Guys, I'm disappointed. The Episcopal bishop of Virginia shows up with the perfect troll, and
nobody took the bait!
Seriously, I think Lee's statements are completely wrong. As I wrote elsewhere:
The thing is that, at the moment, alternative oversight isn't being met with any attempt at real liberal rapprochement, but only with a bunch of phony platitudes about inclusion and a confident press releases that the liberals won't have to make any concessions at all.
Lee's rather striking statements at his diocesan convention are a case in point. He sets up a commission to stall on the subject (to which the conservatives agree reluctantly because they really don't have anything else they can do in the context of the convention) and then says "If you must make a choice between heresy and schism, always choose heresy." This is not, I submit, a statement inclusive of moderates. What moderates believe is that some things are worth fighting over and some are not, and that the character of heresy makes a difference. Some differences are tolerable, and some are not. But instead we get this profoundly unitarian statement, and while this is going to gladden the URI people, it isn't going to do a thing for the Lewisian Mere Christians.
So I don't buy the theory that the radical liberals are going to be able to take the middle for granted. The nation is swinging around to the Eastern Orthodox view of anger: that it is appropriate and necessary in its proper context. They believe that there are things worth being angry about. And it's quite foolish, in a church that historically depends upon adult converts, to think that inertia is going to keep most of them in place.
