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The
Episcopal Church's History in Promoting Civil Rights
Contributed by Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
-
Dr. Kirkpatrick's most recent Book
The
Episcopal Church in the United States (otherwise
known as ECUSA or TEC) was, given its somewhat aristocratic and Anglican and
Tory background, very much in the center of the struggle for civil rights
and women’s rights, and, more recently, for the same rights for gay and
lesbian persons accorded to straight persons. A Church once known as the
“Republican party at prayer” now recognizes on August 14
Jonathan Daniels, a white seminarian who gave his
life in 1965 defending an African-American woman during the struggle for
Civil Rights in this country. His death helped to galvanize the Episcopal
Church into a strong supporter for civil rights (although not all
Episcopalians made the move into full support for the movement).
Slavery and Racial Segregation
This support for the civil rights of
the descendants of slaves in America came only after a long period in which
some of the leading lights of the Church were either tepid on denouncing
slavery in the 19th century or ardently embraced slavery both on
religious/theological grounds as well as in practice. The grandson of the
first Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, Samuel Seabury (named for his
grandfather) wrote a book in 1861 called
American slavery distinguished from the slavery of English theorists, and
justified by the law of nature. And a presiding
bishop of the Church (and former bishop of Vermont), John Henry Hopkins,
also in 1861, chimed in with a
Biblical defense of slavery (A
scriptural, ecclesiastical, and historical view of slavery, from the days of
the patriarch Abraham, to the nineteenth century
).
Other Episcopalians, bishops, clergy, and laity, defended slavery on the
grounds that it was a common practice among the patriarchs of the Bible, was
never condemned as such by God in the Old Testament, and was tacitly
condoned in the New Testament when Paul returned a slave to his owner
without requiring that he be freed from slavery. Beyond what was taken as
the Biblical defense of slavery, many Episcopalians believed slavery was
justified on the grounds of social order. In a hierarchically organized
society, it was necessary, so they argued, that some classes of persons be
dominant while others were to be subservient. At some vague level, the
religious defenders of slavery seemed to believe that over time benevolent
Christian slave-owners would “Christianize” their slaves into willing
obedience to their masters, thus removing the need for harsh discipline.
This was expected, over time, to ameliorate the worst manifestations of
slavery without eliminating the institution itself. Eventually, the
Episcopalians in the North maintained an uneasy affiliation with their
counterparts in the South during the Civil War. The Church never officially
split though southern delegates to the General Conventions during the war
did not attend the convention gatherings.
As attention to the civil rights of
African-Americans began to increase in the late 1940s and ‘50s the Episcopal
Church started to pay attention not only to the situation of racial
minorities in the country at large but particularly to their presence (and
often absence) in the predominantly white Episcopal Church itself, though
there were almost exclusively black Episcopal Churchs, especially in the
rural south and in the urban centers of the north. (For a good history of
this period in the church’s life see David Hein and Gardiner H. Shattuck,
Jr.,
The Episcopalians (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).
In the 1950s some previously racially segregated Episcopal seminaries
(Virginia, Sewanee) were desegregated. The continuation of churches whose
membership was built primarily along racial lines was questioned. Shortly
after the
Brown vs. Board of Education decision was
announced by the Supreme Court, the
National Council of the Episcopal
Church issued a statement declaring that not only was the Court’s ruling a
matter of law, but that is “has to do with the will of God and the welfare
and destiny of human beings.” (Hein and Shattuck, p. 126). In 1963,
demonstrations on behalf of civil rights were beginning to provoke
violence
from its opponents, especially but not exclusively in the south. (At least violence that could be filmed: the violence done to African Americans during
the course of American history was overwhelming, brutal, but virtually
unrecorded in a way that could get the attention of the rest of the nation).
The Presiding Bishop in 1963
Arthur Lichtenberger, issued a pastoral letter approving of protests in
defense of civil rights and an end to racial segregation. The
House of Bishops called for participation in the
famous “March
on Washington” in late August of that year. While
racial segregation continues to exist in some Episcopal churches it is not
due to law or polity but to habit and practice, chiefly that of residential
and class differences which have much to do with where one chooses to go to
church.
