The imagined community of the Anglican Communion

There is an astonishingly clear essay on the Anglican Communion which has just appeared on a US website. It is well worth reading in full. I think that increasingly, there are good people who are starting to question the presumed goodness of what is at the heart of the dreadful mess of international Anglicanism.

About time too, I think.

Here is a flavour of the essay:

The good that the Archbishop of Canterbury seeks to achieve is the unity of an imagined Anglican Communion that has virtually no existence in reality. In support of that unity he willingly sacrifices the ordination of women in some dioceses, the appointment of women to the episcopate in some churches, and the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from ordination and the episcopate. For the sake of unity of a communion that does not really exist, he has (perhaps unwittingly) fostered turmoil, dissension, and schism. He has urged the adoption of an ill-conceived covenant for the purposes today of excluding those churches who would embrace as part of the divine creation gay and lesbian people. But whom will the covenant exclude next year? The precedent for exclusion and persecution will have been established, and on the pretext of unity future dissidents and yet to be designated minorities could be targeted.

Well worth reading the whole thing: The imagined community of the Anglican Communion