Evangelical Episcopalians: 1950s–1990s

In the late 1940s, American society began moving in a direction that was more privatized, individualistic and suburban. Churches accommodated this shift rather well, and the ECUSA experienced a tremendous growth in membership in the 1950s that accompanied the ‘baby boom’. This growth also occurred during the same years that evangelicals’ influence within Anglicanism gained both momentum and prominence in Britain and North America. In continuity with other mainline denominations, the ECUSA’s rapid growth in church membership during the 1950s peaked by the mid-1960s (3,647,297 members in 1966), and dropped to 3,095,080 in 1979.Footnote 3 Some of the disparities between conservative evangelicals and liberal mainliners began to emerge during the mid-1960s in conjunction with ECUSA leaders’ heightened social consciousness. These disparities grew more prominent in the 1970s, and by the mid-1990s, led to the formation of trans-oceanic networks of like-minded conservative Anglicans.

Though conservative evangelical Anglicans grew in prominence within the ECUSA and Church of England in the mid-twentieth century, they share much in continuity with their evangelical predecessors who have formed a contingent within Anglicanism since the mid-eighteenth century. American and British evangelicals have historically engaged in concerted efforts for social and political causes.Footnote 4 From anti-slavery and temperance movements on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, to anti-pornography and anti-abortion campaigns in late twentieth-century America and Britain, evangelicals have proven to be quite adept at mobilizing for political action.Footnote 5 As a result of many factors in the early twentieth century, perhaps most notably debates of biblical inspiration and authority that accompanied the ‘modernist’ controversies in North America and Western Europe, there emerged around mid-century a strong conservative evangelicalism that at the same time was pan-denominational and increasingly ascendant within particular denominations. For the current discussion, the most important dimensions of historical commonality between late-twentieth century conservative evangelicalism within Anglicanism and its evangelical predecessors are the interconnected themes of biblical authority, social activism and dedication to traditional foreign missions.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, a general sense of a need for renewal emerged among Episcopalians. Reform movements took on various platforms: advocating for women’s ordination, liturgical reform and social activism, among other things. Starting with Dennis Bennett’s charismatic experience of speaking in tongues at a Pentecostal prayer service in 1959, the charismatic movement within the ECUSA seemed to address at least one aspect of the need for renewal.Footnote 6 The charismatic movement made the Christian faith more tangible and personal for many parishioners, particularly those in the suburbs, as church leaders became more involved in fighting for social justice causes.Footnote 7

It was during this same period that evangelicalism began to have an increasing presence within the ECUSA and the Church of England. The first National Evangelical Anglican Congress was held in England in 1967. It attempted to ease any separatist movements by seeking to provide a theological means for evangelical Anglicans to be fully incorporated into the Anglican tradition.Footnote 8 The congress seems to have succeeded in many respects and consequently bolstered evangelicals’ confidence to take part in the liturgical and prayer book reforms that were taking place during the same period.Footnote 9 Discrepancies over the liturgical revisions were related to historical tensions between ascendant Anglo-Catholics and conservative Anglican evangelicals from the early twentieth century. These tensions with Anglo-Catholics served to unite conservative evangelicals against ‘liberal evangelicals’ over matters of liturgy and biblical inspiration and interpretation.Footnote 10 The influence of British evangelical Anglicans on North American evangelical Episcopalians is significant in this regard because, as David Bebbington argues, external opposition from Anglo-Catholics led British evangelicals to assert their ecclesial identity, which held schism ‘high on the list of corporate sins’.Footnote 11

The 1970s brought a new set of challenges to the ECUSA and other mainline Protestant denominations, as church membership declined and tensions grew between more liberal and conservative constituencies within the church. It was within this context that the difference between conservative evangelicals’ and mainline Episcopalians’ disposition to modern American society began to emerge in full. Some saw the ECUSA’s dwindling numbers as a sign of its internal weaknesses, exemplified in its failure to proclaim the gospel through evangelism, for which the church’s leaders had substituted social activism.Footnote 12The Christian Challenge, a publication of conservative reformed and evangelical Episcopalians, frequently attacked this liberal drift in the leadership during the 1970s, lamenting, in 1978, the lack of attention given to spiritual matters that concerned many laity, while the clergy ‘preached regularly on the “rights” of gays and priestesses’.Footnote 13

The conflict over evangelism and foreign missions was faced by most Western denominations in the 1970s and 1980s, as they responded to the critiques of the foreign mission enterprise given by Christian leaders in former colonial and mission territories. Generally speaking, evangelicals retained a commitment to ‘missions’ in the traditional sense, while liberal/mainline leaders developed a disposition of ‘mission’. The distinction between the two approaches left mainline leaders accusing missionary-minded evangelicals of being imperialistic and evangelicals accusing mainliners of having disregarded an essential tenet of the Christian faith, substituting it for social activism and accommodation to a pluralistic North American society.Footnote 14 Nevertheless, evangelical Episcopalians remained committed to overseas missionary activity, and their continued presence in Southern Anglican provinces helped to foster the relationships, which would develop into worldwide conservative networks with overseas Anglican leaders in the 1990s.

