Family Feud Who cares about the arcane battles of Episcopal Church?

From Newsweek-

The annual convention of the Episcopal Church ended last month in Anaheim, Calif., with a whimper, despite these rather staggering announcements: it would, after years of internal battling, continue to elevate gay priests to bishops, and it would consider blessing same-sex unions in the states that allow gays and lesbians to marry. The convention—and these announcements—received a fair amount of obligatory coverage, but the news cycle quickly moved on. In the wake of that coverage I received the following e-mail from an editor: "I've been following this story and trying, without success, to think of an interesting line of argument. It's been in the news a lot lately." Right. It's hard to think of an interesting story about the Episcopal Church in America because what happens within the Episcopal Church is—frankly, and with deep apologies to all my Episcopalian friends—just not that interesting.

After years of dominance, Episcopalians have become a minority religion in America. There are just 2.4 million Episcopalians in the United States, down from 3.5 million in 2001—a 31 percent falloff. (The Episcopal Church is the American branch of the Anglican Communion, a worldwide church that has 80 million members.) By comparison, there are 8 million nondenominational Christians (a low estimate), up from 2.5 million—an explosion of 220 percent over the same period. Thanks to the Great Awakenings and the waves of immigration over the past hundred years there are exponentially more Roman Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists in America than Episcopalians. There are also—surprisingly—more Mormons, more Pentecostals, and slightly more Jews. (This last is especially interesting because at the height of 20th-century anti-Semitism, American Jews who wanted access to the highest levels of status and power would sometimes become Episcopalian. One wonders whether they would have done so had they known that they were switching from one shrinking minority religion to another.) According to the latest data from the American Religious Identification Survey, more people belong to cults and emerging religions than to the Episcopal Church.

More here-

http://www.newsweek.com/id/212713