So, the Church of England named Dame Sarah Mullally as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Because news sites need to generate stories, it was a “thing” for a few days. Yes, she’s a feminist, and yes, she is worried about microaggressions and all of the other accoutrements that come with being on the left. 

Funny thing – I wasn’t surprised in the least. And I’ll bet every former member of the Anglican Communion, including the ex-Episcopalians, along with the disgruntled current members, was not caught off guard either. As the ancient Romans used to say, “Nihil novi sub sole.” Well, I’m pretty sure they said that. 

Frankly, I was only surprised it took them this long. England has been accelerating toward a left-wing utopia at a much faster rate than the U.S., and the Brits have been at it longer. I mean, c’mon, the Episcopal Church got its first woman Presiding Bishop in 2006. The Mother Church in England is slacking, if anything.

I won’t re-tell the saga of how I parted ways with the Episcopal Church; that story is in several other pieces around this site, somewhere. But it had a great deal to do with the fact that I was the wrong sex. Or is it gender? One never knows anymore. If only the pronoun fad had existed back then! Why, I might have been Rev. Brown, after all. I just would have had to identify as a woman, or a eucalyptus tree, or something. 

I have long since come to terms with the fact that I would have made a lousy priest. In retrospect, I’m not sure how long I would have lasted as an Episcopalian. When you are in the pipeline for the priesthood (aspirant, postulant, candidate, ordinand), you end up going to various retreats, meetings, and conferences where much is said, virtue is signaled, and very little is accomplished. I seem to remember them serving a lot of soup, which was a disappointment for a guy like me who has never met a cheeseburger he didn’t like. Not to mention, I was usually the only man there, and it was fairly clear that I was being tolerated more than welcomed, and this was back in the '90s. Men, particularly of the straight variety, were being minimized quickly even then, so Mullally’s impending enthronement is not an eyebrow-raiser for anybody remotely familiar with the lay of the land. 

This will undoubtedly offend some people, but I was raised around women priests, and it was never a big deal to me. I was young enough at the time that I did not see women’s ordination as a milestone in women’s rights, and conversely, it never occurred to me that it might be an affront to scripture or church tradition. Of course, it also never occurred to me that I was responsible for thousands of years of male oppression, but that was made clear to me in short order. 

One thing I have learned as my hair has greyed is that it is not just the thing you do, but why you do that thing. In this case, have the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion, and other mainline denominations ordained women because they will faithfully bear the yoke of Christ? Or have they ordained women because it was high time that we got men off the altar and out of the pulpit? And in such a case, just exactly who are we putting in the pulpit, and what are the intentions?

The intention, of course, is to morph the church from the Body of Christ into an engine for social change. Everyone should feel welcome at church, but the societal engineering aspect is the reason for so many rainbow decorations, abortion literature, and the other trappings of Leftism. It is also why, on any given Sunday, you could drop a couple of crates of superballs from the ceiling and probably not hit anyone.  Once a church stops being about Jesus and the Word and becomes just another institution for combating “isms” and “phobias,” then it is no different from any of the other like-minded organizations out there. And then it becomes irrelevant. Which may have been the plan all along. 

I knew that back in the '90s. Honestly, I'm surprised anyone is surprised.

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