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[The following is Part Two in a series entitled, "Mark Harris' Manifesto for Walking Apart." Parts One can be found at http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5328; and Part Two at http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5347]

I recently wrote two articles in response Canon Mark Harris from the Diocese of Delaware, whose blog piece on Jan. 11 I have called a Manifesto for Walking Apart, echoing the terminology of the Windsor Report. Whether consciously or not, Harris is prognosticating the separation of The Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion. What follows is the final of three articles in response, unpacking some of the seminal principles driving the culture wars in The Episcopal Church.

In my first article I commented on Harris' misuse of the word "church", which he seems to understand as a concept from sociology, and hence, theologically, as something strictly human. He has a narcissistic reading of the Episcopal Church's history. Ours is a church with its own unique vocation from God, which no other "church" has a right to challenge, other than in the most inconsequential terms. The church catholic, standing outside of space and time, is itself just another unit in the same cosmic democracy, and as are the member churches of the Anglican Communion.

In a follow-up article I observed that Canon Harris articulated a vision of authority - a vision both grandiose and paranoid, where nobody can tell us what to do, and those that do are in league with the archvillains of history. At the same time Harris cites the authority of "moral urgency" issuing from the righteous indignation of individuals. This is the adolescent spirit that came to public notice with the Baby Boomer generation, defying injustice and wickedness with the virulence of a teenager staying out after curfew.

In this final section I would like to point out the real gospel of TEC as Harris presents it, and then briefly characterize the world that envisions such a gospel. After that I resign from the role of critic of the celebrated Canon from Delaware.

The first half of Harris' article is, in effect, the construction of a mythic past for the new Episcopal Church. This mythology is empty of live concepts. There are no giants and no divine rescues. The real redemption history of TEC begins with the acknowledgement of shame during the era of slavery. This particular history is the defining reality for the Episcopal Church, and the lens through which TEC recasts its former history. It is replicated in all the liberation movements of the twentieth century, in particular "the struggle for equal rights for all citizens and in particular for women and for people of color". Gay liberation fits neatly into this same pattern. As Dr. Schori told interviewers recently, there will be others. The Episcopal Church is now in the liberation business. All of the church's rituals have been subsumed under this one promise: not salvation from sin before God, but salvation from shame before men and women - or at least from the ones who matter.

For all its faults and failings the historic church has a solution to the problem of shame: repent of the sin you're ashamed of, and go on. Amend your life, make restitution to those you have wronged, and go on. The community of the redeemed is a society where people forgive and accept forgiveness, knowing they will sin again and will rely upon the brethren for forgiveness. Sin is a terrible, haunting reality that disrupts and threatens the human community. It won't go away until Jesus comes back. Even the Christian promise of forgiveness has an awful, bittersweet quality.

While traditional Christians will always need to be forgiven, they don't need the reality of sin in order to maintain their community. They are not addicted to the feeling of forgiveness, except in some evangelical circles where being "born again" is repeated with a ritualistic regularity.

The Episcopal Church has become a different sort of society. It is no longer a society of the redeemed, however imperfect. It is a society of the suspicious, the aggrieved - in short, an adversarial society - a society not of equals, but of victims trading sideward glances, never secure in each other's company, and not really saved from anything. TEC has styled herself a revolutionary workshop where adversarial relations must be maintained in order that ritual acts of liberation can be endlessly enacted.

There are striking ironies in this brave new Episcopal world. For example, a female priest in the West must be an icon of the adversarial movement that brought her ordination to the "urgent" attention of the Episcopal Church. There are many women priests who embrace the orthodox religion of the historic Church and reject the confrontational character of the women's movement. They are naïve in thinking they can rise above or somehow sidestep the movement which made their holy orders an "urgent" necessity.

Similarly Christians have "winked" at homosexual clergy for centuries and gratefully received ministry from them, acknowledging not their sexuality but their humanity, and Christ's likeness in it. Now that our public consciousness has been raised, there is no such thing as a priest who "happens to be gay", any more than a woman who just preaches the historic gospel. History has stamped the identity of a moment on these unwitting souls, and none of us has the power to wish it away.

One of the messages of Canon Mark Harris is the recognition that the die is cast for The Episcopal Church. It must go forward on its present course for better or for worse. The new faith has its own true believers, and many more hangers on who cling to the known rather than journey into the unknown. There's irony for you - the Church of revolution-for-its-own-sake has become the inert Establishment. Some who burnt flags in 1968 are wrapping themselves in a different flag forty year years later.

There are more terrible ironies for the present generation of Episcopal true believers. Their greatest critics are not the dissenters from within, but those from colonial Asia and Africa who have been liberated by the "conservative" religion of the Bible. This is not the liberation of a leisure class who can choose whether or not to identify with an aggrieved party, or just as easily choose not to, once the profile of the victim no longer meets some deeper psychological need. I think of the bishop from Uganda who literally dodged bullets to come to the United States and address our Diocesan Convention back in the late 1980's. His message: "Preach Christ." I recall the utter lack of comprehension on the part of that roomful of liberators.

The Episcopal Church has recently found herself spinning off from the critical mass of a burgeoning Anglican Communion. To her shock and dismay, the former colonies now call her the spiritual successor to the old imperialism. Not through overt acts of enslavement and oppression, but through the moralistic posturing with which she imposes her social improvements on these "primitive" cultures. It is the White Man's Burden all over again. The old patrician self-assurance returns in a new patronizing condescension, with the same feeling of being born to rule.

This is a terrible moment of reckoning for a proclaimed liberator.

---The Rev. Canon J. Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of Saint Luke, Orlando, Florida. He is a regular VOL columnist.