Women
Women have also faced an uphill struggle to achieve the rights due to them by virtue of their baptismal covenant and full membership in the church. This struggle, while clearly related to the struggle for equal civil rights, rests on a different foundation than that which women in civil society can appeal to. The argument for the equality of women within the church rests on Biblical and theological principles. Even securing the right to vote, for example, does not entail the obligation of a religious community to recognize a woman’s right to be a priest or bishop. That recognition must arise from reasons internal to the Church.
Although the historical record of the
earliest church bears witness to the prominence of women in its ministry, by
the early Middle Ages women were nowhere to be seen in the ranks of clergy.
By the end of the 19th century in America some women had been
ordained in other denominations, but the Episcopal Church did not make
significant progress in this area until the movement for the right of women
to vote coincided with the struggle for women to become priests, and later
bishops in the Episcopal Church. Women had been ordained ‘deaconesses’ in
the church as early as early as the 1850s. There was dispute, however, over
whether deaconesses were a ‘holy order’ alongside male deacons. This
controversy was not resolved until the General Convention of 1970 when women
deaconesses were recognized as constituting a holy order. This was the same
convention at which women were first allowed to serve as deputies (or
delegates). The way had been cleared for this action by the prior General
Convention of 1967. The following year, the newly formed
Anglican Consultative Council (the only
‘instrument of communion’ permitting priests and laity to serve on it)
recommended that the diaconate be open to “men and women remaining in
secular occupations” and that deaconesses “be declared to be within the
[previously male only] diaconate.” The Council also said that “the
theological arguments as at present presented for and against the ordination
of women to the priesthood are inconclusive” and requested every province to
“give careful study to the question of the ordination of women to the
priesthood”
Outside the US the first woman to be ordained to the priesthood was Florence Li Tim Oi in 1944. She was ordained by the Bishop of Hong Kong and South China.
In 1972 the House of Bishops endorsed women’s ordination “in principle”. The following year, at the General Convention of 1973 a majority of lay and clerical deputies at General Convention voted in favor of women’s ordination but a parliamentary technicality prevented the vote from carrying. In order to test the will of the church on the issue and in the belief that their right to priesthood had been too long and unjustifiably delayed a group of 11 women were ordained to the priesthood on July 29, 1974, in Philadelphia by a small group of supportive bishops.
At the General Convention two years
later, in 1976, the bishops and deputies voted to recognize the eligibility
of women to serve in all three orders of ordained ministry (including the
episcopate). This resolution was to become effective Jan 1, 1977 and
regularized the original ordinations of 15 women priests who had been
‘irregularly’
ordained earlier. A year after the 1976 Convention at the
House of Bishops meeting at Port St. Lucie, Florida, Presiding Bishop John Allin told the bishops that he was “unable to accept women in the role of
priest” and that he would resign as Presiding Bishop if it was decided by
the House that his refusal to accept women priests disqualified him from
serving in that role. Buffaloed by his threat, the House decided that it
would respect his right “to hold a
personal conviction on this issue” and to
retain his ecclesiastical position. It went on to adopt a policy of
‘conscience’ that said that “no bishop, priest, or lay person should be coerced or penalized in any manner” either for endorsing or rejecting the
ordination of women. Later that year, the Evangelical and Catholic Mission
was founded to provide support for Anglo-Catholics who objected to the
Convention’s actions on women’s ordination. The Mission was eventually
reorganized in 1989 as the Episcopal Synod of America. In 1977 New York
Bishop Paul Moore ordained to the priesthood a woman known to be a lesbian
to the priesthood. Twelve years later, in 1989,
Barbara Harris, an African American, is elected to
serve as suffragan bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, becoming the
first woman bishop in ECUSA.
At the first Lambeth meeting (1978) following the actions of
the ’76 General Convention the assembled bishops from the Anglican Communion
acknowledged that any particular province had the autonomy “to make its own
decision about the appropriateness of admitting women to Holy Orders.” It
also urged, by an overwhelming majority, all the members of the AC to
“respect the convictions of those provinces and dioceses” that have either
accepted women’s ordination or refused to do so. Today there are over 2000
women priests in ECUSA and more than 26 women bishops in the Anglican
Communion. 
