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2 July 2008

Jerusalem and Global Anglican Futures - following the money.

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Has the "Global Anglican Futures"conference really amounted to anything new for the international Anglican church?/ The ideas, the money and the effort behind the conference in Jerusalem./ Implications of GAFCON for the Australian Anglican church

Transcript


Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Thomas Oden on the Confessing movement in the United States
US Canon Jim Naughton on GAFCON and the money trail
Newcastle Bishop Brian Farran on GAFCON and Australian Anglicans

Stephen Crittenden: Welcome to the program.

It's very difficult to say just what it was that happened at the Global Anglican Futures Conference in Jerusalem last week, and no doubt many of the bishops attending the Lambeth Conference later this month will be hoping that the global Anglican communion will keep limping on pretty much as it was before.

One thing that's certain is that the participants at GAFCON are now in formal schism with the liberal Canadians and the Episcopal Church in the United States. They've also set up their own leadership structures, including a rival primate's council made up entirely of Africans at this stage, and it looks certain that the United States will have two parallel churches, possibly with two primates.

There was more than a whiff of anti-colonial grapeshot in what was said in Jerusalem, and it's not entirely clear where GAFCON stands in relation to the Archbishop of Canterbury, now that it's all over. They say they aren't in schism but in the statement they released at the end of the meeting they also state that they 'do not accept that Anglican identity is determined through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury'.

Another telling detail that may help us understand what has really being going on behind GAFCON is that the new movement which has emerged from the meeting intends to be known as the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. That word 'confessing' is the giveaway, because it suggests that this is part of the neo-orthodox Confessing movement which has emerged within a number of Protestant churches in recent years.

The Confessing movement is not to be confused with the Confessing church of Pastor Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer which stood against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. The Confessing movement is a non-denominational movement which h stands against liberalism and modernism.

In fact back in 2006 on The Religion Report when the Confessing movement emerged within the Uniting Church in Australia, we brought you an interview with the founder of the Confessing movement in the United States, the Reverend Thomas Oden. Thomas Oden is a former President of the ultraconservative think-tank called the Institute on Religion and Democracy, set up to support Ronald Reagan's foreign policy agenda in Central America. He's also the author of an important book called 'Turning Around the Mainline', and this is the key: it's been described as 'a how-to manual for operating a 5th column in the church'. Here's an extract of that interview from 2006, in which I asked Thomas Oden whether his movement was mainly an anti-liberal movement.

Thomas Oden: No, I wouldn't say it's defined primarily anti-liberal, it is pro-orthodox. It is strongly oriented towards the recovery of classical Christian teaching, that teaching which is received by Christians of all times and places, based on the Scripture. So it is not denominationally oriented, certainly has emerged out of a period of liberal hegemony or domination. And that has been in the view of many others, a great failure, because it has put the church at risk for being the exponent of all kinds of strange and crazy and even heretical teachings.

Stephen Crittenden: And your approach is to stand and fight, to say 'Let's not have schism, don't leave, stay and re-form the church?'

Thomas Oden: Correct. Yes, I think this is exactly the wrong time for talking about an exit strategy or schism. I think that we are in a growing position, a position of extraordinarily rapid growing influence within North American churches.

Stephen Crittenden: Now you've written a very interesting book called 'Turning Around the Mainline'. It's been described in my hearing as 'a how-to manual for operating a 5th column in the church'. Would you agree with that?

Thomas Oden: (laughs) Well I would say that's a bit of a dramatic way of stating it. I don't regard it as a 5th column, the analogy is wrong, because we are a confessing movement. If you're going to use the 5th column or let's say the Nazi analogy, we would be far closer to the confessing movement that opposed the church that accommodated to Nazism in the 1930s. Are you with me here? In other words there's a history of confessing movements. We have lived sadly out of so many years of a liberal church that has been identified with a particular party. You understand that the bureaucracies of liberal Protestantism or mainline Protestantism in North America, have extremely predictable social policies because they're all encapsuled in the liberal side of the Democratic Party.

Stephen Crittenden: Your opponents point to the connection between the confessing movement, particularly your role, and the work of the Institute for Religion and Democracy.

Thomas Oden: Well you will see I have about a paragraph, one paragraph, on the Institute for Religion and Democracy, and that paragraph states that the Institute for Religion and Democracy is a clearing house, a place where many of the intellectual activities of these varying confessing movements meet.

Stephen Crittenden: What does that mean? Does that mean it's the think-tank where a lot of the original thinking is done?

