The Day After the Episcopal Bomb

Published on October 24, 2005

Leaked minutes from a meeting of liberal Episcopalian para-church laity have found their into the hands of The Washington Times’ Julia Duin, who dutifully characterizes the notes as a deliberate plot to “oust” and “disenfranchise” conservative Episcopal bishops who have called for the deconsecration of gay Bishop Gene Robinson. Duin also repeats the charges of […]

Leaked minutes from a meeting of liberal Episcopalian para-church laity have found their into the hands of The Washington Times’ Julia Duin, who dutifully characterizes the notes as a deliberate plot to “oust” and “disenfranchise” conservative Episcopal bishops who have called for the deconsecration of gay Bishop Gene Robinson. Duin also repeats the charges of conservative Anglican groups, such as the American Anglican Communion, who called the meeting of the liberal Episcopalians an attempt at a church coup, and suggests that the plans be given the atomic-age code name, “Day After,” based on what seems to be a pretty loose, and misleading, read of the text. (The phase “Day After,” which other newspapers — some upping the ante by describing the liberal group in question as “pansexual” — have promptly latched onto for its Strangelove sound, does appear, but in the somewhat less-nefarious context of: “What will be our response the ‘Day After,’ when [conservative] bishops start announcing they are in a ‘new’ Anglican Communion and the Network is ‘recognized’ as the only legitimate expression of the Anglican Communion in North America?”) The website of Orthodox Anglicans who originally came upon the documents, “Virtue Online,” took the analogy even further: what the liberal group was planning was akin to the Nazis spreading the ideology of Fascism so thick nothing else could survive, and the “Day After” was not just a bomb, but a “final solution”: presumably, the genocide of conservatives. That sounds serious. So what’s all this doomsday talk about? As far as can be seen, the meeting of a group of liberal church members involved in a liberal advocacy group, the Via Media group, in preparation for the worst-case scenario of a Church split in the United States (largely over issues such as the church’s stance towards homosexuality and gay clergy), and what small town churches and regional dioceses would need in terms of legal support and interim clergy, should the conservatives bishops decide to break away from the church and try to hold onto diocesan property. Well, if that’s not just Hiroshima and Auschwitz rolled into a ball, what is?

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