Evangelical Episcopalians’ missionary work in the ‘Two Thirds World’ was integral to the relationships that developed between evangelical Episcopalians and churches in Southern Anglican provinces, as these missionaries became more attuned to the situations that the churches faced, particularly in Africa.Footnote 15 The East African Revival, which began in the early 1930s and ran in phases through the 1980s, served to strengthen the spiritual and theological ties between Western evangelical and African Anglicans. While some conservative evangelical Anglicans left the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in the 1920s to establish the more rigorously conservative Bible Churchman’s Missionary Society, missionaries who worked in the Ruanda Mission sought to maintain ties with the CMS, though they made provisions to safeguard the conservative disposition of the mission. It was around the Keswick-influenced evangelical CMS missionaries of the Ruanda and Uganda Missions that revival movements sprang up. Missionaries and revived Africans sought to combat what they perceived to be the ‘nominal’ Christianity prevalent in East Africa as a result of expansive baptisms performed by previous CMS missionaries in competition with Roman Catholic missionaries. Public confession, hymn singings and group Bible study accompanied the revival movements, which were often spontaneous and lay-led. In fact, these elements were derived from Keswick teachings of confession and the ‘second blessing’, and African hymns that arose during the revivals bore similarities to Keswick hymns.Footnote 16 Bible studies on the Holy Spirit gave revival theology its ‘hallmark’ teachings.Footnote 17 The revived African Christians, called ‘balokole’ (‘the shining ones’) or ‘Abaka’ (‘the on-fire ones’), also employed Keswick traditions in order to ‘seize the initiative in transforming a superficial brand of imported Christianity into an authentic African faith’.Footnote 18 The revival movement also served to mend pre-existing rifts between East African Christians and missionaries. Thus, the East Africa Revival was at the same time a revival movement stemming from Keswick movements among Western evangelicals and an African appropriation of conservative Keswick evangelicalism which deepened African Christians’ faith and drew evangelical missionaries and African Christians closer together.

Willis Jenkins argues that evangelical Episcopalians’ continued dedication to traditional missionary work from the 1960s to the 1990s allowed them to build long-term relationships with churches in Southern Anglican provinces that have fostered a sense of mutuality and inter-connectedness between conservative evangelicals and churches in Southern Anglican provinces.Footnote 19 By comparison, liberal Episcopalians failed to develop such international relationships, and their hesitation to send missionary personnel seemed evidence not of granting freedom to provinces in post-colonial circumstances, but rather of a propensity of the United States to act hegemonically and independently, eschewing ministry partnerships. As a result, conservative missionaries were more aware of the ways in which sexuality is appropriated within cultures in Africa, Asia and Latin America and familiar with the ways in which North American debates might affect Southern Anglican provinces.

The early 1980s were a time of significant evangelical migration into the ECUSA. The General Convention in 1982 reported that 58% of its members had grown up in another Christian denomination, with 17% of these being from Baptist churches alone.Footnote 20 The evangelical upsurge was observed in 1985 in Robert Webber’s anecdotal work on evangelical migration into the ECUSA entitled Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. Regarding the present crisis, Miranda Hassett also observed in one ‘dissenting’ Episcopal parish in the early 2000s that many of its members were not, in fact, lifelong Episcopalians, but rather evangelicals who had joined the ECUSA in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote 21

Homosexuality and Evangelical Episcopalians: 1970s–1990s

The ECUSA was confronted with the role of women and gay and lesbian persons within the church, while society at large was responding to feminist and gay rights movements. Integrity was founded in 1974 as an advocacy group for gay and lesbian persons within the ECUSA, and in 1977 an openly homosexual (though celibate) woman, Ellen Barrett, was ordained in the diocese of New York by Bishop Paul Moore.Footnote 22 A resolution passed at the 1979 General Convention stated that sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage was inappropriate, but it did allow for the ordination of celibate gay and lesbian persons, which continued on a small scale through the 1980s.Footnote 23 This compromise resolution seems to have provided enough leeway to assuage somewhat the mounting tensions between conservative and liberal Episcopalians by creating enough space so that both conservatives and liberals could essentially interpret it in accordance with their personal dispositions.

This is not to say that the debate and tensions completely abated during the 1980s. This was certainly not the case with American evangelicals as a whole, with the Religious Right surging to prominence during the Reagan presidency. The ECUSA’s Commission on Human Affairs began in 1985 to investigate a compromise between the polarizing factions within the denomination, but it received heavy criticism from both sides of the debate and its final findings were not published. With American society’s increasing acceptance of same-sex partnerships and gay and lesbian lifestyles in the 1980s, many gay and lesbian clergy found their obligatory celibacy unacceptable. Bishop John Shelby Spong’s ordination of Robert Williams, a partnered and not sexually exclusive gay man, in 1989, re-opened in full the debate over the ordination of partnered gay and lesbian persons. His ordination would usher in a decade of stalemate within the ECUSA, as neither side could mount enough support at General Conventions in the 1990s to pass their particular agenda.