Thomas Oden: That's exactly right, yes. I think it's a place where a lot of work is done, that is being used profitably by the Presbyterians, by the Methodist, by the United Church of Canada. Let me read one sentence here that describes the Institute of Religion and Democracy, and remember this, it's only one paragraph. This is not what the book is about, but it is 'an ecumenical alliance of North American Christians working to reform their church's social witness in accord with Biblical and historic Christian teaching, thereby contributing to the renewal of democratic society at home and abroad.' That's what it's about.

Stephen Crittenden: Well that's the Reverend Thomas Oden. Now for the link with our next story. There's a link between the Institute on Religion and Democracy and GAFCON in the person of a mysterious American billionaire who was spotted and photographed at the GAFCON meeting. His name is Howard F. Ahmanson Junior. He's been deeply involved in the controversies in the American church, bankrolling movements opposed to the Episcopal Church's liberal views on homosexuality and indeed bankrolling the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Ahmanson belongs to a parish at Newport Beach in California, which was among the first breakaway parishes to place itself under the authority of a Ugandan bishop. He's very close to the Chief Executive of the conservative American Anglican Council. He's a member of the secretive Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye , the author of the 'Left Behind' novels, whose membership is a who's who of American neo-conservatives and theo-conservatives, Paul Weyrich, Phillis Schafly, Oliver North, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and James Dobson of Focus on the Family. He also bankrolls the Discovery Institute which is the home of the Intelligent Design movement.

Well Jim Naughton is a canon in the Diocese of Washington, D.C. He wrote a very interesting report on all of this called 'Following the Money' that shows how Ahmanson has been bankrolling all of these movements, and the conservative African bishops such as Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria. I asked him to tell us about Howard F. Ahmanson.

Jim Naughton: Well he inherited a savings and loan fortune from his father, and at some point, I think in his late teens or early 20s, had an intense religious experience after which he became a Christian Reconstructionist. Now I don't know how familiar that term is to everyone, but it's basically the movement led by a theologian named Rushdoony on the West Coast of the United States, and the notion was that what you wanted to do to achieve a perfect society was to bring back the laws of ancient Israel and make those the laws of your home country.

Stephen Crittenden: This includes executing blasphemers and adulterers and homosexuals. This is real Christian Taliban stuff.

Jim Naughton: Right. And whipping Catholics and children and all that sort of thing. It is pretty scary stuff. And in the mid-1980s Ahmanson said 'What I want to do is bring back the laws of ancient Israel and then have that be the law of the United States of America'. The other interesting thing about him was that he's poured millions of dollars into political campaigns in the United States, and one of the other facts that just kind of caught my attention was that at some point, his views became so well-known and so toxic that Republican political candidates started returning his donations. And one of the things that just really kind of crosses the T's and dots the I's if you will, is that after the incident where candidates started giving him his money back, he and his wife, who used to be a religion reporter for the Orange County newspapers in California, they sat down and did a lengthy interview with the Orange County newspaper, and in that interview he was asked about his opinion on homosexuals, and he said (and this was him trying to soften his image) he said he no longer thought it was necessary to stone homosexuals but that if you came upon a society that was living by the laws of ancient Israel, where they did stone homosexuals, you couldn't say that that was necessarily immoral. And that was the softening of his view.

Stephen Crittenden: Sounds like he and Archbishop Akinola would have a lot to talk about.

Jim Naughton: Well they have a lot to talk about. I mean there's no question that Howard Ahmanson has poured millions of dollars into the movement to undermine the Anglican communion. You can't say 'Oh, he definitely paid for this; he definitely paid for that', but I've done a lot of work on this and his fingerprints are all over the filings that religious right organisations of the United States have to make.

Stephen Crittenden: Well your report is called 'Following the Money Trail', where does the money trail lead?

Jim Naughton: Well it leads from Ahmanson and five other large American foundations into the coffers of the right-wing Anglican groups in the United States.

Stephen Crittenden: And we're talking about people like Richard Mellon Scaife , another billionaire. These are the people who in the years of George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton, brought you the culture wars in the United States.

Jim Naughton: Right. I mean Scaife has spent millions of dollars to keep a magazine called 'The American Spectator' afloat, and that was the magazine in which all of the allegations against President Clinton first surfaced. These are also the folks who along with the Coors Family, and some other foundations, that built what became this network of neo-conservative think-tanks in the United States, sort of the intellectual counter-establishment here in Washington, and they understood that if they were going to win the culture wars, they were going to have to make sure that they had a religious outfit, so that they could attempt to co-opt the church in the way that they'd co-opted the government. And they formed something called the Institute on Religion and Democracy - and the tactics of the Institute on Religion and Democracy sort of sapped the strength of your opponents by getting inside their organisations and taking them over - are precisely the tactics that Archbishop Jensen and his allies embraced at this conference in Jerusalem that just concluded.

