Marilyn McCord Adams – Showing Us the Future of The Episcopal Church?

Canon Marilyn McCord Adams has delivered a paper that is creating quite a stir. Although she is now ensconced at Christ Church, Oxford (where I’m told she is an excellent scholar), I suspect her paper gives more than a glimpse of the future of The Episcopal Church and other likeminded provinces. The following especially stands out:

Likewise, sex-and-gender liberals have no interest in excommunicating sex-and-gender conservatives or in denying them the institutional access that all members of TEC/CoE enjoy. But in the name of faithfulness to the Gospel, sex-and-gender liberals cannot extend toleration to allowing sex-and-gender conservatives to set institutional policy no matter what. Liberals should not be so desperately committed to inclusiveness as to let themselves be held hostage by conservative threats to leave unless they get their way. Nor should liberals barter conscientious content-commitments away in a panic to be included in the pan-Anglican polity that conservatives are constructing. Time to teeter-totter! Sex-and-gender liberals should repent of the ‘flying bishops’ scheme, of DEPO and EV. Liberals should also refuse to sign a Gomez-style (as opposed to a Lambeth-Quadrilateral-style) covenant. Liberals should work within the established polity of TEC/CoE and use their majority to uproot homophobia. The reason is straight-forward: homophobia is a sin, and its end-time is now!

Granted, Adams is rather far left. But her advocated policy of close to zero (or below zero?) accommodation of traditional conservatives already is the policy of several TEC dioceses. And I suspect it will soon be the policy of TEC as a whole. Take a good look. This is the real face of “inclusiveness.”

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By the way, Canon Adams gave a Remembrance Day sermon at Christ Church I had the misfortune to hear. In it, she made an offensive comparison between Hiroshima and the Holocaust. Yes, you read correctly – it was a Remembrance Day sermon.

Christ Church nearly had its first spontaneous combustion in its long and hallowed history . . . with me as the combustee.

In a subsequent exchange of e-mails, she did eventually say that she felt Hiroshima and the Holocaust were different. Nevertheless, I challenged both her and the Dean either to apologize for the extremely inappropriate comparison or to publish the sermon so that others could judge for themselves.

As far as I can tell, they have done neither.


Hat tip to MCJ.