Has the Episcopal Church passed the tipping point for mainstream news?
Old people on the religion beat (my hand is raised) will remember the 1980s, back when the mainline Protestant doctrinal wars over sexuality started breaking into elite headlines – big time.
Year after year, the some kind of mainline fight over gender and sexuality would score high in the annual Religion Newswriters Association poll to determine the Top 10 stories. More often than not, the Episcopal Church led the way in the fight for feminism and eventually gay rights.
These national headlines would, of course, inspire news coverage at the regional and local levels. Some Episcopal shepherds went along and some didn’t. All of that produced lots of news copy, no matter what Episcopalians ended up doing.
At one point, while at the Rocky Mountain News, I told Colorado’s Episcopal leader – the always quotable former radio pro Bishop William C. Frey – that a few local religious leaders were asking me why the Episcopal Church kept getting so much media attention.
Frey laughed, with a grimace, and said that was a strange thought, something like “envying another man’s root canal.”
Eventually, however, the progressive wins in Episcopal sanctuaries stopped being news, at least in mainstream news outlets.
Take, for example, that recent leap into gender-neutral theology in the District of Columbia, an interesting story that drew little or no attention in the mainstream press. Thus, here is the top of the main story from the Episcopal News Service:
The Diocese of Washington is calling on the Episcopal Church’s General Convention to consider expanding the use of gender-neutral language for God in the Book of Common Prayer, if and when the prayer book is slated for a revision.
He? She? Those pronouns aren’t preferred, the diocese says in a resolution it passed Jan. 27 at its convention, held at Washington National Cathedral in the nation’s capital city. Instead, the resolution recommends using “expansive language for God from the rich sources of feminine, masculine, and non-binary imagery for God found in Scripture and tradition.”
Now, here is the interesting part of this non-story. From the Episcopal point of view, it was still a story that there were people – on the cultural and theological right – who considered this action to modernize (click here for .pdf of the resolution) a topic worthy of news coverage:
The diocese’s convention passed two other resolutions, voicing support for immigrants and the transgender community. But it was the call for more inclusive language in the prayer book that drew national attention, especially from conservative-leaning critics.
“What I see is a church that embraces literally any fashionable left-wing cause,” Tucker Carlson, host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News, said in a segment Feb. 5 in which he interviewed the Rev. Alex Dyer, one of the resolution’s sponsors.
The Daily Caller, a news website founded by Carlson, reported on the resolution last week, as did Breitbart and The Blaze. Some of the reaction has been “vitriolic,” Washington Bishop Mariann Budde told Episcopal News Service in describing three negative emails she has received. All three emails were written in a similar tone, she said, describing her diocese alternately as aligned with Satan and at war with God.
As in the past, the key question was whether this action will mean that some traditional forms of liturgical language vanishes – as opposed to the old language being blended into gender-neutral references to God. In particular, how does one reference the Holy Trinity, without turning God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit into mere functions (Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier) as opposed to Persons?
Read it all in GetReligion.