Stephen Crittenden: Just remind us about the Institute on Religion and Democracy, Jim. Wasn't it founded in 1981 basically to support Ronald Reagan's foreign policy in Central America?

Jim Naughton: Yes, exactly. I mean the Institute on Religion and Democracy was basically founded to attempt to denigrate and undermine the liberation theologians of Central America which is one of the things that makes the claim now that these folks speak on behalf of the global south, so outrageous. I mean the first indigenous theological movement coming out of the global south in the second half of the 20th century -

Stephen Crittenden: Was stomped on well and truly.

Jim Naughton: Was stomped on by these people.

Stephen Crittenden: Well let's talk about the global south. We've constantly heard that this dispute in the Anglican communion is being led by bishops from the global south, Africans in the main. But doesn't this connection to Howard Ahmanson and the Institute on Religion and Democracy suggest that we should be a bit dubious about that? Peter Jensen was Chairman of the organising committee of GAFCON, you've got the driving influence of people in the United States like Martyn Minns , who's been revealed as the ghostwriter for Archbishop Akinola. To what extent is this movement highly organised from the west with the Africans perhaps being used as window-dressing?

Jim Naughton: Well it's both, and I'm leery about saying that the Africans are window-dressing because I don't dispute that Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria and Orombi, of Uganda, have serious theological differences with the Episcopal church or other churches in the communion, but the fact is that much of the money comes from the West, the statements are written almost exclusively in the West or by Westerners and if you notice, I mean what just happened in Jerusalem is that bishops from some of the poorest countries on the planet got together for a meeting to make a great contribution to the church. And what emerged was a document that did nothing to improve the life of the average African, but did much to advance the interests of wealthy Americans, Australians, and people in the United Kingdom.

Stephen Crittenden: You're talking about conservatives in those countries.

Jim Naughton: Right. I mean the idea that you would harness the people of Uganda who live with incredible ethnic strife and widespread disease and just crushing poverty, you would harness their numbers to advance the cause of people living in the richest suburbs in the United States is obscene, but that's what's happened.

Stephen Crittenden: Some conservative commentators have dismissed your report as just another conspiracy theory, and as you say, they argue that the GAFCON bishops have a genuine theological grievance, saying that the progressives in the church have rejected the authority of the Bible.

Jim Naughton: Well I mean, the fact that lots and lots of money came from wealthy Americans to split the Anglican communion into its current situation is a matter of public record., These are documents that these folks had to file under US law with the Internal Revenue Service. But the other point, I think your larger point, is this illegitimate grievance? It is a legitimate grievance but there are a number of illegitimate theological grievances in the Anglican communion and many other Christian bodies. This is the only instance in which one of the parties to the grievance has adopted what's basically the playbook of the American political right in the 1970s and '80s, and said, 'You know, we're going to win this by decimating our opponents'.

Stephen Crittenden: So how are Episcopalians in the United States reading the outcome of GAFCOM, Jim?

Jim Naughton: Yes, I think that we don't see it as a great threat to us. I mean unfortunately, people in the United States who want to attend a church that's aggressively antagonistic to gays and lesbians, have a wide variety of choices. It's not as though these folks are filling a market niche. But just the brazenness of saying basically 'We will make up the rules; we will decide who are the real Anglicans and we will not brook any opposition', how do you stay in relationship with people who vow that they will hurt you at every opportunity?

Stephen Crittenden: Bishop Katherine Jefferts-Schori in her statement yesterday seems to be taking it all very much in her stride.

Jim Naughton: Mmm. I don't think there's an immediate threat here to the Episcopal church, I think that they have done everything that it's in their power to do to hurt us already, so I don't think they have any new tools.

Stephen Crittenden: Nonetheless isn't it important now how the Episcopal church behaves, particularly in relation to the Archbishop of Canterbury. I mean if the American church is going to go on ordaining more gay bishops, or blessing same-sex unions in California, it's just going to make Rowan Williams' task of holding the global communion together more and more impossible.

