On untheological language and clergy culture

What the Washington National Cathedral controversy tells us about the Episcopal Church

The last few days have seen a rather ferocious controversy in the small world of Episcopal Church social media. It was discovered that Washington National Cathedral was requiring paid tickets to attend several of their Christmas Eve worship services. You not only had to reserve a ticket to attend worship (not necessarily shocking for a church with massive numbers of people looking to worship at it during major holidays) but also pay what was described as a General Admission Fee of $7.00.¹ I and many people were very upset about this, on the grounds that Christian worship (and especially Christian sacraments) is not the sort of thing that should be for sale. It smacked of simony, the sin of trading in ecclesiastical goods or preferments for financial rewards. After a few days of criticism on social media and an email campaign, the National Cathedral announced that they were changing course in response to community concerns. The $7.00 charge was now to be optional; you could reserve a ticket to attend Christmas Eve worship without paying. I am very thankful indeed that they were moved by the public protest to change their policy. You can, if you’d like, read the Episcopal News Service write-up of the whole controversy here.

In many ways, this is just another one of the periodic controversies that boil up especially in the era of social media, in which institutions get caught doing foolish or wicked things (or at least things that people think are foolish or wicked), are criticized for doing so, and offer exculpatory explanations and/or apologies.

But there are two elements of this particular imbroglio that I think are worth further reflection, because they pertain to deeper problems in the Episcopal Church and mainline Anglicanism more broadly: our increasing inability to have substantive theological discussions on matters of doctrine, and a clergy culture marked by defensiveness and hostility to accountability couched in pop-therapeutic language. I will discuss each of these in turn:

Is the Episcopal Church losing its ability to think theologically?

One of the things that I found very noteworthy about the National Cathedral’s statement about abandoning the mandatory fee for reserving a ticket was the justification given for it. The statement announcing the policy change describes the Cathedral leadership realizing that “a required processing fee for passes to some holiday services is a barrier to worship.” This is why the fee needed to be done away with, because Cathedral leadership “never want[s] finances to be a barrier to worship at the Cathedral, and it is clear that this fee has become a barrier.”

What I find striking about this is that the problem with charging fees for worship is described entirely in a secular language of accessibility. The argument could be sketched like this: the Cathedral wants to be welcoming and inclusive; charging a fee to attend worship excludes some people; so, the Cathedral has come to realize that it can no longer charge fees for worship. One could, frankly, imagine any number of historic cultural institutions using similar language to apologize for practices that are seen as unwelcoming or exclusionary, especially to groups conceived of as marginalized (in this case, the poor). There is nothing explicitly Christian about the reasoning here.

Now, to be clear, I do think that Christians should care about the accessibility of the world writ large and of their institutions in particular, and that this fee may indeed have excluded people who wanted to attend worship. And one could certainly give a richly theological account of why it is that it is so urgently important that the church in particular be as widely welcoming as possible (to avoid putting up any barriers that prevent people from coming to a saving knowledge of Christ and being joined to his Body, say).

But the Cathedral did not do so. Nor – and this was even more telling – did the Cathedral’s statement address the theological issues with putting Christian worship and especially Christian sacraments up for sale in se, regardless of accessibility concerns. I would argue, for example, that charging to attend Christian worship and to receive the Eucharist is theologically unacceptable even if the charge would not hinder anyone from attending who wanted to attend, because the Eucharist, God’s free gift to us, is not to be sold. That is, even regardless of accessibility concerns, it is a gravely wicked thing to sell the Sacrament, because this is taking God’s free gift of himself to us and seeking to profit from it, using the treasures of heaven to store up treasures on earth.

Perhaps addressing these substantive theological points is too much to expect from something entitled “Policy Update.” But it made me wonder about something I have also worried about (and written about) in the Anglican Church of Canada. The question is this: do we, as a church, have a sufficiently robust shared understanding of what the Christian faith is to be able to have genuine theological conversations with each other? In the case of Canada, I worried that the ACC’s latest publication on MAiD (to which I contributed) showed that pro-MAiD and anti-MAiD Christians are basically talking past each other, that we don’t have enough in common theologically to actually reason together about whether or not the church should endorse doctors intentionally killing their patients in certain circumstances. In this statement, the absence of any explicitly theological reasoning and the default to secular progressive language of accessibility raises similar concerns.

