Conservative Episcopalians engineered diocesan secessions to form a purer church
Evidence
In conversation with me, the historian Diana Butler Bass, whose books include Standing Against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Ninetheenth-Century America, describes concurrent efforts to bring the Episcopalian church, too, under more conservative leadership. “On the national level, there were people who were troubled by what they saw as a turnaway from orthodoxy,” she says. “They abandoned the traditional policy structure of elected representatives and adopted a strategy of succession in order to have as many dioceses as possible secede and form the ‘true’ Episcopal church, and thus leave the old Episcopal church, with gay people and women leaders, in the dust.” These conflicts, Bass notes, “function as predictors, or canaries in the coal mine, about larger political movements.” — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 285
Categorization
- XREF: Church schism engineered via a change of structural strategy echoes the ‘Abandoned policy structure of elected representatives, adopted succession’ move — comparable to how the SBC was taken over from the top and how coups displace liberal leadership, tying to the reader’s other work on organized minority capture of shared institutions. — connects to: Institutions built for withdrawal later enabled evangelical political reentry