Jim Naughton: I'm not sure. I mean I think one of the things that GAFCON has done is demonstrate that whatever concessions you make to these folks, they will want more. I mean the notion that we all need to go back to the 1662 Prayer Book and the 39 Articles of Religion from Elizabethan times is kind of whacky, yet that's at the core of their movement. So we can't give up enough to please them, and yet retain any kind of identity. Another point that we need to make is that every church in the Anglican communion has its own identity, and its own domestic situation. The Episcopal church would fall apart if it suddenly decided, 'Oh, you know what? We really don't mean anything that we said about the full inclusion of gays and lesbians', it would be institutional suicide. I mean it would be a tremendous betrayal of our own consciences, but it would also be institutional suicide.

Stephen Crittenden: So how do you see this unfolding at Lambeth?

Jim Naughton: Well you know, the Lambeth conference is designed in some ways; they're going to try as hard as they can not to 'commit news'. I mean they don't want there to be big headlines coming out of Lambeth, what they want to do is take down the temperature on this situation a few notches and make it possible for people to really talk to one another and really get to know one another. And then begin to look at OK, now that we're not shouting any more, how can we go forward? If they achieve that, it's actually I think a significant breakthrough, because the Peter Jensens and Peter Akinolas of the world thrive only when there's this drummed-up air of crisis. It's an interesting situation because they don't have the muscle basically, they don't have the juice to create a real schism, not enough churches in the communion would jump with them, and many of their better allies like Peter Jensen in Australia, and some of their friends in England, are part of established churches so they can't really go -

Stephen Crittenden: They'd lose their property.

Jim Naughton: Exactly. So what these folks need to do is keep the communion in a state of near schism for as long as possible, because as long as it looks like there's a huge crisis, we all look for ways to create a strong, central authority that will solve the crisis.

Stephen Crittenden: So what you're saying is that strategically the bishops meeting at Lambeth later this month need to just remain calm, and act as though nothing so tremendously terrible has happened and move on with the next item of business.

Jim Naughton: Right. I mean they need to take a long view. This is a communion that was born in controversy, that has never fully reconciled its Anglo Catholic wing to its Evangelical wing, and has nonetheless prospered over five centuries. This need not be a communion-breaking issue.

Stephen Crittenden: Thank you very much for being on the program.

Jim Naughton: Sure. I was glad to do it.

Stephen Crittenden: Canon Jim Naughton of the Episcopalian Diocese of Washington, D.C., and we'll put a link to his report 'Following the Money' on the Religion Report website.

Well what is the fallout of GAFCON likely to be here in Australia? The Australian Anglican Primate, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, is yet to give an interview, but he put out a short statement yesterday urging the Sydney Anglicans if they say they're still in the communion, not to boycott Lambeth.

Meanwhile the Bishop of Newcastle, Bishop Brian Farran, who lives right next to the Sydney Diocese says Archbishop Peter Jensen has created difficulties for his relationship with the rest of the Australian church. I asked him what are those difficulties.

Brian Farran: Well I think it's particularly difficult within the province of New South Wales where the Archbishop is the Metropolitan. I think there's in fact emerging as he has, probably by default, as a principal leader of the GAFCON movement, and their statement in which they really encourage the formation of what seems like a church within a church. I think it would be difficult for him to come back and operate as if nothing has happened, and that the relationships that we have normally, through say our Primate with the Archbishop of Canterbury, that they're going to be a bit muddied by his relationship with this secondary movement.

Stephen Crittenden: I'll come to the Archbishop of Canterbury in a moment, but presumably there would be some conservative Anglicans in every diocese in Australia who might want to join this new Confessing movement, but also many Anglicans in Sydney who'd like to escape it. I mean is this the time when some kind of Episcopal oversight needs to be offered to alienating Anglicans in Sydney?

Brian Farran: Well I personally don't agree with alternative forms of Episcopal oversight, so I'm finding myself rather constrained in all of this. Certainly I've been in contact with some of the Anglicans in Sydney who sometimes flee up to Newcastle actually for a dose of liturgical renewal, and they themselves have said that they're totally disappointed that the Sydney bishops are not going to be at Lambeth, and they really do feel abandoned in that. So I guess there will be people in Sydney who are looking for some kind of insight from Lambeth and some follow-on.

Stephen Crittenden: Isn't the primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury actually ended in that these people will be giving their allegiance to apparently a new conciliar body from which they will take their lead?

