Episcopal Church Plays Russian Roulette on the Gay Issue

WASHINGTON — The Episcopal Church's confirmation last week of the openly gay Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire was hailed as a victory for the forces of inclusiveness and diversity. That may be, but it was also another step in the church's prolonged ecclesiastical suicide.

Since the late 1960s, the Episcopal Church has served as a laboratory for the proposition that Christianity must liberalize -- jettison its more demanding traditional teachings and get in step with the times -- to survive. The Episcopalians have done it all: allowed women clergy, dropped sanctions against divorce, made belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ optional. Now their bishops, who met last week in Minneapolis, have confirmed a bishop who will share the bishop's house with a male partner and have tacitly approved leaving decisions on blessing same-sex unions to local priests. During these 30-odd years of early adoption of whatever mores the avant-garde of secular society has embraced, there has been only one snag: The Episcopal Church has declined precipitously in both membership and influence. The treatment has been successful, but the patient, if not quite dead yet, looks to be dying.

Many individual Episcopalians, including the 43 bishops who voted against Robinson's confirmation and the 20 who protested afterward, are worried that their church has painted itself into a corner of trendiness. Nonetheless, the Episcopalian scramble for secular relevance at the expense of religious content proceeds apace. John Shelby Spong, former bishop of Newark, N.J., churns out books denying Jesus' virgin birth and other tenets of the Nicene Creed that are still part of the Episcopalian liturgy. Robinson himself conceded that his fellow bishops' implicit endorsement in Minneapolis of homosexual activity contravened both traditional Christian doctrine and the Bible. "Just simply to say that it goes against tradition and the teaching of the church and Scripture does not necessarily make it wrong," he told the Washington Post. That's a big "just simply to say."