Statements, Covenants, and Nitwits.

The Archbishop of Canterbury might be a lot of things, but he’s not stupid. He might have too much facial hair, and write books that will never be made into movies with exciting car chases, but he’s still nobody’s fool.. He and his advisors might even be shape-shifting lizards, only able to maintain human form by drinking the blood of evangelical virgins (as a frightening number Viagraville’s commenters clearly believe), but that doesn’t mean they’re not a fair bit sharper than the average knife in the ecclesiastical drawer.

Sadly the same can’t be said for the Bishops prepared to put their names to the Statement on the Polity of the Episcopal Church produced by the modestly self-styled “Anglican Communion Institute”. Despite the impressively creative historical revisionism (Sure the church’s founders saw themselves as establishing the Episcopal equivalent of the Helvetic Confederation), anyone thinking that the folks at Lambeth aren’t going to see through this document quicker than a Vegas hooker asks for money has either been smoking some of Bishop Quinine’s toadstools, or was never too bright to begin with.

Let’s face it; the entire raison d'etre of the looming Anglican Covenant is to bind the lot of us together. ++Cantaur cares less about whether two people can or can’t marry in any given place than he does about the fact that many of the places in which they can’t are making awfully threatening noises about splitting away in a division that could ultimately leave us all as united as Brethren, Baptists or fringe Seventh-day Adventist sects. The purpose of getting everyone to put their necks into a covenantal collar is to keep the more dysfunctional adolescent members of our family from running away from home before they’re mature enough to understand what can happen when you loiter around on your own in Hollywood bus stations.

Which means there’s no way he’s ever going to let it be manipulated into becoming a vehicle for further Episcopalian division. It doesn’t matter how long-winded a document anyone produces with the crumbs of little Don Armstrong’s tangled financial shenanigans; if they think the Biggest Blessed Beard in the Communion can be fooled into accepting diocesan level assent to his Covenant, thereby establishing a precedent which can be used to further divide an already fractured Church, then they’re more deluded than the sweet Anglo-Catholic dearies who think that they’ll always have the same rights as Evangelicals in Bobby Duncan’s brave new Province-in-Perpetual-Waiting. It's just not going to happen. Even if the dearies do have a lovely collection of man-lace.

I’m Father Christian and I teach the Bible.