NEW ANGLICAN LEADER FACES TURMOIL
Sarah Mullally has her hands full. The newly installed Archbishop of Canterbury is facing turmoil in her church, much like that of other mainline Protestant denominations in North America.
Mullally, who was a nurse before she was ordained an Anglican priest, took over as archbishop after her predecessor, Justin Welby, resigned following his handling of a sexual abuse case. She inherits a church that is torn over sexual issues.
She is also faced with a sharply declining Anglican population, especially among young people. Catholics in England now outnumber Anglicans among the Gen Z population (those born between 1997 and 2012) by a margin of more than 2-1. The problem is not limited to youth. Overall, attendance at Anglican services are declining; they are increasing among Catholics.
In the United States, none of the mainline Protestant denominations are in good shape. The Episcopal Church had made sharp cuts in its headquarters staff. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has also laid off many senior officials from its national staff. The United Methodist Church has undergone a major schism, cutting its number of bishops. All have seen sharp reductions in attendance at weekly services, though that appears to be stabilizing.
The Catholic population in the United States has grown by 40 percent in the past 40 years, mostly because of increases in the South and West. Of the top ten gainers, six are in Texas or California.
Younger dioceses such as Fresno and Atlanta are doing very well, while older dioceses like Pittsburgh and Milwaukee are not. Pittsburgh has seen a decline of over 30 percent in the Catholic population since 1980, and is situated in the bottom in terms of priestly ordinations, along with New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and Dallas. New York is especially troublesome given that the Catholic population has actually increased; Pittsburgh’s situation is more understandable given the loss of the Catholic population.
There are many reasons why Catholics are doing better than mainline Protestants in the U.S. and the U.K. The latter suffer from mixed messages on sexual issues, and from a misguided attempt to be “relevant.” The data clearly show that the more “relevant” a religious community tries to be—in terms of accepting the norms and values of the dominant culture—the more irrelevant it becomes for its adherents.
This may seem counter-intuitive. But it isn’t: the desire for continuity among the faithful is strong and seriously unappreciated. If Christianity is about truth—which is what it is supposed to be—then constant challenges to settled teachings is not only unappealing, it is subversive.
We should have known by now that attempts to secularize Christianity are an utter failure. Archbishop Mullally will either move toward orthodoxy and succeed, or she will continue the slide toward heterodoxy, and fail.