The struggle for the same ecclesiastical rights once denied to African-Americans and women is now being vigorously waged by gay, lesbian, transgendered, and bisexual persons in the Episcopal Church. But this struggle has for a variety of reasons nearly brought the Anglican Communion to the verge of rupture and has led, in ECUSA, to the defection of a majority of parishioners in nearly 100 parishes throughout the province. This chronology and the arguments and events constituting it have been laid out in my book The Episcopal Church in Crisis: How Sex, the Bible, and Authority are Dividing the Faithful (Greenwood/Praeger, 2008).
As in the case of women’s struggle to achieve equality in all respects within the church, the same struggle by gay and lesbian persons rests on foundations and arguments that, while similar in some respects to the fight for civil rights in the society as a whole, are essentially religious in nature. The presence of gay men in the clergy undoubtedly goes back to the beginnings of the church even though their sexual orientation was usually not openly proclaimed and no documents exist proving that openly gay men were admitted to the priesthood or the episcopate until the latter part of the twentieth century. That more recent history in which gay and lesbian persons became open about their sexuality and sought ordination without hiding it really began in the late 1970s and eventually would embroil the entire Anglican Communion.
Shortly
after women were admitted to holy orders, Bishop Paul Moore of the Diocese
of New York in 1977 ordained a woman to the priesthood who was known to be a
lesbian. Two years later the General Convention of
1979
adopted a
position stating the inappropriateness of ordaining practicing
homosexuals and forbade the ordination of anyone gay, or straight, who
engages in sexual relations outside of marriage. At the next Lambeth
Conference, in 1988, the
assembled bishops passed a resolution asking each
Province to reassess its attitude toward gays and lesbians. It
also passed
a resolution giving qualified support to polygamy in certain countries where
its immediate abolition would cause harm to the wives who would be discarded
when the abolition went into effect. The following year Bishop Jack Spong of
the Diocese of Newark ordained an openly gay man to the priesthood. 
And in
1995 formal charges were brought by a number of bishops against
Newark Bishop Walter Righter on the grounds of heresy for participating in the ordination of an openly
gay man. The charges were ultimately dismissed in 1996 on the grounds that
homosexuality was not a doctrinal matter and thus not subject to the charge
of heresy. Reaction to these events by those deeply concerned that what
they regarded as the core of the Christian faith was being eroded led to the
formation in 1995 of the American Anglican Council and the Ekklesia Society,
both
organizations
designed to appeal to conservatives upset about the
direction TEC was taking. They hoped to sway opinion within the Episcopal
Church toward a defense of what they called “the faith once delivered to the
saints”. Aiding their efforts within ECUSA were the voices of a number of
Primates from Africa. In 1997 eighty bishops and archbishops from what came
to be called the “global south” met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and issued
the “Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality”. It asserted that the clear
and unambiguous teaching of the Bible rejected the ordination of gay persons
and the blessing of their relationships. Nevertheless, TEC’s General
Convention that year came within one vote of approving a request to have the
Commission on Liturgy and Music develop a ritual for the blessing of same
sex unions.
Perhaps the two most important developments in the recent history of the struggle for the rights of gay and lesbian persons in the life of the church were the 1998 Lambeth Conference and, in 2003, the election of an openly gay man, Gene Robinson, as the bishop of the diocese of New Hampshire. Conservatives made the point that his election violated the resolution (known as I.10) approved by the bishops at Lambeth in 1998. The resolution, passed overwhelmingly by global south bishops and their conservative North American counterparts, said that faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman was the clear teaching of Scripture and that abstinence for those who were homosexual was the only appropriate course of action available to them within the teachings of the Church. It also rejected the ordination of those persons in same sex relationships.
Against the background of that resolution, it is not hard to
understand why there would be such an uproar at the election of Gene
Robinson, the General Convention’s approval of his election, and his
subsequent consecration. Shortly after these events in the summer and fall
of 2003, the Archbishop of Canterbury created a committee to prepare a
report looking into the question of how the Anglican Communion could handle
the issue of some provinces (e.g., TEC and some dioceses in Canada)
approving actions that violated the Lambeth Resolution of 1998. The Windsor
Report, as it was called, was released in 2004 and
while it spoke at length
about ways in which the Communion could order the relationships among its
members and urged deference to the views of the majority of provinces in the
Communion, it did not take a position on the appropriateness, per se, of gay
priests and same sex relationships.
