[ NOTE :
Written by Matthew Thompson and originally posted on Talk To ActionHere's the significance of this story to US politics: The efforts of IRD associated groups could bring the American Episcopal Church, this summer, to split over issues such as homosexuality. Anglican splinter groups would gain control of Episcopal Church resources, and the split would diminish prominence of voices of liberal faith in America. Further, there is a real possibility that Peter Akinola - who supports the legislation described by Matthew Thompson - could emerge as the most prominent leader of the wider Anglican communion. ]
[ by Matthew Thompson ] In late February, 2006, John Bryson Chane, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC, wrote an op ed for the Washington Post. In it, he revealed to the WaPo's readership one of the many awful consequences that decades of conflict have brought to the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexuality.
[ editor's note ] : also see Religious Turf Wars - the possibility of a split has been looming for several years: "Graham Davis: "Archbishop, this is pretty radical. You're saying that the moral authority currently enjoyed by the Archbishop of Canterbury would transfer to the Archbishop of Nigeria."
Archbishop Jensen: "As a possibility. Now I hope that doesn’t happen and I don't think it has happened yet but it's conceivable.""For more on far-right associated attacks on the Episcopal Church in America, see Episcopal Newspaper Exposes Rightwing Agencies by Frederick Clarkson
Just days before, one of Chane's fellow bishops in the Anglican Communion, the Primate of All Nigeria and leader of the Anglican Communion's largest Province, Archbishop Peter Akinola, endorsed legislation that would ban most basic civil rights for gay and lesbian Nigerians, and enforce that ban with a 5 year prison sentence.
The Anglican Communion is in crisis mode, struggling to salvage a broad though loosely affiliated organization from self-destruction under the pull of two strong forces. On the one hand, northern Anglicans in the US, Canada, and the UK are committed to a liberal stand on homosexuality, and to a Gospel of Inclusion (i.e., "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You"). On the other hand, the Provinces of the Global South, along with splinter organizations in the North (see the American Anglican Council, or AAC, and the Anglican Communion Network, or Network) are "orthodox" on the issue of homosexuality, and consider their purpose to be far more evangelical than that of the Episcopal Church, USA ( ECUSA), or of other Northern Anglicans. The Provinces of the Global South claim moral authority because of their great and increasing numbers, while parish registries in ECUSA and elsewhere are stable or in decline.
The "splinter organizations" that have organized the conservative movement within ECUSA, and in the process have forged deep alliances with their Global South brethren, have their roots deep within the Republican Party. Jim Naughton of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington expertly outlines that relationship in his series Following the Money." The AAC -- an umbrella group for American conservative Anglicanism -- has historical and present ties with the Institute on Religion and Democracy (or IRD ), a deeply conservative group devoted to supporting politically consonant forms of Christianity within mainline Protestant denominations. The historical relationship between the IRD and the AAC is clear -- at one point, their websites were identically formatted, and their offices were in adjacent suites in an I St. office building in northwest Washington, DC. (The AAC is now headquartered in Atlanta.)