This
is like deja vu all over again
-
Professional
Baseball Legend Yogi Berra
The Episcopal
News Service is reporting that the Diocese of South Carolina has voted
to leave the Episcopal Church:
Charleston,
South Carolina - The majority of South Carolina Episcopalians who attended a
special convention at St. Philip’s Church here Nov. 17 affirmed actions by
Bishop Mark Lawrence and the diocesan Standing Committee a month ago to
disaffiliate the diocese from the Episcopal Church.
The
bishop referred to the special convention as “the Valley of Decision” during
his address and asserted, “It is time to turn the page.” He referred to
attempts to prevent separation of the diocese, and his oft-mentioned issues of
theology, morality and disagreement with church canons. “So
be it…We have withdrawn from that church…We have moved on. With the Standing
Committee’s resolution of disassociation, the fact is accomplished: legally and
canonically,” he said.
Hmmm. This story sounds awfully familiar. Wait, I think I’ve
got it:
[U]pon
arrival of the news of the Republican victory, the General Assembly, on
November 10, 1860, called for a Convention of the People of South Carolina to
draw up an Ordinance of Secession. …On December 17, 1860, the Secession
Convention convened in the Baptist Church in Columbia. The spirit of
Nationalism, Sectionalism, and Secessionism filled the air! One observer said
that restraining the spirit of the Convention was like restraining the wind. On
this first day, the Convention passed a unanimous resolution to Secede from the
union. There was at that time an epidemic of smallpox in Columbia, so the
convention adjourned to Charleston."
The
next day, the Convention met in Charleston's Institute Hall and formed several
committees including one to draft an Ordinance of Secession. Then
on the heroic day of December 20, 1860, the Convention met in St. Andrews Hall
on Broad Street an adopted the Ordinance of Secession on roll call vote. On the
question being put, "Will the Convention adopt the Ordinance?" it passed
in the affirmative. Yeas, 169; Nays, none.
- “South
Carolina Secession Convention, November – December 1860,” Author Unnamed, Lt.
Gen. Wade Hampton Camp No. 273 Columbia, S.C. Sons of the Confederate Veterans
site, http://www.wadehamptoncamp.org/hist-sc.html
Leaders
who proved lightning rods
There
are some interesting if ironic similarities in these two conventions beyond the
fact they both occurred in Charleston within blocks of each other. Both of them
involve the election of a national leader who proved to be a lightning rod. In
the 1860 event, it was election of Republican Abraham Lincoln whose abolitionist
sentiments frightened the gentile Southern aristocrats fearing the eminent loss
of their privileged existence at the expense of an entire class of African
descent slaves. South Carolina’s secession and the attack on Ft. Sumter in
Charleston’s harbor a mere five months later would plunge the nation into a
Civil War that would prove to be its bloodiest conflict in 236 year existence.
No doubt conservative South Carolina Episcopalians felt a
sense of déjà vu in the election of ECUSA Presiding Bishop Katherine
Jefferts-Schori. As the unprecedented first woman presiding bishop in the US
church, she has proven to be an enormously talented and visionary leader who
has negotiated ECUSA through an expansive and painful process of inclusivity
that has steadily sought to remove the last vestiges of institutional homophobia
and sexism in the church. As such, Jefferts-Schori has been a lightning rod
among conservatives throughout the Anglican Communion who have, from time to
time, excluded the American primate from Communion gatherings or made the participation
of this woman bishop – itself still a point of contention in many quarters of
the Communion - conditional upon being silent. She has endured much indignity
in the process to say the least.
Jefferts-Schori has also had no shortage of antagonists
within the American church. South Carolina is not the first diocese to see
major defection from the church upon her election. The path to departure has
been particularly stormy in South Carolina. The election of Mark Lawrence as
the bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina did not come easily. He was
initially rejected by the wider church when the standing committees in each
diocese failed to confirm his election in South Carolina in 2006. Many were
concerned that Lawrence would do exactly as he has now done and lead his
diocese out of the Episcopal Church. South Carolina promptly reelected him and
he was finally confirmed on his second attempt in 2008.
