How do the sexual politics of the Episcopal Church in America affect Christians throughout the world? Faith J. H. McDonnell explains in an article for the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Her story begins with a Sudanese priest, John, who sought assistance from the Diocese of Newark’s “justice missioner,” only to find that the justice missioner’s sole concern was advocacy for people with disabilities, people of color, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex community.
John is a former “Lost Boy,” one of some 33,000 southern Sudanese children who fled attacks by government-sponsored militias during Sudan’s more than two decades of civil war. He survived a three-year trek from Sudan to Ethiopia to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Now he is the pastor of over 1,000 refugees at Kakuma.
John assumed that a church justice office would focus on human-rights issues like genocide in Sudan, religious persecution, poverty, hunger, and human trafficking. What he did not know was that in the U.S. Episcopal Church, affirming one’s sexual orientation is as much a justice and human-rights issue as genocide.
“There is rather more at stake here than the issue of sexual politics,” writes Andrew Proud, Area Bishop of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, in an article on the Anglican crisis for Trinity Journal for Theology and Mission. In fact, one church’s human-rights issue is creating another church’s human-rights crisis. By pushing sexual politics, Episcopal church leaders are compromising the churches’ witness abroad, exposing Christian brothers and sisters to violence, and unwittingly aiding and abetting the Islamization of Africa and elsewhere.
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