Again, to avoid misunderstanding, I think it’s a positive thing that we, as a church, broadly agree that accessibility is good! But it is deeply concerning to me that we seem to decide properly theological questions in terms of secular center-left ethical norms. For this is not the only example of this practice. It rather reminds one of the (fortunately defeated) attempt at General Convention a while ago to remove ‘Israel’ from Eucharistic Prayer B out of a concern that its placement functioned to validate the behavior of the contemporary state of Israel. Whatever your view of the state of Israel, allowing contemporary political concerns to dictate how we describe central acts of salvation history — in this case, God’s election of Israel — has things backwards.

Similarly, our last General Conventions have involved lengthy debates about the language for God used in our worship, in particular the use of the male pronoun for God and “Father” to refer to the first person of the Trinity. I have been very disturbed to see that much of the argumentation, especially of those seeking to change our inherited (and, I would argue, Scriptural) language has focused on ideas of inclusion, accessibility, and welcome, of the impact of this language on worshippers, especially those understood as marginalized. Now, no doubt these are important considerations which should be taken seriously (for what it’s worth, while I insist on the traditional, Scriptural language as normative for public worship, in pastoral conversations with those for whom this language is difficult I am most willing to use other language so long as it is Scriptural and/or orthodox). But if these ethical principles become determinative for how we speak about God, as though ‘God’ is just a malleable-but-useful concept that can be made and re-made to serve our immediate ethical goals, we’ve lost the plot entirely, and have missed that we worship a God who is not just a projection of our own hopes or desires but the Wholly Other who graciously revealed himself to us!

Simply put, if properly theological questions like whether or not we should charge money for people to receive the Eucharist or how we should address God are reduced to being adjudicated by center-left ethical mores, we are in deep, deep trouble as a church.²

 The Thin Black Line: When Accountability is Called Abuse

There’s another feature of this dust-up that I think is worth consideration. Before long, there was a backlash to the backlash: people criticizing the people who were criticizing the National Cathedral. People (and particularly clergy) suggested that it was wrong to focus on something like this when there are much bigger problems in the world, that criticizing progressive Christians was letting down the team given the power of American Christian conservatism, that criticism was driven by envy at the size and reach of the National Cathedral or, rather implausibly, specifically generated by the Episcopal Church’s enemies, and so on.³ You can read one of the most popular examples of the backlash-to-the-backlash here. This is also a familiar feature of online controversy; it is not necessary particularly surprising or remarkable. But what I do think is worth reflecting on is how many of the most popular backlash-to-the-backlash arguments reflect what I believe is a broader problem in our church: the ways that the language of Christian kindness, professionalism, and pop-therapy get selectively deployed to shield Episcopal Church clergy from responsibility or accountability.

Let me offer some qualifications at the beginning to ensure I am not misunderstood. It is certainly true that social media in particular breeds a culture of cruelty and nastiness, and that this is a problem. I don’t doubt that there were some unjustly nasty comments made about the Cathedral. I’m also sure that it was uncomfortable to read comment after comment, email after email of even measured criticism. As someone who has been the target of internet pile-ons myself, I can affirm by bitter experience that they are not fun. It is also true that Christians are called to be kind to each other, that Episcopal clergy should relate to each other professionally, and that norms of politeness are generally a good thing. The sort of person who likes to tell others that they are “good, not nice” is usually neither.

And yet: all these caveats notwithstanding, I have grave concerns about a defensive clergy culture in the Episcopal Church (and, for that matter, the ACC) that shields some clergy (especially progressive senior clerics) from accountability or responsibility by calling for clergy solidarity no matter what and casting criticism as invariably a matter of inappropriate personal attacks. I call this – perhaps somewhat inflammatorily – the ‘thin black line’ mentality.⁴ The fundamental ideas seem to be this: working as a mainline clergyperson is uniquely and unprecedentedly difficult; those who are not clergy are wholly incapable of understanding the role; mainline Christianity is under attack; as a result, clergy have a responsibility to support each other no matter what and no duty whatsoever to attend to external criticism.⁵ Often this is grounded in a lightly spiritualized, pop-therapeutic language: to paraphrase the piece I linked above, criticism is cast as fundamentally driven by envy and seeking to instill shame, and shame has no place in healthy Christian discipleship, which is supposed to be about love (which excludes shame).

