Purple shirts, funny hats, and gay people too...

Big Country's post generates this one, which will pretty much harmonize with his sentiments. Katharine Jefferts Schori (Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA) went to my school and has served on numerous committees and boards here as the Bishop of Nevada, so I've bumped into her once or twice, but not really talked to her. See, she's generally surrounded by a sycophantic mob of seminarians and faculty hoping to touch the hem of her garment or be granted some cushy national church position. I can't compete with that.

Anyway, a while ago she did a 10 questions sort of spot for the New York Times magazine, in which she implied that the Episcopal Church is losing membership in part due to the fact that our highly-educated adherents understand the pitfalls of overpopulation more clearly than our less-informed Mormon and Catholic brethren. Clearly, she didn't mean it to sound so elitist or condescending, but she said what she said. She caught the appropriate crap for that in the following week's letters to the editor (I'd link to these things, but it's old enough that the NYT wants you to pay for it now), but the point here is that she makes me a little nervous when she tackles a sensitive issue. I think she's done well on the homosexuality debate, but then again, I'm on her side.

I whole-heartedly agree with the Presiding Bishop on striving for equality for everyone in the church, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, etc.. Anyone who reads this blog knows that about me, but there it is, just to be clear. As a student at a seminary in Berkeley who hails from the South, I often find myself defending the region's conservative tendencies to West Coast cosmopolitan types, several of whom are good friends of mine. It's hard for many of them to really ingest the idea that Southern conservatives are not necessarily mean or ignorant, but are generally good people doing what they and their community believe is right. It's also hard for them to grasp that liberals are not as rare in the South as they would think.

To my mind, the chief issue behind the homosexuality debate, at least on the global Anglican scale, is Scriptural Authority. US Episcopal theologians, advocating the majority view in our church, have argued that when the Bible is unclear on an issue (or simply does not address it), we must prayerfully turn to tradition and reason for guidance. Here in the US, that has in general led to a progressively minded church which ordains women, has begun ordaining practicing homosexuals, and perhaps most radically of all, revises its liturgies on a fairly regular basis (England still relies on the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer; we use one from 1979, with a new one in the works).

For those in the Anglican Communion who see Scripture as a broader authority, the actions of our church are difficult to accept. I think Scripture is ambivalent toward homosexuality, but it's easy enough to understand the conservative viewpoint. It's the difference in the sort of authority we ascribe to the Bible that really makes this issue difficult and painful, though. The Episcopal Church's aforementioned response to the global criticism leveled in the 2004 Windsor Report (.pdf files available here), a document entitled "To Set Our Hope On Christ" (.pdf) was viewed as condescending. Many conservative Anglicans felt that the ECUSA was saying, "We're cutting edge; you're not. Some day you'll understand this. Until then, trust us." I think they're right. That is what we're saying. Some day they will understand this. At the same time, I can hardly blame them for being put off by our tone. That's why this is going to be so hard.