A Flock Divided

From Atlantic Monthly-

Rowan Williams—reader of Tolkien and prolific author, opponent of nuclear weapons and the Iraq War, Latin note-taker and distinguished scholar at Cambridge, husband and father—presides over 80 million Anglican believers around the world. Elected as archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, he is now, as Paul Elie describes in his March Atlantic piece, “The Velvet Reformation,” uniquely poised to guide his flock through a controversy that threatens to split it in two: whether to accept gay bishops and how to open the church to lesbian and gay members.

As the gay rights movement has come into its own over the past several decades, and as cultural norms and understanding of sexuality have evolved, many religions have had to grapple with how to address these changing frames of mind and experience. Even just within Christianity, there have been stark differences over how to address homosexuality: the Presbyterian and Congregationalist Churches, for example, have committed to embracing equal-rights for all, whereas Evangelical churches and the Roman Catholic Church have opted to hold gay people firmly at a distance. The Anglican Communion alone, Elie writes, “has sought to have it both ways: at once affirming traditional Christian notions of marriage and family, love and fidelity, and adapting them to the experiences of gay believers.”

But straddling such a tendentious fault line has not been easy. Schism seemed imminent last summer when the Anglican bishops met for their once-a-decade gathering in Canterbury. Shortly before the conference, a group of traditionalist bishops had held a rival meeting in Jerusalem, upset with what they perceived as Williams’s tolerance of gay clergy. Progressive church leaders expressed disappointment, too, after Williams decided not to invite Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the only openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, to the conference. In the end, despite a boycott by the Communion’s most conservative members, more than 600 bishops assembled and affirmed their unity and commitment to forging ahead on the issues facing the Church in the 21st century.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200902u/anglican-church