Bishop Walter Righter’s ordination of an openly gay man would result in his being brought to a heresy trial in 1994–1995, along with Bishops Stuart Wood and Allan Bartlett, because their actions ‘taught a doctrine not held by this church’.Footnote 24 The bishops, however, were not charged with having broken ‘core doctrine’.Footnote 25 This defeat signaled not only a stalemate between the conservative and liberal factions within the ECUSA. It also confirmed the conservatives’ need to look elsewhere in an attempt to reform their denomination, which they believed had unacceptably compromised the authority of clear biblical teaching regarding human sexuality.

The Lambeth Conferences of 1988 and 1998 and Evangelical Anglicans

When homosexuality came to be a major issue in North American churches in the mid-late 1970s, conservative evangelical Episcopalians did not stage a major campaign to ‘win back’ the increasingly liberal church. Instead, it would seem that certain resolutions provided relative tranquility in the church and assuaged conservative evangelicals through the 1980s. By the time that Lambeth Conference 1998 came, however, conservative evangelical Episcopalians were engaged in a calculated, concerted global effort to reform the unacceptably liberal ECUSA. The development of this complex movement will be discussed in light of the following factors: Lambeth Conference 1988, evangelical Episcopalians’ continuities with North American evangelicalism — particularly regarding biblical authority and social morality, and their use of modern technologies and denominational networking.

While the failed Righter heresy trial of 1995 seemed to confirm for conservative evangelical Episcopalians that the ECUSA could not be reformed by using its internal structures, I will argue that their decision to look for overseas allies in the mid-1990s had its roots in the General Convention of 1988 and the presence of the ‘Two Thirds World’ bishops at Lambeth Conference 1988. The reasons for this are their shared evangelical heritage, similar dispositions regarding the primacy of Scripture, and a shared opposition to liberal views on homosexuality.

The ECUSA’s 1988 General Convention, which preceded the Lambeth Conference, saw a clash over women’s ordination and homosexuality, both of which would emerge at the Lambeth Conference a few weeks later. Conservatives ignited controversy at the Convention when they attempted to endorse a resolution that was passed earlier that year by the General Synod of the Church of England ‘in which a list of specific activities, including “genital sexual relations” between two members of the same sex, was declared to be sinful’.Footnote 26 Though this effort failed, the reaction of conservative bishops was, in effect, ‘Just wait for Lambeth’.Footnote 27

The period leading up to Lambeth Conference 1988 provided many precursors to what would transpire between conservative evangelical Episcopalians and their overseas allies. There was a resolution passed at the ECUSA’s General Convention that allowed for like-minded bishops (who were opposed to women in the episcopate) to serve episcopal functions in conservative parishes. There had been instances of this occurring on a ‘global’ (though infrequent) scale prior to Lambeth Conference 1988. For example, the Bishop of London, Dr Graham Leonard, came to Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1987 in order to perform ecclesiastical functions.Footnote 28 Such was the opposition from many bishops within the Anglican Communion to women’s ordination as bishops that some had left open the possibility of secession from the communion, and some African bishops left Lambeth Conference 1988 vowing to not be in communion with a bishop who ordains a woman as bishop.Footnote 29

Lambeth Conference 1988 illuminated many similarities between conservative evangelical Episcopalians and bishops from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Conference was also the first time that attending bishops from the ‘Two Thirds World’ were in the majority at a Lambeth Conference. A shared sense of their evangelical identity was evident in the African bishops’ work to have the 1990s proclaimed the ‘Decade of Evangelism’.Footnote 30 This undoubtedly resonated with American evangelicals, who had continued more traditional missionary work through the 1970s and 1980s, well beyond the time when it fell out of favor with many in mainline denominations. Additionally, according to a history given in the Episcopal Evangelical Journal, these ties had also been developed in the mid-1960s through a program envisioned by John Stott, whereby he brought church leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America to Britain and trained them in evangelical theology.Footnote 31 The inherited effects of evangelical Anglicanism were described by one African attendee to the Lambeth Conference 1988 as follows:

The high regard given to Scripture in the life of the church is another important area of common ground between evangelical Episcopalians and Southern Anglican leaders. A recently published history of the Anglican Communion’s conflict by the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) cited the high regard for Scripture in Southern Anglican provinces as being linked to the missionary presence of conservative evangelical Anglicans.Footnote 33 When speaking of the importance of Scripture in the life of the Southern churches, Samuel and Sugden stated that its authority was ‘rarely questioned’ when compared to two other tenets of Anglican authority: reason and tradition.Footnote 34

At Lambeth Conference 1988, the most pressing issue of sexual morality for most African bishops was polygamy. A significant number of African bishops were concerned with the pastoral implications of the 1888 Lambeth Resolution which denied baptism to men who were in polygamous marriages.Footnote 35 Samuel and Sugden described the perception of some of the Southern bishops in the following way:

While many maintained a conservative moral and theological view of polygamy as a marital institution, they also recognized the need for pastoral sensitivity and ecclesiastical flexibility with regard to the men and women in such relationships.Footnote 37

It is with the same disposition of not ‘letting down the standards of the Bible’ that some bishops from Southern provinces countered initiatives on the part of Bishops Paul Moore of New York and John Shelby Spong of Newark to investigate gay rights within the Anglican Communion. Specifically, one clause reading ‘to encourage those who will not or cannot marry at least to observe permanence and faithfulness in their sexual relations’ met with fierce opposition from some, but not all, of the African bishops.Footnote 38 Archbishop Manasses Kuria is said to have responded to their initiative by stating: ‘Homosexuals have rights as human beings. But they do not have rights as homosexuals. Homosexuality is a sin. We do not call homosexuals to be faithful in marriage to one another. That is to call sin holy.’Footnote 39 Conservative views were ultimately expressed in Resolution 34 on Marriage and Family, which ‘reaffirms the traditional biblical teaching that sexual intercourse is an act of total commitment which belongs properly within a permanent married relationship’.Footnote 40

The hostilities that would foment in the 1990s were initiated in late 1989 when Bishop Spong ordained an openly partnered and non-sexually-exclusive man, Robert Williams. Williams eventually resigned his post and later died of HIV/AIDS, but the place of gay and lesbian persons within the church became the focus of evangelical Episcopalians’ long-standing frustration with the liberal direction of the denomination’s leaders. In the spring of 1991, the ECUSA’s Standing Commission of Human Affairs released a report stating that the church should ‘ “begin the process of developing liturgical forms for [gay and lesbian persons]. […]” And “be open to ordaining gay men and lesbians otherwise qualified who display the same integrity in their sexual relationships which we ask of our heterosexual ordinands.” ’Footnote 41 This was yet another sign to those opposed to the continued liberal direction of the church that they would not be able to reform the church from within, using its traditional structures of polity.

As a result, the mid-1990s were filled with the formation of intra-ecclesial fellowship societies and networks. For example, the Ekklesia Society was formed in 1996 by Canon Bill Atwood

Other similar societies, such as the American Anglican Council (AAC) (1995), the Emerging Church Network (1996), and First Promise (1997) emerged during the same period.Footnote 43 It was at the founding of the AAC that the prospering churches of Africa, Asia and Latin America were suggested as possible allies in the lead-up to Lambeth Conference 1998.Footnote 44 Shortly thereafter, conservative evangelical clergy began a concerted effort at forging alliances with overseas bishops who may well be inclined to their moral and theological dispositions. These small groups of conservative evangelicals proceeded to arrange (and fund) meetings around the world in order to create a network of global Anglican leaders who were sympathetic to, or would support, the plight of the conservative evangelicals within the ECUSA at Lambeth Conference 1998. The conjectural thinking of the conservative evangelicals was that if the ECUSA would not acquiesce to their desired reforms, then perhaps a strong show of global support for a conservative statement affirming a traditional understanding of marriage and sexuality at the upcoming Lambeth Conference would reveal the apostasy of the leadership of the ECUSA and pressure their capitulation to the conservatives’ position.

The three most significant pre-Lambeth meetings were held at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Dallas, Texas, and Kampala, Uganda. The meeting at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1997, was comprised mostly of Anglican leaders from Southern Anglican provinces. They published a statement at the close of the meeting entitled ‘Second Trumpet from the South’ that covered a broad range of topics that were of importance to Southern Anglicans for the upcoming Lambeth Conference.Footnote 45 The section on human sexuality, however, was soon picked up by North American conservatives, who effectively reduced the meeting to the production of this ‘Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality’. The statement’s marked conservative, and ‘biblical’, approach undoubtedly resonated with the conservatives’ agenda:

The Kuala Lumpur meeting was followed by another in Dallas, Texas, in September 1997, which was pivotal in the Southern bishops’ realization of the prominent role they could play in the upcoming Lambeth Conference. The purpose of the Dallas meeting was to court the support of Southern bishops and to familiarize them to the condition of the ECUSA — particularly to the plight of the conservatives struggling against the denomination’s liberal leadership. One particular activity at the meeting was the training of Southern leaders in the procedural etiquette of the Lambeth Conference so that the Southern bishops would be able to be heard in what had historically been a Western-dominated event that was primarily driven by concerns of the European and North American churches. The irony of this is that the North American conservatives were effectively training African bishops on how to conduct themselves at the Western-church dominated conference so that the African bishops could speak out at the conference on an issue that was determined by North American conservatives.Footnote 47 In return, the conservative North American bishops promised their support for the resolution on international debt, which was of high importance to the Southern bishops.Footnote 48 This process of conscripting Southern leaders into Northern agendas is what Ian Douglas referred to as the ‘new colonialism’ within the Anglican Communion.Footnote 49 Douglas described this unbalanced adoption of concerns (of which international debt was already strongly supported among North American bishops) as a blatant exchange of ‘money for sex’.Footnote 50 It was through such a process of globalized networking that the (largely North American) issue of homosexuality became a truly global issue to which Anglican leaders in Africa, Asia and Latin America felt they must respond at the Lambeth Conference.

