Absent Allies
David Mills on Conservative Avoidance
In my years in the Episcopal resistance, I often ran into conservative men and women who would explain to me that though they rejected some liberal innovation, “it is not a hill I am going to die on.” More than once someone told me that he would not fight an innovation right after telling me that he thought it completely unbiblical. Friends in other churches have told me that they have heard the same declaration from those who ought to have been their allies.
Often such people will concede that the innovation is heretical, or may well be heretical, but then claim that the battle has been lost and the innovators have won, or that the issue is not a “Gospel imperative,” or that opposing the innovation is either “not a hill I am going to die on” or “not a trench I want to die in,” or that the people on the other side are good and godly people whose good work cannot be denied, or that we cannot make a definitive judgment when sincere believers disagree.
To be fair, sometimes the excuse may have been a good reason badly expressed. To say that “it’s not a trench I want to die in” may mean that you are not called to activism—to speak at meetings and organize petitions and the like—though you will resist the error firmly in your own place and time. In an imperfect church and world, Christians must pick their fights. However, most of the people I am writing about meant by such high-minded phrases that they would accept the innovation and act as if it did not matter, despite thinking it either wrong or likely to be wrong.
These are obviously very bad reasons for avoiding what they admit may well be the teaching of Scripture and for living peacefully with innovations they admit are or may well be heretical. Bad as they were, I don’t remember anyone ever looking guilty as he gave one of them, though I thought that they surely knew how flimsy and self-serving their arguments seemed to the rest of us. They often gave them with as much intensity and conviction as if they were saying, “I will not sell my children into slavery.” It still strikes me as odd, this complete lack of self-consciousness or embarrassment.
The main issue during my time as an activist was the ordination of women. Many conservative Episcopalians came genuinely to believe in it, but many—the people of whom I am speaking—did not. They would tell people like me, usually under the cloak of night, that they really didn’t agree with it, or had problems with it that would not go away, or were sure that it would eventually be proved wrong. Several priests told me that they did not believe that women should be ordained, yet had women priests serving as assistants in their parishes.
Most obviously felt that their doubts made us comrades, though their doubts were secret and ineffective when mine were public. They sometimes made a cozy disparaging remark about some conservative supporter of women’s ordination, as if he were in a different camp than they. I found this the oddest part of the business.
I would have thought that such people would be moved by seeing that each reason could apply equally well to innovations they opposed, including the approval of homosexuality and “inclusive” or goddess liturgies, were these innovations ever officially approved. Having granted one innovative reading of Scripture, they could not logically rule out another. They could not answer the insistence of the innovators that a similar “paradigm shift” will someday reveal to them the godliness of homosexual marriages or prayer to God the Mother. They could not with any confidence declare that they would never come to believe in these things, against the Christian tradition they inherited, as they have come to believe in the headship of women, against the Christian tradition they inherited.
As some predicted (including me), some of these conservatives are already invoking these excuses to justify their inaction as the homosexualists press in their churches for the approval of sodomy and others move for the approval of liturgies that remove the Father and the Son. One could predict their current capitulation because these excuses are the natural responses of the conservative faced with paying the cost of conserving the faith given him to conserve. They are the sorts of things you say when you are trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Bad Excuses
It may therefore be worth briefly examining each excuse. None of them work. None of them come close to working.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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