But that was last spring, and he was only Archbishop of Wales. This spring he was in Canterbury when his old friend Jeffrey John, a now celibate gay who shares his theological views, was put up for a minor bishopric in Reading. Dr. Williams first approved the appointment, and then forced Dr. John to stand down when the anger of the opposition became clear. The argument in his defence was that you couldn't force on a diocese a bishop whom some parishes thought heretical. But Anglicans have believed each other heretical, very happily, for the past century at least. Women priests are still not accepted in large areas; women bishops are still forbidden under English law. Even where there are women priests, Anglicans do not agree about what a priest actually is or does. Anglo-Catholics believe that they celebrate a Mass; evangelicals don't believe in a sacramental priesthood at all. These are matters for which people were tortured to death, on both sides, in the Reformation. Why have they now shrunk to quaint and tolerable disagreements, whereas beliefs about sexuality demand exorcism or expulsion?The article goes on to opine that the reasons include money and the general decline of traditional Christianity in the Western world. That said, the author of the editorial, Andrew Brown, believes that Williams will drive the same knife into gay and pro-gay Anglicans' backs that he used on his old friend Jeffrey John.

Good God, I hope not.

My take on this as a queer, former Catholic who had her eldest child baptized in an Episcopal church is best described using the words of retired Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong, who uttered these words after conservative Anglicans slammed gays at the 1998 Lambeth Conference: "I never expected to see the Anglican Communion, which prides itself on the place of reason in faith, descend to this level of irrational Pentecostal hysteria."

Schism is not something to be taken lightly. It is agonizing, messy, and immeasurably costly. But sometimes it is necessary and for the best. In the 2000 Baltimore City Paper article "One Broken Body", I addressed the painful reality of schism in US Protestant denominations.

The prospect that some in the Methodist and Presbyterian communities seek and leaders of those churches are working desperately to avoid--schism, disunity, breaking up--has a history as old as Christianity and is woven into the denominations now visiting these questions. Christianity itself was founded when the first followers of Jesus left Judaism behind. One of them, Peter, founded the Catholic Church. When that church became vastly wealthy and powerful, its authority was challenged in a series of uprisings that created a new pole of Christianity. The very meaning of Protestantism comes from the root of its name: protesting against the religious status quo for the right to consider different ideas, to reach different conclusions, to worship in different ways, to find authority in a completely different place.

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