Imagine further that the prime minister also declares that unless the U.S. Congress and the president force those states with civil union statutes to repeal those laws and guarantee that this will never happen again, the United States will no longer be considered an ally and future relations with Britain and its commonwealth nations will be "impaired."
Now this would never happen, right? It's in no one's best interest to do such a thing and even so, as Americans, we would never stand for something like this.
While this may seem like fiction, this is exactly what is happening in the Anglican communion. The communion is a coalition of 38 independent churches which have a common heritage with the Church of England. Each of those churches over the past 250 years has developed independently in their own cultural context, which has created within Anglicanism a rich diversity unlike any other worldwide church.
At the heart of this "unity in diversity" is a principle called the Via Media - "the middle way." For 400 years Anglicans have agreed that what is essential is not a unity of thought, but a healthy respect for all points of view balanced with generally agreed-upon forms of worship and a commitment to God-given reason. In fact, Anglicans upheld this unique form of compromise as a source for divine revelation.
Even when Anglicans have faced serious theological disagreements and a small number of individuals or congregations have left the church as a result, the Via Media has allowed for maximum participation and exhibited a way of living in unity, while affirming difference.
That is, until now. In February, the heads of each of those 38 independent churches, called primates, met in Tanzania. High on the agenda was what to do about the Episcopal Church - the Anglican body in the U.S. - and its position on the role of homosexual people within the church.
They issued a statement very similar to the fictional account this article started with. They required that the House of Bishops (which functions in the Episcopal Church much like the U.S. Senate) take certain positions as binding on the Episcopal Church - something no group of Episcopal bishops has the authority to do - including endorsing statements about human sexuality that the vast majority of Episcopalians do not accept.
In this they disdain the democratic model that has served the Episcopal Church well since the Revolutionary War, because those processes disturb the comfortable certainty of the communion. Keeping with this theme they have introduced repeatedly over the past four years the novel notion (for Anglicans, anyway) that unity of thought in theology is now a requirement to be a member of the communion, and that the Episcopal Church or any other communion church is less than fully Anglican if it doesn't conform to a prescribed statement of faith.
In their efforts to force unity of belief and practice these foreign primates have now gone so far as to demand direct involvement in the governance of the Episcopal Church, proposing to provide foreign oversight for a minority of dissenting congregations and dioceses in the United States.
Regardless of the primates' intent, this is nothing more than a power grab by one faction. It is the very thing against which the United States fought its Revolutionary War, and it moves Anglicanism far away from its origins by seeking to impose the authority of foreign bishops, an ironic twist since the Church of England's foundation came out of refusal to accept the authority of the Pope.
The response of the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops in the past week presents a polite, but firm, attempt to bring the dialogue within the Anglican Communion back to the Via Media. While affirming the importance of Global Anglicanism and recommitting to its relationships within the communion, the House of Bishops reaffirmed the inherently Anglican understanding of the autonomy of the Episcopal Church and the need to reset the terms of debate.
Especially in our post-modern age, it is just too easy to walk away from people with whom we disagree, rather than do the hard work of living with our differences. We in the United States - and the world, for that matter - are in desperate need of a witness to a middle way.
Far too often we live with one side imposing its will on another, or with compromises that dilute the integrity of peoples' positions. If Anglicanism can survive with the Via Media intact, then what we will see is a living example of how to hold the extremes in a creative tension, a genuine alternative to self-isolation and alienation.
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* THE REV. MICHAEL MAYOR is rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Salt Lake City. He can be reached by e-mail at rector@allsaintsslc.org.
