Like Lost Sheep

...This means of identifi cation is based upon a set of assumptions about which she is clear...

...After serious engagement with church members at her two research sites, examination of the charges and countercharges being made in the current debate, and careful study of the literature on globalization theory, Hassett reaches some interesting and carefully nuanced conclusions...

...She found it to have a positive and signifi cant effect on members of the congregation...

...Many conservative Episcopalians have genuinely come to see the world in a new way, with greater interests in the global South and greater respect for the wisdom and resourcefulness of Southern Christians...

...She notes that the relationship has some positive impact on the African side as well...

...As a result, they fi nd the “rejection of their proffered solidarity dismaying and confounding, and often react by explaining away African views and blaming Northern conservatives for indoctrinating Southern Anglicans, rather than seeking to understand how homosexuality functions as an issue in other cultural and political contexts around the world...

...Hassett notes her indebtedness to Douglas in her acknowledgments, and is critical of Jenkins’s work...

...For as recent polling data (which may not have been available to her at the time that she wrote) suggests, only a relatively small percentage of Episcopalians actually identify their congregations as “predominantly liberal...

...She concludes that the affi liation of her fi eld site in the South with the Church in Rwanda was more than a simple paper relationship...

...She suggests that they rely upon a vision of the natural affi nity of liberal American activists and Christians in the developing world that is based on “the bias toward the Left in the scholarly literature on global movements...

...This assumption is critical, if Hassett wishes to speak of a “liberal/moderate majority,” which she will do later in the book...

...Although she acknowledges that a wide variety of issues are involved in current church feuding, she uses attitudes on the appropriateness of the ordination of sexually active gays and lesbians as the line of demarcation between what she identifi es as the “conservative” and “liberal/moderate” blocs in the Episcopal Church...

...She spent four months at “a parish in the southeastern United States that broke from the Episcopal Church and placed itself under the authority of the archbishop of Rwanda” and “almost six months in central Uganda” at Uganda Christian University, an Anglican university with strong ties to conservative Episcopalians in the United States...

...She concludes, however, that “the leaders in the Episcopal GLBT rights group, Integrity, and a few outspoken bishops, other church leaders, and scholars” who are activists “for the full inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) Episcopalians” represent “a position with the general support of a majority of Episcopalians...

...Thus it is only by classifying the “generally nonactivist, majority of Robert W. Prichard, the Arthur Lee Kinsolving professor of Christianity in America at the Virginia Theological Seminary, is the author of A History of the Episcopal Church...

...She writes that, although her analysis reveals some of the limits of transformation wrought by these new relationships [between the American parish and Rwanda] those limitations do not negate the real and transformative impact of this globalization process...

...She spends considerable time on the charges and countercharges that Americans on both sides of the debate over sexuality were attempting to buy African votes with promises of aid...

...Jenkins, she charges, underestimates the material inequality between the global South and North, and overstates Southern power...

...As a result of their contacts with American conservatives, African Anglicans have found “a new way of thinking of Africa in relation to the United States...

...The strengths of the book are also its weaknesses: Close attention to events of the past decade have led the author to neglect the history of ties between Evangelical Episcopalians and Africa that began in the second decade of the 19th century, and her carefully argued prose can read, at times, like an introductory textbook...

...In contrast, she reckons that “most of those who hold strong conservative views of homosexuality” are members of congregations in “the conservative camp” composed of parishes that have taken explicit stances against the ordination of gays and lesbians...

...In contrast, Hassett can be critical of the attitudes of liberal Episcopalians...

...This would presumably involve strong alliances between Episcopalians committed to full gay/lesbian inclusion and African Anglicans resistant to such a vision...

...Hassett recognizes that, in the period after the gathering of Anglican bishops at the 1998 Lambeth Conference adopted a resolution critical of same-sex behavior by an overwhelming margin, Some Northern liberals and moderates were indeed moved to speak about the global South in derogatory terms...

