Sunday March 2, 2008
Unilateral declarations of independence
There have been two significant declarations of independence recently. The region called Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from the state of Serbia. Similarly, 15 Anglican parishes voted for independence from the national Anglican Church of Canada.
Can one simply declare independence?
If so, can Quebec do it? Can Kashmir? Can the Kurds in Northern Iraq, the Luo in Kenya, or the Palestinians…
Not surprisingly, the countries most directly affected by that question – Canada, Israel, India — have been slowest to recognize Kosovo.
Israel might have been expected to support Kosovo. As an editorial in the Israeli paper Haaretz said, Kosovo is “reminiscent of the struggles of other nations for the right of self-determination.”
But of course, Haaretz referred to Israel\’s own unilateral birth, not to Palestinian struggles.
The United States was one of the first to recognize the new nation of Kosovo. That too might be expected, since the U.S. also declared independence, unilaterally, in 1776. However, the U.S. seems to take an opposite view of a Kurdish state between Iraq and Turkey.
So there must be something else behind the U.S. haste to recognize Kosovo.
Unmentioned factors
Perhaps it\’s the pipeline.
Kosovo itself has no oil reserves. But it has a strategic location on the proposed trans-Balkan pipeline, bringing oil from the Caspian Sea region to an Albanian port on the Mediterranean.
This pipeline has apparently been planned since 1994, although I had not heard of it until last week. In the oil industry, it\’s called the AMBO pipeline, for the U.S.-registered Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation. Brown & Root Energy Services, a British subsidiary of Dick Cheney\’s Halliburton, did the original feasibility study.
Caspian oil could go through the Turkish-controlled Straits of Bosporus. But that\’s not considered safe. “This is about America\’s energy security,” said Bill Richardson, U.S. Energy Secretary, in 1998 – just months before starting to bomb Serbia.
Astonishing coincidence, isn\’t it? That all four of the last U.S. military interventions – Kuwait, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq – involved nations that either have oil reserves or potential pipeline routes?
Quebec, Kashmir, and Gaza possess neither oil nor a pipeline corridor. Fox News is therefore unlikely to champion their cause.
Anglican breakaways
But Fox and other media have – by my admittedly limited sampling – tended to report sympathetically on the breakaway Anglican parishes.
Which raises another question – why?
Spokespersons for those parishes have talked about restoring the authority of the Bible, and maintaining the essentials of Anglican tradition.
Retired bishop Donald Harvey called it “a crisis that goes to the heart of Anglican identity and doctrine.”
Nonsense! Because the authority in question turns out to be the only seven Bible verses (out of about 31,000), that censure homosexuality.
On that basis, these 15 parishes and their priests reject the carefuly studied decision of the Anglican Church\’s national General Synod that same-sex marriage does not conflict with the core doctrines of the church.
"The day that that was passed,” Harvey told the Globe and Mail, “I knew my career in the Anglican Church of Canada was over.”
Harvey quit the Canadian church to become a bishop of the Province of the Southern Cone, which represents 27,000 Anglicans in South America.
Harvey is also moderator of the recently formed Anglican Network in Canada, an umbrella group for breakaways.
Breaking from precedent
To a public raised on the cult of individualism, there might seem to be nothing extraordinary about a parish choosing to divorce itself from a parent body. Baptists do it regularly! When I lived in Prince Rupert, the city of 10,000 had 11 Baptist congregations, each one having split over some pretext.
But it\’s not as easy for Anglicans. Basically, its members are not the church. Rather, God vested the church in a person – first the apostle Peter, then his successors. In churches that recognize an apostolic succession, the bishop is the church. Priests act on the bishop\’s behalf, taking the church to the people.
So when parishes declare independence, they effectively cease being a church until they can connect to another bishop.
Even if that bishop\’s diocese is 15,000 km away, on another continent.
The so-called essentials of “Anglican identity and doctrine” are not, in fact, its theology but its liturgy. The Anglican communion worldwide probably spans the broadest theological spectrum of any branch of Christianity. “Low church” Anglicans can be more evangelical than Methodists and as humanist as Unitarians; “high church” Anglicans can make the Pope look informal.
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The uniqueness of the Anglican Church – as Patricia Bays stressed in her book, This Anglican Church of Ours – is its worship patterns, founded on Archbishop Cranmer\’s 1549 Book of Common Prayer.
And that tradition is not, in any way, threatened by same-sex issues.
So, as with Kosovo, there seem to be other factors at work.
Perhaps I\’m biased, but I suspect that the breakaway congregations take their cue from the more fundamentalist U.S. denominations, for whom anything related to homosexuality is a red rag to a bull.
Doctrinal squabbles always have concrete consequences. In Kosovo, in Kashmir, in Palestine, and in the Anglican Church, the most vicious battles will involve property, not principle.
Kosovars, if they succeed, will naturally take their property with them into independence. The breakaway Anglican parishes probably will not.
In Canada, a multitude of legal precedents agree that real property belongs to the diocese or national church. For example, none of the congregations that left the United Church of Canada in the late 1980s, over the possibility of ordaining gay ministers, succeeded in keeping its building.
On the other hand, no breakaway congregation yet has had the resources of St. John\’s Shaughnessy in Vancouver. The parish has committed itself to raise $1 million for legal fees to retain the church and land.
As one Anglican insider told me, that parish has more lawyers and more money than its parent diocese.
Don\’t expect these issues to go away soon.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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