This defensive clergy culture was present in spades in the backlash-to-the-backlash, with pieces like the one I linked arguing for the inappropriateness of criticizing National Cathedral leadership for a (in my opinion, anyway) flagrantly anti-Christian policy because it’s wrong to shame people and we need to defer to our fellow clergy.⁶ But I’ve seen it elsewhere, too. It showed up in the Title IV (clergy misconduct) training I received in seminary, delivered by a bishop of the church, in which I was told that clergy misconduct allegations are handled in a way to be as non-punitive to clergy as possible, that dioceses take care of clergy accused of misconduct. It shows up when clergy, upon hearing misconduct allegations about other clerics, are more concerned about the sin of gossip and potential reputational damage to their friends than the truth of the allegations. It shows up when heretical preaching is tolerated because raising a fuss would be unkind (and “he’s such a good guy” and “really loves his people” or what have you). It shows up when suggestions that clergy should be in some way evaluated for the competencies required to do the job are castigated as ‘bringing in business methods’ or ‘succumbing to capitalism.’ The glorious truth that our standing before God does not rest on our own works but his grace is bizarrely taken to mean that the same is true for the standing of clergy coram ecclesia.

I think the first time I truly realized the extent to which our defensive clergy culture inhibits honest conversations about the state of our church was during the pandemic. During it, I heard over and over again that seeking to evaluate or even discuss the effectiveness of our pandemic response was inappropriate because “everyone is trying their best.” Doubtless this was largely true – but the idea that if people are really trying hard, we can’t ask whether or not they are succeeding is laughable. If a doctor is really trying his best every day but keeps killing his patients, sooner rather than later someone is going to ask what is wrong. This is true even if the doctor is in a particularly stressful work situation! If we do so for those who can only kill the body, should we not be even more concerned about the competence of those whose errors can drive souls away from God?

I don’t know exactly how to change this culture, especially within an institution in possibly terminal decline. But I do believe that if we are going to be able to tell the truth about our current state, we need a clergy culture that is strong, loving, and supportive without enabling bad behavior – and we need to let go of the idea that being on the right team or trying hard exempts one from accountability.

By way of a conclusion, let me say that I raise these issues not to castigate the church in which I am ordained, nor merely to vent my spleen. I love the Episcopal Church, and believe that we have so much to offer a nation in need of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is why I hope that we can return to theological language when discussing theological matters and reject a toxic clergy culture - so that we can better serve our crucified and risen Lord.

1. A little historical note: this was frequently compared to the practice of pew rents, in which specific pews were rented out to parishioners as fundraising. But, while I think that pew renting is a troubling way to raise church revenue, the analogy is inapt. In the old pew rent system, there were seats (or at least standing room) available for those who did not pay, if typically in less-desirable locations in the church. The Cathedral was charging money for every single admission. This is why pew renting, while a bad thing, did not amount to selling the sacrament in the way that WNC’s practice did.

2. One way to put this is that I worry in Canada that we simply do not have a shared language in which to conduct theological disputes, and I worry that in the United States the only shared language we have in which we can conduct theological disputes is an inappropriate one to address the questions at hand.

3. It was argued that the Institute for Religion and Democracy was somehow behind the public criticism, apparently on the basis of an admittedly rather snide blog post they put out after the public outcry had already begun.

4. It is important to underline that some clergy are protected by this mainstream Episcopal clergy culture, while others emphatically are not. Clergy who are associated with political and theological conservativism, fairly or not, are typically seen as fair game for even very harsh criticism, often by the very same people who (for example) have been defending the Cathedral. This culture is, in a lot of ways, a progressive clergy culture - although it should be added that conservative Episcopal Church clergy can have their own sense of being besieged which can produce similar results. It also tends to protect seniority (bishops, diocesan staff, rectors especially of cardinal parishes). Young clergy or more marginal clergy (without full time parish jobs, say) are typically not protected.

5. It is perhaps worth saying here that I choose the language of the ‘thin black line’, on analogy to the ‘thin blue line’ that police officers like to reference, not merely to shock progressive Episcopal clergy sensibilities. Without suggesting that they are exact analogues, I think there are similar features - an inflated view of the profession’s difficulty, a siege mentality, a sense that outsiders cannot evaluate one’s work, all of which produce strong social pressure against criticizing one’s fellows - between our clergy culture and the police culture that many of us rightly see as toxic.

6. Somewhat bizarrely, this piece also argues that shame does not work. But if the criticism of WNC was a matter of shaming, as the piece argued, it certainly worked in this case; the Cathedral changed their policy.