...In contrast, 18 percent responded that their congregations were “predominantly conservative,” 25 percent said that they were “somewhat conservative,” and 27 percent characterized their congregations as “in the middle...

...We may have grounds for questioning Hassett’s assumptions about the attitudes of the silent majority in the Episcopal Church, but not for questioning the seriousness with which she goes about studying the presumed minority of Episcopalians and former Episcopalians who oppose the program for full inclusion...

...These ideas were widely expressed and represent a real struggle with the painful experiences of Lambeth 1998...

...In such remarks, American Episcopal liberals and moderates were giving voice to their fear, anger, and sense of alienation from the Southern church, for whom they had previously seen themselves as advocates...

...She concludes that the question of aid is neither the sole cause for African behavior, nor irrelevant, declaring that “from the Ugandan perspective, there is no way to purify North-South relationships of material elements, because there is no way of inequalities to access to resources not to be at issue in these transnational Anglican interactions...

...The 2005 “Faith Communities Today Survey” of 4,102 Episcopal congregations, commissioned by the Episcopal Church’s Congregational Development offi ce, found that only 8 percent of respondents characterized their congregations as “predominantly liberal” and only 22 percent suggested that their congregations were “somewhat liberal...

...This is the challenging and exciting message that Africa is superior to America in certain ways and that Africans have something to teach American Christians...

...Nevertheless, this is a book that deserves to be read by anyone with a serious interest in the current state of the Anglican Communion...

...In an era in which those involved in the debates over theology and morality in the Anglican Communion increasingly rely upon caricature and overly simple explanations, Anglican Communion in Crisis stands out for its closely argued, nuanced discussions and its unwillingness to follow any single party line...

...BY ROBERT W. PRICHARD This is the most recent in a growing genre of books that seek to explain the current feuding in the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church in the United States is a part...

...She suggests that, in place of this scenario, liberals adopt Ian Douglas’s dream of “an emerging global Christian community embodying radical differences...

...Recent volumes on this subject include Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom (2002), Ian Douglas and Paul Zahl’s Understanding the Windsor Report (2005), and Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner’s The Fate of Communion (2006...

...That is to say, she approaches the current debate in the Episcopal Church from a liberal perspective...

...As in almost any public debate, it is only a relatively small percentage of Episcopalians who actually make open declarations of their views on the disputed matters...

...She closes by warning liberal and moderate Episcopalians not to accept the inevitability of an alliance between conservative Americans and Africans...

...Miranda Hassett’s particular interest is in the alliances made between conservative Episcopalians and former Episcopalians here and Anglicans in Africa...

...Avoiding that strategy herself, Hassett looks deeply at Uganda and concludes that “the debate over homosexuality in Uganda is as much over outside infl uences and the cultural and economic power of the North as it is about the morality of same-sex desire,” and that “homosexuality has thus become one of the key points at which Uganda leaders seek to express their ideological independence from Northern cultural infl uences...

...the Episcopal Church’s membership” as aligned with the activist leadership that one can posit a “liberal/moderate” majority...

...Nevertheless, the picture Hassett paints is, in large measure, positive: The alliance of African Anglicans and American conservatives is transformative in ways that she regards as primarily good...

...Her explanation is this: that the offer of a relationship that may result in the reception of aid can lead Africans to be more vocal about convictions that they already hold, but that Africans are generally unwilling to accept aid based on the requirement that they adopt points of view inimical to their own convictions...

...It is clear that she listened carefully to those whom she met, and did not succumb to what she recognizes to be liberal stereotypes about conservative Anglicans and Africa...

...It is this perspective of materially unbalanced relationships that leads Hassett to be critical of Philip Jenkins’s argument in The Next Christendom about a global shift in power...

...Hassett qualifi es both of these judgments, noting that conservative Anglicans in the United States retain some negative stereotypes about Africa and that some Africans recognize problems with the idea of African superiority...