Point First: American right-wing money has fueled this upraising of mostly African and Asia conservative bishops within the Anglican Communion.

Background: News articles are talking about "schism" with the Anglican Communion. Some say or write the "within the Anglican church." There is no "Anglican church" per se. There is only the Anglican Communion, and it is NOT the authoritative body conservative Anglicans are leading the press to believe it is.

The Anglican Communion is a loose confederacy of the Church of England and national churches (in the U.S., it's The Episcopal Church) bound together by the heritage of the Church of England ("Anglicanism"), specifically--in the case of the Anglican Communion--by what are called the "instruments of unity," which are roughly statements of belief that all the national churches agree upon.

The Lambeth Conference, which is a meeting of bishops of the Anglican Communion, next meets in 2008, in England as always.  As dKos member PastorDan notes (http://www.dailykos.com/user/pastordan; his diary on all this Anglican split business is excellent!)- if "no apology or change of course is forthcoming" from the US and Canadian churches by 2008, conservatives in the Anglican Communion want them somehow kicked out.

This is distinctly un-Anglican behavior, and anyone with a grasp of the history of Anglicanism should be disgusted by it.

During the American Civil War, the General Convention of The Episcopal Church (its official name then was slightly different) carried on as if the war was irrelevant to the Church's unity. Name plates were placed at the seats of Southern bishops (some of whom were officers and even general officers in the armies of the Confederacy) as if at any minute they would walk through the door (having, apparently, caught a train from Atlanta, slid past Union pickets, and avoided arrest up in the lands of Billy Yank). Bishops disagreed violently among themselves over slavery, but the idea of a split within The Episcopal Church over the issue was considered...well...un-Anglican, at best.

Therefore, the split now occurring, and that conservatives want made official, is distinctly un-Anglican. The heritage of Anglicanism is genuinely "big tent" and rich with compromises. That slavery wouldn't cause serious fragmentation within Anglicanism but the ordination of a gay bishop somewhere would, shows that Anglicanism itself--a centuries-old thing--has become the latest victim of a conservatism that is on the rise in many nations, including our own. That money from major GOP donors has helped destroy something so global and old, demonstrates its power, and leaves me in horrible awe.

Point Second: Many have foreseen this split. The Anglican Churches in Africa are growing especially rapidly and are especially conservative and evangelical. The conventional wisdom is that they will dominate the Lambeth Conference in 2008. (One Episcopal priest expressed his frustration to me hyperbolically, "They're minting 12 new bishops a day!") By virtue of the simple fact that they will so hugely outnumber the bishops from the Americas and Europe by 2008 means that if they really want to invent a way for a national church to be thrown out of the Anglican Communion, they will.

And they will have to, because all of this is unprecedented. Lambeth is a consultative and advisory body officially and only. Period. It doesn't even have the mechanisms in place to dis-invite or excommunicate or kick-out or chuck a member. This is an important point, since most of the media coverage I've read misses the fact that the conservative bishops are calling for something that in essence isn't even possible without re-inventing the Anglican Communion itself, and making it a distinctly un-Anglican thing: something that's authoritative more along the lines of the Roman Catholic Church. If the conservative bishops have their way, it's really the end of Anglicanism as history has known it, not just an end to the participation of Americans and Canadians in some "Anglican Communion."

Point Third: But, as one Episcopal priest said to me: If The Episcopal Church is kicked out, fine, why would it want to stay if that means suddenly being under a more authoritative Communion run by "mal-educated, third-world, fundamentalist nitwits." (It may not be a very P.C. statement, but I agree with it 100%.)

There has been talk for the last few years, after the sad, distinctly un-Anglican militancy of the conservative African (and Asian, too) bishops began to manifest itself, of starting what I call The Anglican Church of the Americas. Basically, it would be a loose association of the national Churches of the Western Hemisphere, pretty much all of whom would be far more in line theologically with each other than with some radicalized conservative bishop they've never heard of, screaming on a street corner in Uganda about American sin.

Other un-reported points to consider:

*The conservatives may find themselves getting resistance from national churches besides those of the U.S. and Canada because of the sizeable financial contributions they make to the Communion. There are a host of quasi-official orgs affiliated with the Communion, such as the Compass Rose Society, that rely on funding from The Episcopal Church in particular. Anglicans involved with such orgs and associations will not be happy about the push of the African conservatives to somehow expel The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC).

*The unity of the Anglican Communion is nice and noble and old...but it's not as near to sacred as ecclesiastical unity is within the Roman Catholic Church. At the end of the day, it is not participation within the Anglican Communion that many Episcopalians care about, it is some sort of offical communion with the See of Canterbury, that is, with the Archbishop of Canterbury of the Church of England. There is certainly no rule that says that if conservative Anglicans oust The Episcopalian Church from the Anglican Communion, the Church of England cannot maintain (or create new) special bonds on its own with the Episcopal Church or ACC.

My old Patristics professor at Yale, The Rev. Rowan Greer, used to speak with a sly grin of "wishy-washy Anglicanism." He is an Episcopal priest. He is a scholar of early Christian thought, as well as the history of Christianity and Anglicanism in particular. Clearly, for usually grave, pipe-smoking, staid Rowan, "wishy-washy Anglicanism" was no bad thing. In fact, he knew it was part of the genius of Anglicanism, something that had kept Anglicanism alive for centuries and all over the world, something that had made distinct contributions to the development of liturgy and theology within the Protestant traditions.

Rownan's elderly and retired, and I assume still alive. I picture him today gazing through a haze of pipe smoke, those two ubiquitous, lazy labs panting at his side (his dogs accompanied him--always slowly--even to his lectures) and imagining a future for Anglicanism that he may very well be glad he will not live to see.