Just For Fun,

I posted the following comment at Virtue Online in response to an article entitled "The State of Anglicanism in North America".

The article here is unbelievably slipshod. "Continuing Anglicanism" in the US dates from the late 1950s, and it has embraced dozens of splinter denominations besides the ACNA. It is amateurishly careless, if not deliberately misleading, to represent the ACNA, founded in 2009, as "Anglicanism in North America" . It leaves out the denominations founded in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the segregationist James Dees, and furthered by the highly disreputable Anthony Clavier. It leaves out the denominations led or founded by the defrocked Episcopal priest Louis W Falk III, who was deposed by the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac for a scandal utterly unrelated to theology; the ACC, the ACA, and the TAC accepted his leadership apparently without question in spite of this sorry record. There are several qualities that "continuing Anglican" denominations share, and which a responsible article should be pointing out: first, a tendency toward extreme exaggeration of numbers. Commenters here rightly question the ACNA's assertion of a membership over 100,000 -- Virtue should, if he pretends to any journalistic integrity, be investigating these numbers more thoroughly. Second, a tendency toward further schism, which Virtue acknowledges only in passing. Third, a tendency, as we see with Louis Falk and many others in the "continuing" movement, to accept clergy and bishops who have been marginal within the TEC, or who are under discipline there. I don't know if there's a way to get David Virtue to wake up and hew to the straight and narrow in his coverage, but commenters should be more demanding than they are here.

This blog typically gets over 100 visitors a day, and every now and then someone e-mails me worried that I might be winding down or losing enthusiasm. My reply is uniformly that I can't do this by myself. If people don't hold leaders like Brian Marsh accountable, or hold "journalists" like David Virtue accountable for not holding leaders like Brian Marsh accountable, my own efforts will be of little avail.