The Bottom Line
Lawrence and a majority of his deputation from South
Carolina walked out of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church last July
after it passed resolutions lifting restrictions on the blessing of same sex
unions and access to ordination by transgendered persons. He returned to South
Carolina and set about the business of secession resulting in the suspension of
Lawrence from his role as an Episcopal bishop by the national church’s Disciplinary
Board of Bishops last month. The Board’s actions were a response to legal
actions initiated by the diocese to change the status of church properties in
South Carolina pursuant to secession.
Where Lincoln was more than aware of his imperfections
and grieved over the losses his decisions caused, Lawrence embodies the blindness
of the true believer and the egocentrism of the self-styled martyr. His
dissembling in efforts to procure his election is particularly telling. In a
Nov. 6, 2006, letter to the wider church whose standing committees would first
reject his election only to later affirm it, Lawrence promised that he would
“work at least as hard at keeping the Diocese of South Carolina in the
Episcopal Church as my sister and brother bishops work at keeping the Episcopal
Church in covenanted relationship with the worldwide Anglican Communion.”
Ironically, the actions leading to his suspension and the
subsequent secession of South Carolina from the church began with his storming
out of the General Convention even as it voted to affirm its commitment to
building relationships across the Anglican Communion. Apparently that was not
enough for Lawrence.
Ultimate and Penultimate Concerns
Theologian Paul Tillich was very clear that anything that
anything that achieves the status of ultimate concern for man has been elevated
to their god. If you want to see a
person’s or a group’s true religion, look at what they see as the bottom line.
When penultimate concerns - like the nation-state, financial success or a
socially constructed ideology - become elevated to the level of ultimacy, they become
false symbols of ultimate concern. There
is a word for that confusion of the works of our own hands – or minds – with the
ultimate: idolatry.
One of the marks of ultimacy is comprehensiveness. If G-d
is the author of all creation, the divine whose image all created beings bear,
policies which seek to include ever more aspects of the good creation within
the scope of its care and ethical duties point toward ultimacy. Those policies
which create ever tighter tribal circles which separate us (the good, the
elect, the chosen) from them (the evil, the damned, the sinful) by a willingness
to agree to ideological constructions speak to penultimate concerns – such as
security, control and self-affirmation - and thus to idolatry. In Catholic
theologian David Tracy’s terms, it is the analogical approach to religion
focused on belonging versus the dialectical approach which is obsessed with distinction
based upon beliefs.
The Misanthropy Commanded by Tribal Deities
Of course, this is hardly a new story. Even as Abraham
Lincoln agonized over how to achieve the greater good of holding his country
together and how to deal with the new realities of those who had previously
been held as slaves, men of presumably good conscience denounced those plans
from pulpits in the name of a god who not only permitted slavery but in most
cases commanded it as a part of the natural order.
They spoke of a god whose highly rigid hierarchical
universe reflected the values of the aristocratic planters from the southwest
of England who first settled and later controlled most of the Southern colonies.
They also spoke of the dark, grim judging
and punishing tribal deity of the highly sectarian Calvinists from the battle-scarred
borderlands of Scotland and England who settled the backcountry of the
Appalachians. The god of slave state apologists was not the god of all creation
which bears the divine image. It was rather the god of a self-proclaimed elect within
their circled wagons who looked upon the damned outside that circle with fear, loathing
and a determination to control them.
The deity articulated by Mark Lawrence and his fellow
secessionists is such a tribal god. The religion of the tribe is not interested
in ministering to all the children of G-d bearing the divine image. Rather, it
serves the perceived needs of a self-appointed elected to affirm itself by
denigrating those outside the wagons. And it reveals itself in its own bottom
line - the penultimate concern of a common social prejudice which has been
raised to the godhead, a misanthropic idolatry.
One would have thought that South Carolina would have
learned its lesson the first time considering how poorly its original secession
turned out. But, as Eric Hoffer observed in his classic work The True
It is the true believer’s ability to
“shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that d not deserve to be either
seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He
cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacle not baffled by
contradictions because he denies their existence.
- Eric
Hoffer, The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, (San Francisco: Harper&Row, 1951), p. 71.
Abraham Lincoln wept.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The
Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief
system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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