by Harry T. Cook

[July 2008] Lacy vestments, priestly pear-shaped tones, prayer books with gilt-edged pages, solemn processions, church basements called “undercrofts,” priests’ houses called “rectories” and church lobbies called “narthexes” did not, in the end, make Anglican Episcopalians irrelevant. Each came close, but neither singly nor together did they succeed.

It took the so-called “spiritual leader” of the whole Anglican enchilada, the Most Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams, to accomplish that by leaving undone that thing which ought to have been done, viz., issuing an official invitation to the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Bishop of New Hampshire, to join all the other Anglican diocesan bishops at the once-a-decade assemblage known as the Lambeth Conference.

Archbishop Williams excluded Bishop Robinson because the former was concerned that the latter would become a distraction in that he is the first openly gay bishop in Anglican history. (Be so kind as to take careful note of the adverb in the previous sentence. It could have been “honestly” or “frankly,” because any Anglican who knows anything knows that Bishop Robinson is far from being the first gay bishop. Honor Moore took care of that by outing her late father, the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, sometime Episcopal Bishop of New York.)

In other words, if Paul Moore had been open and honest about his male lover of 30 years, he would have been a candidate for exclusion from Lambeth. It is Gene Robinson’s winning honesty that included him out.

Whatever made Rowan Williams think that by deliberately excluding Robinson would make him invisible? Not that the New Hampshire bishop made a fuss on his own behalf. He didn’t need to. When Williams let it be known that a full invitation to Robinson “would be impossible,” any fool realized that Robinson would become the story—as he has and will be.

When the history of Lambeth Conferences is comprehended—and there’s a Ph.D. dissertation waiting to be written by someone who loves mucking around in institutional irrelevance—Gene Robinson will be the main entry in the 2008 chapter. Nice work, Rowan.

Williams’ preoccupation is with the African bishops and their noisy counterparts in the United States who say they sense the sight, sound and smell of perversion in the prelatial personage of Milord New Hampshire. Why? Because “the Bible says” homosexuality is a sin against God. It says so in Exodus (written and edited circa 500 B.C.E.) and St. Paul appears to rail against it in his letter to Roman Christians (circa. + 56 C.E.), though Paul may have had male prostitution on his mind as he dictated that passage to his scribe.

Truth be told, it isn’t the homophobic American contingent that bothers Williams, it’s such African bishops as Peter Akinola of Nigeria. African Anglicans number in the millions, and new dioceses are erected all the time, even as Episcopal congregations in the United States dwindle on down the path of extinction.

Peter Akinola is open himself—open about his utter hatred of homosexual persons and open about his biblical fundamentalism. Williams can count, and when you’ve got 10 million African Anglicans up against at best two million American ones, well ...

The only way for the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (as we are officially known) to remain relevant is for its people to rise up in protest against the exclusion of Gene Robinson by refusing any longer to be known as “Anglicans” and to demand that American bishops henceforth decline to sip tea at Buckingham Palace among the pooh-bahs and to kiss Her Majesty’s hand.

U.S. Episcopalians can begin to regain their relevance if they dump the Archbishop’s tea in the nearest harbor and declare the independence won for them by braver men between 1776 and 1783.

[Harry Cook is an Episcopal priest, journalist and author. Ordained in 1967, he has been rector of St. Andrew’s Church in the Detroit suburb of Clawson since 1987.]

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