By Karl C. Schaffenburg

I cannot claim to not have racist thoughts and instincts deep within me that surface without bidding. I am an American who has spent much of his adult life in Mississippi, a product of the 20th century, and to claim to be free of the stain of racism would be as ridiculous and as proud as to claim to be free from sin. I can claim, however, to be aware of racism, and to attempt to combat it in my own life and in the community around me. Given this awareness, every now and then I will be struck by the fact that real, measurable change has occurred in little pockets of our society.

The other day at a community health center I was in the locker room at a time when most of the other men in there were young African Americans. Without thinking, we acknowledged each other with the slight nod common to chance encounters in Mississippi. “Hey, how’s it goin’?” “All right now.” It struck me that no one now gives much thought to the fact that we are sharing a public facility, whereas 50 years ago the police would have been called if young African Americans were using a “white” (public) facility like the locker room. Racism remains real, and people in our society still separate themselves and treat each other differently on the basis of race, and yet open, state-sponsored discrimination is a thing of the past.

What was the agent of this change? I would like to think it resulted from a growing enlightenment and sense of justice, even a deepening in Christian love, but in reality a lot of it came about because a power outside of Mississippi (or any other state that supported segregation) took concrete steps to make it happen, using superior power. When that “foreign” power (the federal government) started to say, “You must change,” the first result was resistance. The first argument was “states’ rights,” that sovereign states have the right to determine their own governance for their own inhabitants. In other words, the first argument was that the federal government violated the polity of the states in imposing anti-discrimination laws.

Today we hear an interesting echo of this argument. The primates of the Anglican Communion tell The Episcopal Church that our House of Bishops must commit itself to an unequivocal undertaking on an issue of church doctrine and discipline. The most common first reaction one hears is that this does not recognize the polity of The Episcopal Church (TEC); that the House of Bishops cannot bind TEC absent the consent of the House of Deputies, given in General Convention. Leaving aside the finer points of canon law, this argument, like the states’ rights argument against federal legislation, is one that exalts procedure over substance, and thus attempts to avoid the underlying issue.

President Lincoln certainly understood the “polity” of the Confederate States of America (and each state of the United States then in rebellion against the United States) when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Congress and the president understood the “polity” of the states resisting the implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the federal enforcement of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In each case, the substance of the issue trumped the issue of the procedure, and that is, in effect, what the primates have proposed in their communiqué.

In the civil rights era, Mississippi and her sister segregationist states heard from the rest of the people of the United States a message of the need to change. In our current era, The Episcopal Church has pursued a course which has fostered alienation from the majority of catholic and reformed Christendom, whether this has been expressed explicitly (as by the Church of Rome or that of Russia) or implicitly (as seen in any diminution in efforts toward further ecumenical cooperation). More importantly, our sister provinces throughout the Anglican Communion have said that change is necessary. In saying that change is necessary, no other church or church leader has said that our procedures or polity have not been followed. In fact, they have respected that polity. No part of the Dar es Salaam communiqué questions the legitimacy of the election and consecration of the Bishop of New Hampshire. Rather, the primates have focused on the substance of the underlying issue. And what has been our response? First, we argue “states’ rights,” and then we point out that “foreign primates” do not understand our culture and how we experience God’s revelation. The latter argument both reflects an implicit assumption of our own superiority (tinged in no small part by a racist assumption that God’s revelation cannot be understood quite fully by those in the Global South) and the same sort of cultural blinkeredness that allows otherwise well-meaning people in my own state to argue that the Confederate flag is just a reflection of “our culture and heritage.”

The “unequivocal undertaking” which the primates have demanded of the House of Bishops requires us to address an issue of substance. Whether the current debate in the church is characterized as a question of justice or a question of the authority of scripture, it is above all not an issue of procedure and not an issue of the “right” of any one part of the body to say to the rest of the body, “I have no need of you” (1 Cor. 12:21). An issue of justice and/or authority is substantive, and calls for honest and prayerful insight and debate, undertaken in all humility and not with resort to procedural arguments. Discernment and prayer are not matters of polity.

The Rev. Karl C. Schaffenburg is the rector of Church of the Incarnation, West Point, Miss.

This article does not necessarily represent the editorial opinion of The Living Church or its board of directors.

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