Anglicans 'swim the Tiber' while the Church drowns

On Tuesday, I turned 22 years old. I've spent 16 of those years as a member of the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the Church of England, or Anglican Church). I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, but I was raised and confirmed as an Episcopalian. I haven't gone to church regularly since I first started living in New York, but that doesn't mean I've lost the faith. As Winston Churchill once said, "I am not a pillar, but a buttress. I support the Church from the outside."

So, I was stunned and saddened Tuesday to read that Pope Benedict XVI had announced a program to allow disaffected, conservative Anglicans to convert to Catholicism while preserving several key points of Anglican tradition, including the possibility that married Anglican laymen could be accepted for Catholic ordination.

Now, if you believe the scuttlebutt in the religious media, two of the biggest issues that have arisen in the worldwide Anglican Communion over the last quarter-century have been the ordination of female priests and openly gay priests. I was present at the ordination of one of the latter, the Rev. Gene Robinson, Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire.

Personally, I think this is ludicrous. Considering the role women have played in the Christian tradition since the beginning, it seems only right to ordain them as ministers. As for the ordination of gays, as Robinson has said repeatedly, "We've always had gay bishops. I'm just being honest about it."

The larger problem is that the Anglican Church, along with most mainline Protestant churches, has lost its identity. In a well-intentioned but misguided effort to soften its image, the Anglican Church has embraced a big-tent strategy that has driven away its traditional members and made itself even more irrelevant to potential worshippers. The crowning example of this confused strategy came in February 2008 when Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, told a British radio program that the adoption of some parts of Islamic Sharia law in Britain "seems inevitable." Though this can be considered as much an indictment of the present depressed state of British politics and society as much as of the Anglican Church, nothing in Williams' tenure suggests he has committed himself to lifting the Anglican Church out of its decline.

So what must the Anglican Church do to avoid its demise?

First, it must be Christian and unapologetically so. People do not go to church to be lectured about the environment, politics or other trendy topics — they go to church to learn the lessons of the Bible and the teachings of Christ. Once learned, they are free to apply them to their lives however they please in the theory that they will be judged at the end. Stick to the Scriptures and leave the rest out of it.

Second, it must be English and unapologetically so. When I say English, I mean that the Church must embrace the concepts that are so fundamental not only to religious liberty but also to political liberty. So the idea that all people are equal in the sight of God must therefore be extended to allow women and gays to serve as ministers, bishops and deacons. It also means that the promotion of non-Christian, non-Western oppressive legal codes (like Sharia law), no matter how accidental, must be ended.

The Church of England was founded not only on the fact that Henry VIII couldn't divorce his wife without it, but also on the idea that national churches — and those who worship in them — should be autonomous. That idea has led to two of the greatest achievements in modern history: the English Book of Common Prayer and the English Bible. The idea of free individuals reading in their own language, as routine as it seems now, was revolutionary in the 1600s and has lead to the rise of not just greater religious freedom but new conceptions of nationalism and political unity.

If the Pope's new initiative turns out to significantly weaken the Anglican Church, it would be a great loss for all of these causes. I was raised to believe that the word of God was not the domain of one mortal man. As far as I am concerned, it is 500 years too late for the Pope to broaden his prerogative.