Brian Farran: This is one of the problems that the Archbishop of Canterbury has signaled in the press release that he's issued after GAFCON. He's indicated for example, that the GAFCON's initiative in establishing a sort of primational council of some of those African Archbishops, will in fact blur the role of our own primates meetings within the Anglican communion, and I'm not sure how GAFCON's going to operate, because we've had these four very significant instruments of unity within the Anglican community, which includes of course the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates' meetings, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Lambeth Conference. And now there seems to be a rival organisation being established who may well actually be instrumental in developing bishops to move into other dioceses which they regard as unorthodox.

Stephen Crittenden: Let's just come back to the instruments of unity. You mentioned the Council of Primates, and they've already indicated they're going to set up a rival Council of Primates. They're not going to Lambeth, they say they don't accept that membership of the Anglican communion is necessarily determined by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It sounds like the Consultative Council's a dead letter as well, is it not?

Brian Farran: Ugh. Look, it's hard to see. There are some who are going to go to Lambeth. For example, Greg Venables who's the Archbishop of the Southern Cone, it's a very small piece of the Anglican communion.

Stephen Crittenden: In South America.

Brian Farran: Yes. He's going to go. And I guess he will be a probable spokesperson for the GAFCON experience. The only Australian bishop that I'm aware of who went to GAFCON and is going to Lambeth is the Bishop of Armidale, Peter Brain. So it will be interesting for the Australian bishops to hear from him directly.

Stephen Crittenden: In your view are there any legal structures holding global Anglicanism together, and if there are none, a failure to recognise the primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury surely would imply the failure of the whole communion?

Brian Farran: I don't think there are legal structures; I think always from the foundation that the Anglican communion has used the word 'communion', 'koinonia', 'fellowship', as the basis of its life together, and it talks about 'bonds of affection', that's a really critical phrase I think. And those bonds of affection have been focused in those four instruments of unity. Now if people breach relationship, well you've got two possibilities I guess. One is to accept the breach or the other is to try and work consistently and empathetically to overcome the breach, and I think that's what Rowan Williams has tried enormously to do. And I think that's still incumbent on us to try and do that, and not accept the fact that there are some people who view their own views as the only possible view to have. And that I think is the great arrogance of all of this, that there is a diversity of views within the Anglican communion, and there always has been. But there's a movement now to try and narrow that and to focus it into particular areas, and GAFCON I think has been really a symbol of all of that.

Stephen Crittenden: The BBC the other day was painting Archbishop Jensen almost as a patient reconciler. I wonder whether world Anglicanism perhaps doesn't sufficiently recognise the organisational significance of Sydney in all of this. They don't have quite the experience that people like you have, living right next door.

Brian Farran: Well that's a possibility. I mean we here in Newcastle experience the intrusions of Sydney, although of course they're in one sense, second order intrusions, and they're not actually initiated by the diocese as such. But there are parishes within Sydney that plant churches within the diocese of Newcastle as sort of evangelical beacons, although we do actually have classic evangelical parishes within the diocese. But these are bypassed by these initiatives. So we see -

Stephen Crittenden: And would you expect to see that kind of activity increase?

Brian Farran: It could be possible. I don't think it would be initiated necessarily by the Archbishop but I think there are some fairly gung-ho people around and they may take the lead from what's happening through the GAFCON initiatives themselves.

Stephen Crittenden: Isn't this statement really signaling that we may now see local congregations all over the Anglican communion, including in Australia, begin to say We're not going to give our allegiance to our local bishop; we want another bishop, we want another Primate in fact.

Brian Farran: It could be possible. It could actually degenerate into almost an ecclesial form of consumerism where people for a whole variety of reasons want to choose which bishop they have.

Stephen Crittenden: I mean at that point, I wonder would Broughton Knox's radical congregational theology really be in full swing? Doesn't the Episcopal structure of the Anglican church itself start to break down? I mean that was feared by Marcus Loane back in the 1960's wasn't it?

Stephen Crittenden: That's the Anglican Bishop of Newcastle, Brian Farran, and we'll put an extended version of that interview on the Religion Report website.

Brian Farran: yes. I think actually they are going to reap the whirlwind of some of those basic teachings that Knox and other before him may well have introduced. And it's been a very long process actually. I have read some correspondence which Bishop Batty initiated with the then Archbishop Mowll, and it's quite clear that plants- or the idea of planting - was being developed back then.

Stephen Crittenden: The Anglican bishop of Newcastle, Brian Farran. And I should say we did try to contact the Archbishop of Syndey Dr Peter Jensen, but he is still traveling.

That's all this week. Thanks to producers Noel Debien and Charlie McKune. I'm Stephen Crittenden.


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