how the fair trade certification doesn't really help the farmers, to no avail:

After a long pause, the church official replied something like: “I still think the parishioners would feel better knowing that they were drinking fair-trade coffee.”

Yep, feeling better about yourself: that's what loving your neighbor is all about.