Sobered by the criticism in the Windsor Report that ECUSA had acted without sufficient attention to the concerns of the rest of the Communion, by February of 2005 the House of Bishops had moved to a point where it was prepared to declare a moratorium on the consecration of all new bishops until the next General Convention so as not to have to act upon a possible consecration of a gay or lesbian bishop. But by the summer of that year the church released a report “To Set Our Hope on Christ” which considered all the arguments for and against ordaining gay and lesbian persons and blessing their relationships. It concluded that there were no substantial reasons not to do so, at least on the basis of biblical scholarship and theological and moral principles that have historically informed the traditions of Anglicanism.
At the General Convention of 2006 the bishops and deputies
voted to request of all diocesan standing committees that they “exercise
restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the
episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and
will lead to further strains on the communion” (manner of life being
understood to refer to gay and lesbian persons living in committed
relationships). At that same convention the first woman presiding bishop in
the Anglican Communion, Katharine Jefferts Schori, was elected.
Shortly after the convention a number of steps were taken by conservatives opposed to what they perceived as the continuing false moves taken by the national church. A priest serving in the Diocese of Virginia was consecrated as a bishop for a group under the authority of the Primate of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, calling itself the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA). The Global South Primates issued a Communiqué from Kigali, Rwanda, condemning what they regarded as the inadequate response from ECUSA to the Windsor Report, announcing that they would not recognize the authority of the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA, not officially because she was a woman but because she had voted to ratify the election of Gene Robinson and, while Bishop of Nevada had permitted same sex blessings. The Kigali Communiqué also called for the creation of a new church structure within the United States for those opposed to the actions of the national church.
During this period there were continuing defections of a number of Episcopalians from the national church, and, of particular concern, intrusions or interventions into various dioceses by Primates (mainly African) from outside the province of ECUSA. While most bishops in ECUSA had provided opportunities for what was called “delegated Episcopal oversight” (bishops who would serve in a pastoral capacity, under the authority of the diocesan bishop, in parishes that requested a bishop they considered to be more ‘orthodox’ than their own bishop), many foreign Primates entered dioceses in ECUSA without either the knowledge or permission of the diocesan bishop. These interventions had been expressly rejected by the Windsor Report. Also during this period some parishes, the majority whose members had officially voted to leave ECUSA and join dioceses abroad, began going to court to retain their property.
In 2007 the Global South Primates continued their attack on ECUSA and demanded, in a Communiqué from Dar Es Salaam that the bishops of the US church commit to not ordaining gay persons or authorizing blessings for same sex couples and demanded that ECUSA meet these demands by the end of September. Bishop Jefferts Schori also warned bishops in ECUSA not to attempt to lead their dioceses out of the church but if they did so, they will make themselves liable to deposition from office. Depositions eventually occurred in the cases of the Bishops of San Joaquin and Pittsburgh.
At the Lambeth Conference of 2008, while no resolutions were passed, a commitment was expected of all Provinces represented that they would continue a moratorium on electing and consecrating openly gay partnered priests and bishops and would refrain from authorizing rites for the blessing of same sex relationships. The option, within a pastoral context, of blessing same sex unions was not officially rejected.
The issue that is now before some dioceses in states that have recognized gay marriage is whether priests can officiate or participate in those marriages. Gay marriage is different from same sex unions and the Church does not seem ready at this point to move quickly into authorizing official church involvement in such marriages. The civil right of gay and lesbian persons to marry was recognized initially in three states, Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut. California voters have recently (November, 2008) approved a referendum item declaring that gay marriage is not to be recognized in that state. The legal challenges to the referendum are just beginning. But the religious issue is whether dioceses will permit priests to officiate or participate in some way in gay marriages (as distinct from the blessing of same sex unions). At this point it is hard to say which way TEC will move on this and the issue may come up at the 2009 General Convention.
Related Links:
Homosexuality and the Episcopal Church (1976-2007) - Bill Moyers Journal - NPR
General Convention 1976 Recommend That the Church Study Aspects of Human Sexuality
General Convention 1976 Recognize the Equal Claims of Homosexuals
General Convention 1976 Support the Right of Homosexuals to Equal Protection of the Law
The Achieves of the Episcopal Church The Acts of Convention – Digital Archive 1976-2006
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