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Notes -
Just saw this bit of news:
https://religionnews.com/2025/05/12/episcopal-church-ends-refugee-resettlement-citing-moral-opposition-to-resettling-white-afrikaners/]https://religionnews.com/2025/05/12/episcopal-church-ends-refugee-resettlement-citing-moral-opposition-to-resettling-white-afrikaners/
with the title of "Episcopal Church refuses to resettle white Afrikaners, ends partnership with US government". Thinking that it was a case of sensationalizing the tittle to attract clicks to a more moderate news article I opened the page. Oh boy was I disappointed.
While the majority of the article was more as a moralizing plea for the resumption of resettlement programs, the beginning at least was what it said in the title. The episcopal church will end its partnership with the US government due to being asked to benefit white south africans.
Why are they doing that?, in their words, because they are pro racial justice:
Maybe the next step in the Trump Administrations should be to show that welfare programs benefit a majority of white people or something like that?
Link to the letter from the Church - https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/letter-from-presiding-bishop-sean-rowe-on-episcopal-migration-ministries/
Reading the letter, I'm struck by the notion that the way they talk about their operations is not so different than what an international corporation does. Bits like
Just substitute refugees by clients and then it makes sense why they are so gung ho about adding more bodies through this kind of partnerships. They win twice, once by getting money from the federal gevernment and once more with some of those resetled contributing to the church itself, be it through economic donations or voluntary work.
in reference to their winding down of their resettlement services makes me think Corpo. And it's logical if one thinks about it for a moment, but for some reason it never occurred to me that churches aren't that diferent from other NGO's.
Finally, this last bit is maybe the real reason why they are finishing their services and not just out right anti-white racism, but it is curious that it is buried in the body of the letter and the woke justification is front and center in the opening paragraphs. But one salient point against this theory of mine is that it looks like they are ending services due to the white Afrikaneers, not because the pause in the resetlement programs. This is further reinforced when the original news article mentions that
so it sounds to me, like these NGO's were hopping to lawfare their way into opening the money faucet at the through again, but at least for the Episcopal church dealing with whites with "preferential treatment" is too much.
A lot of people wonder why Curtis Yarvin is taken seriously. There’s been a lot of drama lately about whether Moldbug Sold Out, or whether there is any reason to take him seriously. A lot of this comes from an overfocusing on his monarchy prescriptions, but this really misses a lot of the deeper intellectual content. Social justice came from American Mainline Protestantism. They are the same thing.
While my first impulse is to deny and defend the church, with examples like these and seeing lady bishops and whatnot in some denominations, I can't really deny the reality that there is truth to that statement. Always a disappointment to see the religion of the Crusades being so limp wristed with statements like
The episcopal church has always been more or less defined as the liberal branch of the Christian communion least defined by doctrinal concerns.
Was this true 350 years ago?
Ok, you activated an "urquan has too many theological opinions for his own good" moment, but I remember a research project I did for my historiography class in college on Anglicanism in America that gave me a decent answer to this question.
My original question was asking about how American Anglicans on the eve of the Revolution dealt with the idea of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of their Church: the British Monarch. Perhaps this was a silly question to ask, but I seriously wondered how you could deal with the cognitive dissonance of belonging to a church whose governor -- not "head", that's what Henry VIII called himself before someone told Elizabeth that calling yourself "head of the Church" sounds like usurping Jesus Christ -- was the very King you were calling a tyrant. I was aware that many of the Founding Fathers were Anglicans, so this seemed like a fruitful area of study.
I focused my research on Anglicans in Virginia (where several of the Anglican Founders were from) in the 1700s, to narrow in on that question.
And I found that, not only was the exact question "how did the Anglican Founders deal with the cognitive dissonance of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of the Church of England" had never been posed in the historical community, but that actually the subject of intense debate among scholars was the much more alarming question, Did Anglicans in Virginia actually care about their religion at all?
I recall one researcher, who wrote an entire monograph about a specific Anglican lady who had a Bible and a journal where she wrote devotional texts about God. And the researcher treated this like she'd found the Holy Grail -- look, everyone, I found an Anglican woman who seems like she had a heartfelt faith in God! It was a revelation. Stop the presses! We have to rewrite the textbooks! Maybe at least one Anglican in Virginia actually did believe in God!
That underscored to me how serious the rot was in the Anglican Church in America, even back then; it really did seem like Anglicans saw the church as a social club, and took or left portions of their faith as it served their other interests. Actually taking religion seriously just wasn't something in the vocabulary of most Anglicans at the time. That was something for those weird revivalists or those Wesleyans with their method.
Having met some Episcopalians, I really do feel like I can take their approach to faith and just push it back a few hundred years, and get a good sense of the scorn or bewilderment with which their WASP ancestors would have viewed intense religious devotion. Or worse,
expelledbasing your morals on an unchanging read of the Scriptures instead of just doing what's high-status.Relevant to the subject of morals, and to the larger topic at hand -- about racism -- many American Anglicans at the time were slaveholders and it was very common for churches to be racially segregated, or for blacks not to be allowed in the church at all. So there's a bit to the Episcopal Church's posture that really is a "we know we were the epicenter of this, we're really sorry."
As far as I was able to discern, in this very limited research project (that included little to no primary source work), the only effect that the American Revolution had on the American Anglican Church was that they changed their name to "The Episcopal Church," to get rid of the whole "Anglo" thing. ("We promise we're good patriots!") Or wait, was it the Protestant Episcopal Church at that time? I think the "Protestant" got nixed at one point because it sounded too much like having a solid theological opinion.
It's also true that a huge number of Loyalists were Anglicans, and so I'm sure if I devoted myself to a more serious investigation of the time period I could find evidence of Anglicans' religious affiliation influencing their views on the American Revolution. Many of these people fled to Canada as it became clear the patriots were winning, so a true telling of the story of Anglicanism in North America (not to be confused with the "Anglican Church in North America", a modern body, that split from Canterbury over gay marriage and is essentially a missionary project of African Anglicans, because as much as Episcopalians like to talk about their tight links to Africa, the Africans think they're apostate for their strong support of SSM) would have to talk about Canada too.
I'm pretty mean to Episcopalians, but really, I guess I'm just as bewildered about them as they would be about me, God bless them.
If you really want to get me started on things that are interesting about Anglicanism, ask me about the Oxford Movement or the "Anglican Continuum." That's where the story becomes fascinating, in both the way that a plane crash and a mathematical equation are fascinating. But you have to find the Anglicans who barely want to be Anglicans before I start getting really interested. (The ACNA people I mentioned above are continuing Anglicans, they're trying to be more Anglican than the Anglicans, and some of them ordain women. Confessional Protestantism in America has had two big waves of schism, once in the 60s-70s over women's ordination and now in the past 10-15 years over gay marriage, and I'm sure at this point all the Catholics and Orthodox in the audience are going "man am I glad we have The Tradition.")
All that to say -- I think Anglicans ~300 years ago had all the seeds of their present situation already planted, in British America more than in Britain. Anglicanism to me has always seemed like the Church of the Compromise rather than a church with a strong set of beliefs, and the American Anglican Church was so eager to compromise with the prevailing winds that they changed their name to obscure their origins. There's an old quip of Oscar Wilde that seems apropos: "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do."
In that sense I don't see their collapse into social liberalism as particularly surprising, in the way that I find the descent of mainstream Presbyterianism and Methodism (which, to be sure, was an Anglican revival movement at first, though it's always had a more independent nature in America) surprising, given the history of those churches in firm confession and rigorous devotion. But I'm sure that's another story for another time, one that you're no doubt more well-equipped to tell than I am.
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