The final pre-Lambeth meeting was held in Kampala, Uganda, and was comprised mostly of African bishops and primarily funded by North American conservatives, though there were few of them in attendance at the meeting. The Kampala meeting served to unify many African bishops heading into the Lambeth Conference, as they hoped to speak with a single voice — particularly on the issue of international debt relief.

There was, of course, a considerable amount of money involved in organizing and funding worldwide meetings of Anglican leaders. Dissident evangelical groups, though relatively small, had managed to accrue significant funding after only a few years of existence. In an exposé-type report, Jim Naughton traced millions of dollars that had been pumped into right-wing think tanks (such as the Institute for Religion and Democracy) and conservative Christian organizations (such as the AAC) throughout the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote 51 Naughton reports that Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr, who has personal ties to the current president of the AAC, the Revd Canon David C. Anderson, has been cultivating connections with conservative evangelical leaders around the world since the mid-1990s.Footnote 52 Groups such as the AAC and Ekklesia, both of which receive sizeable donations from Ahmanson (AAC received $977,408 from Ahmanson in 2000–2001), have actively cultivated relationships with conservative evangelical Anglican leaders overseas in direct response to the ECUSA’s liberal direction, of which its inclusive stance regarding gay and lesbian persons is a key element of contention.Footnote 53

One must be careful, however, not to suggest that Southern Anglican leaders were merely financial pawns, while also recognizing that financial contributions from conservative evangelical groups were not the only monetary connections between Northern and Southern Anglicans. On the other hand, the economic disparity in these relationships cannot be consigned to irrelevance, as this inequality highlights the continuing global economic tensions that are almost implicit in North/South relationships within the Anglican Communion.Footnote 54 Hassett does not describe the financial asymmetry between Northern and Southern allies in terms of bidding for Southern leaders’ support. Rather, she concludes that

It does not seem, therefore, that such financial asymmetry has necessarily influenced the Southern Anglican allies to otherwise take a radically different theological or moral position on an issue (such as homosexuality). Rather, these financial contributions are seen in another economic light, in which Northern funds are seemingly exchanged for spiritual vitality and ‘orthodox’ theology that for many the Southern bishops represent. In this regard, it is important to note that the development of personal relationships between North Americans (‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’) and overseas Anglicans is one of the most crucial factors in understanding the present crisis within the Anglican Communion.

These dynamics were starkly manifested at Lambeth Conference 1998. In the months leading up to the conference, international debt emerged as a central issue, one for which the Southern bishops heavily advocated. Homosexuality, however, quickly became a focal point for the media after bishops with very polarized positions hotly debated the topic in the first session of the human sexuality sub-group.Footnote 56 The West African Resolution on human sexuality stated unambiguously that the church would ‘commit evangelical suicide’ if it adopted a policy that did not maintain biblical authority that declares homosexuality to be ‘a sin’.Footnote 57 The firmness of the bishops’ convictions on each side of the debate did not necessarily reflect the bishops’ personal conservative moral dispositions. For example, one concern of African and Central Asian bishops was their proximity to Islam and the ramifications that a perceived endorsement of homosexuality would have on inter-faith and inter-denominational relationships.Footnote 58 Ultimately, a resolution favoring a conservative position on homosexuality was overwhelmingly approved by the Conference: 536 in favor, 70 against, and 45 abstentions. Part of the statement reads as follows:

This Conference:

1. a in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman in lifelong union, and believes that abstinence is right for those who are not called to marriage; […]

2. b recognizes that there are among us persons who experience themselves as having a homosexual orientation. […] We commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and we wish to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptized, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ;

3. c while rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture, calls on all our people to minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation and to condemn irrational fear of homosexuals, violence within marriage and any trivialization and commercialization of sex;

4. d cannot advise the legitimizing or blessing of same-sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same gender unions.Footnote 59

The resolution did not offer an outright condemnation of homosexuality, as some bishops had proposed, and therefore has a comparatively moderate tone. Votes in favor of the resolution came from conservatives, moderates and liberals, and are not necessarily evidence that the entire Communion was opposed to liberal policies on homosexuality. Some moderates and liberals voted in favor largely because they feared the drafting of a more condemnatory statement of homosexuals and homosexuality, though their votes may have been swayed also by some degree of post-colonial guilt.

