This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

154THE EPISCOPALIANSDENOMINATIONAL IDENTITY AT THE END OF THEMILLENNIUMBy the year 2000, membership in the Episcopal Church had leveled off atslightly more than 2.3 million. Despite the declining size of their denomination,Episcopalians in the 1990s exhibited a far better appreciation of their religiousidentity than they had 30 years earlier, when membership figures were at theirpeak. With decline and loss came a renewed attention to Anglicanism’s uniquetheology and spirituality—an outlook reminiscent of the early nineteenth century,when unfashionable ideas about hierarchy and tradition set the Episcopal Churchapart from the nation’s democratic, reform-oriented religious culture. 91According to James Fenhagen, a former dean of General Theological Seminary,three key elements—comprehensiveness, personal holiness, and holy worldliness—havealways defined “the Anglican way.” 92 These emphases, he suggests,continued to make the Episcopal Church distinctive among the major AmericanChristian denominations at the end of the second millennium.“Comprehensiveness” reflects the ideal of the via media, originally formulatedduring the reign of Elizabeth I—a blend of Catholic and Protestant elements anda refusal to impose rigid doctrinal tests on church members. As a consequence,Anglicans have usually accepted anyone into their fellowship who is at leastminimally orthodox and willing to participate in prayer book worship. The spiritof comprehensiveness, on the other hand, has sometimes masked moral laxity,doctrinal confusion, and the very exclusion of the minority views it is intendedto protect.The “personal holiness” theme has been manifested in the interweaving ofcorporate worship and individual prayer with a sense of beauty, joy, and religiousawe. The quest for personal holiness, however, has occasionally degenerated intoa narcissistic turning inward, a self-absorption, a focus merely on the feeling ofbeing holy. At its worst, it has also fostered an unhealthy fixation on aestheticsand meaningless ritual.Finally, “holy worldliness” has meant that Anglicanism cherishes the divinepresence in everyday affairs, seeing value in the physical as well as in the spiritual,in pleasure as well as in suffering. At times, however, this quality has amountedto little more than the deification of the status quo, the sacralization of the socialinstitutions of the nation’s ruling elite. The idea of holy worldliness has also ledto the compartmentalization of life into sacred and secular realms, so that thepractice of the faith is thought to have no relevance to economic or political affairsoutside of the church’s splendid Gothic edifices.Throughout the history of the Episcopal Church, and certainly in the lives ofleading Episcopalians, these core elements of the Anglican way have been amplydisplayed. The last third of the twentieth century was an era of rapid social changethat affected Episcopalians as much as all Americans. Despite the many heateddebates and arguments that divided them during this period, Episcopalians stillfound much to appreciate in the traditions of their denomination—an institution