Anglican Pravda
David Mills on Mainline Propaganda
Here is a short press release from the Anglican Communion News Service (ACNS), of no importance in itself, even as a news story, but useful as an illustration of the sort of propaganda the official agencies provide. In addition to reporting news of the Anglican world, the ACNS advances a certain way of reading the news of the Anglican world: a way that promotes the policies of the seven dwindling Anglican churches of the West and not those of the 31 Anglican churches—the ones in Africa, Asia, and South America—where the church is growing.
The Twist
The story is only four paragraphs long. Its lead paragraph promises something out of the ordinary.
On the eve of the consecration of Canon V. Gene Robinson as Bishop-coadjutor of the Diocese of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, a twist.
In the next paragraph the writers explain the “twist” promised in the lead.
It seems students from the University of Durham in New Hampshire will be protesting conservative protestors tomorrow by staging their own demonstration and calling for “a more realistic and broadminded approach” to the current stance on homosexuality in the Church. One of the students, a 21-year-old woman called Nika with a hard-to-miss silver ring in her bottom lip, told ACNS/ENS that she had never been to church, but was joining the protest. “I am very spiritual,” she said, “but I’m not much for organized religion.” Asked if she’d consider actually going to a church that took this kind of action, she said, “Yeah, I think I would. Yeah, I’ll have to give it a try.”
The twist turns out not to be much of a twist. The writers found a group that is: (1) protesting the protesters, and (2) not Christian at all. That some pro-homosexualist college students are taking part of a Sunday to support a homosexualist advance is not really news. (And being college students they may not have actually gotten up in time anyway.) The two writers might as well write stories like “Local Beagle Chases Rabbits” and “Toddler Reveals Plans to Play in Sandbox.”
Then they offer an illustration from a young woman who considers herself “very spiritual” but against “organized religion.” (She is almost certainly very much for “organized government,” like the one that gathers taxes to pay for her time at college, but has probably never actually asked herself why religion shouldn’t be organized as well.) When asked, this woman says that she would go to a church that ordained an openly homosexual bishop.
At this point, the experienced reader of such things rolls his eyes. The claim that the church would attract people if only it accepted this or that innovation, here made implicitly, which is by far the best way for a propagandist to make his point, is one of liberalism’s old standards. Whatever the liberal wants to do is, he believes, with a faith that would impress a snake-handler, what the world is really waiting for.
That the Episcopal Church and others have accepted all sorts of innovations and continued to shrink does not stop the propagandist from offering the idea yet again. And he never raises the problem that these churches might gain new people, often of marginal commitment, while driving out established members who have invested themselves in the church, though it is not only a pastoral but a practical problem as well (the established members pay for things).
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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