The Lambeth resolution on human sexuality also referenced the importance of the Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality, which was highlighted by conservative evangelicals in the United States. The Kuala Lumpur statement built the evangelicals’ case that the ‘global South’, which was recognized as the numerical majority within the Anglican Communion, had taken a stand against the liberal actions of the ECUSA. The marked conservative tone of Resolution 1.10 was achieved through amendments proposed by allied conservative North American, African and Asian bishops.Footnote 60 Hassett observes that while African bishops and commentators referred to a victory of the South, conservatives within the ECUSA quickly shifted their rhetoric. Instead of speaking of merely the ‘South’ in the apparent ‘North/South’ dichotomy, they referenced the ‘global South’, ‘global Communion’ or the ‘worldwide Anglican Communion’.Footnote 61 This rhetorical shift was a part of their hopes of bringing the Lambeth resolution on human sexuality to bear on the ECUSA by conveying the sense that the ECUSA was not merely ignoring a group of African bishops, but rather the rest of the Anglican Communion.Footnote 62 In their effort to accomplish this, conservative Episcopalians expanded their ‘accountability globalization’ networking efforts with overseas bishops in the years following Lambeth Conference 1998.Footnote 63

The transcontinental networks that were created in the mid-1990s and afterwards were made possible because of advanced communication and travel technologies. The advent of the Internet provided a medium through which information could be passed almost instantaneously, building relationships across geographical boundaries to an extent that previously would have been impossible in such a short period of time. Increased travel mobility, funded in large part by North Americans, also facilitated these international coalitions. What seems to have puzzled moderate and liberal North American bishops at Lambeth Conference 1998 is Southern Anglican bishops’ allegiance with conservative bishops in North America, who had not previously shown as much interest in issues such as international debt or poverty as had the more ‘socially-conscious’ bishops of North America and Europe, who also tended to be more theologically liberal. They had hoped that the Southern bishops would ratify a more permissive resolution on homosexuality as a result of the liberal bishops’ historical concern for issues that were of primary importance for the Southern bishops. This, however, was not the case. What seems to have happened is that the conservative evangelical Episcopalians perceived the rising prominence of the Southern Anglican leaders and were able to foresee the possibilities of forming an alliance with them very early on. This was the result of some existing commonalities, but the evangelicals’ continued missionary presence in Southern provinces undoubtedly contributed to North Americans’ ability to foresee the possibilities of a conservative transcontinental alliance. In this regard, the conservatives simply were quicker in taking advantage of an emerging global situation. It is likely that the North American dissidents’ feelings of marginalization and desperation in their reforming efforts drove them to be more creative and develop political ingenuity in order to attempt to reform the ECUSA.

In summation, evangelicalism within the ECUSA has developed in much of the same ways as it has in other denominations in North American society in the late twentieth century. Evangelicals within the ECUSA have experienced tensions with the denomination’s mainline leadership, particularly over the church’s involvement in social movements and the ways in which it capitulated to American society in the 1970s and 1980s, which they felt came at the expense of biblical authority and traditional morality. Evangelical Episcopalians can be seen as a part of the broader evangelical movement within the North American society in the second half of the twentieth century due to their shared tenets of traditional evangelicalism; shared response to the cultural context of America, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s; and in their shared response in particular to the issues of homosexuality and same-sex partnerships within their denomination.

The ‘globalization’ of anti-homosexuality sentiment within the Anglican Communion is largely dependent upon the networking activities of conservative evangelical Episcopalians, whose desire for reform within the ECUSA stemmed mainly from their evangelical heritage, particularly as it related to biblical authority and ‘traditional’ values and morality. Despite the sectarian tendencies within many evangelical groups, many evangelical Episcopalians have remained within the denomination and have attempted to reform it by employing its own structures (with some adaptation of them). These factors are evidence of the movement’s continuity with North American evangelicalism of the late twentieth century, as it shares its same values, issues, funding, and employs similar politicking strategies in attempts to reform its denomination.

A Critique of the ‘Next Christendom’ Thesis

For many, the prominence of the bishops from Southern Anglican provinces at Lambeth Conference 1998 was evidence of a new dynamic within the Anglican Communion, one that would challenge a Euro-Western hegemony within the Communion. This interpretation of the conservative Southern bishops’ role at Lambeth Conference 1998 was given expression with the conservative bishops being called (and calling themselves) ‘the voice of the global South’. Following Lambeth Conference 1998, this parlance came to carry with it the implication that the conservative view on the place of gay and lesbian persons within the Anglican Communion was indeed the position of the majority of Anglicans within the Communion, and, therefore, the ECUSA should capitulate to it. Such a perception was vigorously ‘validated’ when Philip Jenkins’ popular book, The Next Christendom, was first published in early 2002. Himself inspired by the events of Lambeth Conference 1998, Jenkins describes the Conference and its subsequent developments as ‘a perfect symbol for the termination of the paternalistic relationship between the churches of the Old and New Christian Worlds’.Footnote 64 Jenkins, therefore, juxtaposes the rapidly growing churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America against atrophying, beleaguered and liberal Northern Christian denominations. If the crisis is seen in this light, the conservative Northern Episcopalian dissidents are enjoying something of the first fruits of a new Christian order in which powerful ‘Southern’ leaders will (re)establish a conservative orthodoxy in light of the decline of liberal churches in the North.Footnote 65 The caricatured portrayals of these seemingly monolithic opposites seem to lead rather deterministically into a seismic ecclesial collision.

