State churches, ecclesiology, and history.

The news in part of the Christian world this week that is being quite talked about is the "suspension" of the Episcopal Church in the USA by the Anglican Communion.  Unfortunately, the mainstream press has gotten a lot of it wrong, and made outrageous statements about it.  I've been following it because for several years now I have been circling around the Episcopal Church and considering pursuing ordination in that denomination.

This is a ridiculous and illogical article.  The author complains that the Anglican Communion has "disciplined" the Episcopal Church in the USA for changing their rites to allow full gay marriage "while unambiguous sins of other leaders have gone unaddressed."  And those sins are supporting repressive and punitive anti-LGBT legislation in their own home countries.

It is completely illogical because the people who voted to discipline the Episcopal Church are the very same ones engaged in supporting anti-LGBT legislation.  Of course they are not going to chastise themselves for their sins; they think they are right!  It is not hypocritical at all, what it is is unidirectional bias and consistent thinking.

This is one of the things that, unfortunately, makes me lukewarm about the Episcopal Church.  I am not sure I want to be associated with an organization that has such virulent anti-gay attitudes. 

But there's another, deeper problem here for me, theologically.  The Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Communion in general, are descended from the Church of England.  And the Church of England is an established state church.  We don't have those in this country, so I think Americans often miss the theological dangers of state church traditions (Americans in general have pretty wide ignorance about state churches and their history.  I once read a journalist reporting on the German parliament ask indignantly what happened to the separation of church and state.  Newsflash: it doesn't exist in Germany).

Besides the inhumanity of anti-LGBT legislation, the African primates are not only within their rights to affirm such legislation, but the history of state churches encourages them to get involved in the legislative process.  Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was baptism in the state church that granted citizenship (this also, by the way, opens a huge window that most people ignore when discussing European anti-semitism and the Holocaust).  It was the state church that made marriages and therefore inheritance legal.  Bishops in England still officially have seats in Parliament.  And this has led to a certain theology of church and society, one where the "wheat and tares" of Jesus' parable refers to the general population as a whole, who are all baptized as infants and then don't make good on the Christian baptismal commission.

I was raised in an amalgam of Anabaptist traditions, and I do think they have a better ecclesiology.  The church is made of those who have joined it voluntarily, it does not look for power in the world, and it operates separated from the world's structures.  For an Anabaptist, love is the guiding principal, and political legislation is irrelevant to the church's practises.  Even were a Mennonite bishop anti-LGBT, he or she would never endorse legislation criminalizing their lives.  It was, in fact, the huge population of German Anabaptists in Philadelphia (from whom I'm partially descended), as well as William Penn's Quakers, who made it possible for the framers of our Constitution to consider the possibility of no state church at all.

So the other reason I get a little leery of the Episcopal Church is its state church history.  It was the state church of Virginia and many of the southern colonies until the Constitution, and many Episcopalians unconsciously associate their church with social and political power.  When I look at the history of the church global, especially the first few centuries after Jesus left it, I don't see a church that was formed for power.  I see one that was formed in social and political weakness and extended love to those on the edges and margins of society.  Any Christian claim to political power is, I feel, not a Christian claim at all.