This understanding of the Anglican Communion’s situation, based upon Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, has become so prevalent that its relative merits and demerits have seemingly foregone a scrupulous assessment in a de facto acceptance of its validity.Footnote 66 The first major work to critique the ‘Jenkins’ understanding of the Anglican conflict is Miranda Hassett’s Anglican Communion in Crisis. Through an anthropological study of a dissident Episcopal congregation and its ‘ally’ in Rwanda, she argues that the crisis is ‘the cooperative globalizing work of American conservative dissidents and a number of sympathetic Southern Anglican leaders since the mid-1990s’.Footnote 67 She therefore emphasizes the agency and personal initiative of both the US dissidents and their African, Asian and Latin American allies (though she focuses on Africa).

Hassett critiques the interpretation that the crisis is the result of an inevitable rise of a powerful new conservative voice of the ‘global South’, as well as its opposite extreme, that the Southern allies were merely conscripted into a North American debate and therefore did not act in their own agency or out of their own motivations or convictions. Her work aptly describes the ambiguities that exist in the Anglican Communion’s crisis that have resulted from the complex global networking of Anglican leaders. It also reveals the extreme difficulty (or impossibility) of speaking of a ‘global South’, as it is not a homogenous, unified and monolithic entity. Hassett’s work is a challenge to re-examine the history of the formation of the crisis — a clear, nuanced understanding of which has been obfuscated by its rapid and complex development as well as the deep emotional fervor with which the battles have been fought.

Conservative North American evangelical dissidents as well as their ‘Southern allies’ have been inclined to talk of their movement in the terms that Jenkins popularized. One such group, the Anglican Communion Network (ACN), describes its orthodoxy as being, in some way, an orthodoxy of global majority by citing:

Similarly, the Anglican Mission in the Americas’ (AMiA) website has on its recommended reading list Jenkins’s The Next Christendom and states that he was a featured speaker at a recent winter conference.Footnote 69 Perhaps the most obvious of such usages of the ‘Global South’ in connection to the Anglican crisis is the ‘Global South Anglican’ website, which corresponds to a network of Anglican leaders from Southern Anglican provinces that was started in October 2005.Footnote 70 Many of the most prominent Southern allies of the North American dissidents are connected to the Global South Anglican network, including Archbishops Gregory Venables, Emmanuel Kolini and Peter Akinola. Jenkins also receives a less overt reference in GAFCON’s booklet detailing the theological history of the crisis, though his book’s title is deemed by the authors of the booklet to be ‘rather dramatic’.Footnote 71 There is sufficient evidence, therefore, that in the use of ‘Global South’ language, conservative dissidents and their allies determine to connote a sense of the ECUSA’s exclusivity in its liberal direction. In this sense, the ECUSA is not just neglecting a group of conservative dissenters within its provincial boundaries, but rather the majority of the Anglican Communion. The astounding growth which many Southern Anglican provinces are experiencing is proof (to the evangelical dissenters in North America, at least) of the orthodoxy of their conservatism, in comparison with the declining numbers in European and North American church services. In some way, these demographics have been used to validate the rightness of the conservatives’ campaign.

The preceding analysis of the origins of the evangelical Episcopalians’ dissidence in the evangelical movement provides a basis on which to critique the ‘Jenkins’ understanding of the Anglican Communion’s crisis. Based on this analysis, the Anglican crisis is not best understood in terms of a gradual, relatively inevitable shift of Christianity’s decline in one region and growth in another, with the corresponding value differences that accompany such demographic shifts. Rather, the Anglican Communion’s crisis over the issue of homosexuality and the place of gay and lesbian persons within the church is the result of the evangelical Episcopalian dissidents’ continuity with twentieth-century North American conservative evangelicalism. The crisis’s global character that was taken on in the lead-up to Lambeth Conference 1998 is not the result of a confrontation of a conservative, ‘orthodox’ South calling a liberal North to account, but rather the result of Episcopalian dissidents’ global networking with sympathetic allies in Southern Anglican provinces.

The ideals and issues raised in the case of the conflict within the ECUSA are a result of differing reactions between conservative evangelicals and liberal/mainline Episcopalians to the context of North American society in the 1970s. The origins of the conflict, therefore, are not in the independent condemnation of the North by the ‘Global South’, but rather in tensions that existed for some twenty years (or more) prior to Lambeth Conference 1998. Additionally, it is unknowable as to how bishops from Southern Anglican provinces would have conducted themselves had not North American conservative evangelical Anglicans begun their networking strategies prior to Lambeth Conference 1998. While the beliefs that these Southern bishops proclaimed likely would not have changed, it is uncertain as to whether or not the conflict would have been so vitriolic during the weeks of the 1998 conference. What is evident is that conservative evangelicals seemed to accomplish their initial task: assembling a very strong, conservative and ‘global’ consensus at the largest meeting in the Anglican Communion. The corresponding reforming effect that they hoped the conservative statement would have on the ECUSA, however, did not come to fruition.

The resolution on human sexuality that passed at Lambeth Conference 1998 did not merely represent the moral views of the ‘Global South’, as if their conservatism and beliefs were an entirely new voice. The resolution was also in direct continuity with the position that evangelical Episcopalians had held for two decades. In this sense, the resolution does not in itself manifest a moral uniqueness that is particular to the Southern Anglican provinces. Instead it demonstrates a common conservative consortium, without which the resolution as it now reads would not have passed. This conservative voice had existed within the ECUSA and the Anglican Communion for many years prior to Lambeth Conference 1998. What had not existed is a global network that would be able to create a unified conservative voice within the larger ecclesial structure.

There can be little doubt that the ‘Global South’ language, as popularized by Jenkins’s The Next Christendom, has become the dominant framework within which both the dissidents and their allies view their networking movement and the appropriated reality within which they are operating. Their thinking: If the demographic shifts in the decline of Christianity in the West/North and its expansion in the South/East are true (and they can hardly be argued), then their rise to power has just begun and the North Americans’ conservatism will be vindicated by history in the churches of the South. Jenkins acknowledges that both ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ in the West have attempted to align themselves with the emerging churches of the South — the liberals with their social activism and the conservatives with their theological and moral conservatism.Footnote 72 Jenkins’s treatment does fairly connote that the emerging churches do not easily fit into either of the Western ideological blocks — ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’. In this sense, he accurately describes the challenge that Christian churches will face as the emerging churches in Southern regions will not fit neatly into a pre-existent Western ideological category. North American conservative Episcopalians seem to have recognized this reality in the Dallas meeting in 1996, in which they pledged support for the Southern bishops’ concern for international debt relief while courting their alliance on a conservative resolution on human sexuality. In Western ideological terms, this would seem a combination of ‘liberal/progressive’ and ‘conservative’ platforms.

The conclusion to this point regarding the Anglican Communion is that the conservative evangelicals have seemingly done a better job at enlisting allies in the regions where Christianity is growing rapidly and with whom are associated notions of youth, zeal, vitality and moral uprightness.Footnote 73 Their ability at enlisting allies has included their ability to create the sense that the majority of this new powerful block is singularly on their side. The prevalence of this understanding of the current situation has the potential to create a certain fatalism towards the outworking of the crisis. If indeed the ‘Global South’ is taken to be a fairly monolithic entity that unanimously represents vitality, conservatism and ‘orthodoxy’, and it is juxtaposed against a decrepit and liberal West/North, then an escalating clash between these seemingly incongruent monoliths is bound to end badly for the North. This understanding, however, does not entirely factor into account the reality that many of the ‘orthodox’, conservative opinions held by these Southern Anglican allies were present in abundance within North America during the period when the so-called decrepit Western churches were atrophying. It would be disingenuous to describe the prevalence of the conservative values present in America in the 1970s and 1980s as being values from the ‘Global South’. In fact, the spread and numerical success of conservative evangelicalism in North America during the final decades of the twentieth century is also evidence of a vibrant, conservative presence within the North. This vibrancy and conservatism did not, therefore, result from contact with ‘Global Southerners’, but rather grew up from within North American Christianity, particularly its evangelical branches.

The results of this conclusion are that the supposed cosmic clash of ‘Southern’ and ‘Northern’ churches may not be as inevitable as some may believe. Instead, it seems as though marginalized conservatives within the ECUSA were able to employ great political and technological savvy in order to court relationships with Southern Anglican allies whom they perceived to be influential future church leaders. The North American conservatives did not exchange their existing values for conservative values of the Global South, but rather used select existing commonalities, particularly moral and theological conservatism, to build alliances. The expansive presence of conservative Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity, in North American society in the late-twentieth century is evidence of an ambiguity that is present when speaking in broad descriptions of ‘declining Northern Christianity’ or the like. The rise of powerful Southern Anglican leaders, particularly in Africa and South Asia, in the last ten years has posed serious challenges to the unity and structure of the Anglican Communion. The foundations of these dynamics, however, do not appear to lay in their inevitable rise to dominance or influence, but rather in coordination with conservative North American Anglicans. There can be little doubt that tremendous changes have been wrought in the Anglican Communion since the mid-1990s. What these changes represent does involve a development in global Christian dynamics, but there does not seem to be sufficient evidence to conclude that this case is evidence of an apathetic, atrophying North or, much less, that it is ‘a perfect symbol for the termination of the paternalistic relationship between the churches of the Old and New Christian Worlds’.Footnote 74 Rather, it suggests direct continuities with a growing conservative evangelical movement in North American in the late twentieth century utilizing global networks in an attempt to address issues within their particular society. The Anglican Communion’s ‘crisis’ is not a unique instance in its basic dynamics or issues, but the working out of a North American evangelical movement in a particular ecclesial context.