The Anglican schism culminates

Here’s an update to a story that’s been brewing for almost twenty years.

In 2006 and then in 2010, I wrote about how the Anglican church was slowly fracturing. This month, this schism became official.

Anglicanism is the world’s largest Protestant denomination and the third-largest Christian denomination. However, liberal and conservative churches within the denomination have been locked in a standoff for years over women’s equality and LGBTQ rights. Now the divorce papers have been served.

An alliance of conservative Anglican churches, mostly but not exclusively in Africa, which calls itself the Global Anglican Future Conference or GAFCON, grandiosely announced that they’ve “taken control of the Anglican Communion”.

What this announcement really signifies is that the GAFCON churches have split with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who’s the nominal head of the Anglican denomination worldwide, and the Anglican Consultative Council. The GAFCON churches will no longer listen to them, give them any money, or attend the Lambeth Conference of bishops. From now on, they consider themselves their own denomination.

In their announcement, GAFCON references the 2008 Jerusalem Declaration of conservative Anglican churches. As with all these tedious theological disputes, it proclaims with no evidence that they and they alone understand what God really wants.

And, as with all conservative religion, it denounces any and all moral progress as a sin, and insists that past error has to be propagated into the future forever. The most relevant part is article 8, which rejects all notions of LGBTQ rights and proclaims “the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family”.

But when you scratch the surface of homophobia, you always find a misogynist, patriarchal worldview. That’s the case here.

While conservative Anglican churches have been fuming for years over gay rights, the event that precipitated the breakup was the October 2025 appointment of Sarah Mulally, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. The GAFCON churches raged that this was forbidden because the Bible doesn’t allow women to hold positions of power over men:

“Christ is the head of the Church, man is the head of the family, and from creation God has never handed over the position of leadership to woman,” Nigeria’s Funkuro Godrules Victor Amgbare, Bishop of Northern Izon, told Reuters in Abuja.

How many people are going to end up on each side of this divide? GAFCON claims, with little evidence, to represent 85% of Anglicans. But these numbers seem to be inflated, and more objective research puts the number closer to half. It’s also not clear whether the self-proclaimed GAFCON leaders speak for all Anglicans in their respective countries.

Whatever the numbers, this schism sends a clear message. It’s another piece of evidence that religion is fundamentally hostile to moral progress. For a woman, being religious means, at best, constantly having to battle for your own equality against church leaders that see you as second-class citizens. This is true even in supposedly more liberal denominations.

In striking out on their own, GAFCON has only underlined this point. It seems likely that this will further accelerate the decline of religion and the spread of secularism, especially among young women – a trend that’s already in progress. The conservative churches think they can stand athwart this trend and yell stop, but all they’ll accomplish is to consign themselves even more firmly to the fading past.

The Probability Broach: Go directly to jail

A prison cell with light streaming through a barred window

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

Our heroes fought off a gang of thugs that attacked them in the night, and they’ve captured one of the assailants alive.

Win Bear is all in favor of torturing the prisoner (or at least scaring him into believing he’ll be tortured) to force him to talk. But his friends from the North American Confederacy say that’s not how it works there:

“What the hell do you mean? This guy and his friends rough you and Forsyth up, and now I can’t even bend him a little? We’d know how to take care of him back home!” I began describing the Spanish Inquisition, the Iron Maiden, certain North Korean variations. I was just warming up the hot pincers when Ed worked himself in between the prisoner and me.

“Look, Win, we’ll do this my way. I’ve just called Civil Liberties Association—”

“Huh?”

“What would you prefer, a lynching? He’s got rights, my friend, the same rights you’ll want, if you’re ever accused. The CLA or some other professionally neutral organization takes care of everything. They’ll call his security company, his relatives, friends—”

… “And what do they do, send him to the country club?”

Ed looked exasperated. “He’ll spend the night in custody, just as I might, under similar circumstances, wind up under Professional Protectives’ supervision. No, they won’t let him go—not the way they’re bonded!”

“Y’gotta admit, Eddie,” Lucy butted in again, “the accommodations’re pretty accommodatin’. Shucks, the guest pays for ’em—and recovers with interest if he’s proven innocent.”

On the very next page, L. Neil Smith says “there aren’t any real prisons” in the North American Confederacy. But this is obviously false, and his own writing contradicts it. There are prisons, or at least jails, in this society. It’s just that they’re run by private companies, rather than administered by the government.

There are two big problems with this, both of which L. Neil Smith is blissfully ignorant of. Let’s examine them one at a time.

The first one is that, because this is an anarcho-capitalist society, there are no police, but there are private security companies that perform the same “policing” function. According to Smith, these companies cooperate with each other. I hire my security firm to protect me from criminals, but if I’m accused of a crime, they’re also responsible for holding me in custody until I get a trial.

This would never work. Take a moment to think about the incentives.

Is my security firm going to imprison or punish me, their paying customer, merely on the say-so of a person who isn’t their customer? Obviously not.

Even if a security company was rigorously fair and treated everyone impartially, the race to the bottom of capitalist competition would guarantee that company would go out of business. Everyone would drop them and switch to a different security company that promised favorable treatment to its subscribers. (Imagine the commercials: “Bob’s Discount Security—Where your first felony is free!”)

Before long, these security companies would be little more than protection rackets, ensuring that their customers have impunity for any crimes they commit against outsiders. If you mugged or pistol-whipped someone and they made a complaint against you, your security company would check that your dues were paid up, then announce that in their professional judgment, you’re 100% innocent and are free to go about your day.

Meanwhile, if two customers of the same firm got into a dispute, it’s obvious what would happen: whoever pays more would get the verdict they wanted. It would be justice for sale to the highest bidder, which is what you should expect in a society where everything is driven by money and profit incentives.

These problems would be even more acute when it comes to the people who own these security companies, as I’ve pointed out before. Are private cops going to arrest the person who pays their salary? Of course not.

In this society, the CEOs and top investors of security firms would literally be above the law. They’d be in charge of private armies that answer only to them, like mafia dons or feudal lords in the days of old. Needless to say, TPB never depicts the extremely foreseeable abuses that would arise from this arrangement.

But let’s set this aside and say for the sake of argument that it works the way Smith insists it would. Let’s say I’m accused of a crime, I’m in arrears to my security firm, and they decide to lock me up to send a message about the consequences of not paying your bill.

The problem is that, once a suspect is in custody, the incentives flip the other way.

As Lucy said, a prisoner in this society has to pay for their own imprisonment. (What if you can’t afford it? Do you just starve to death in jail? Better hope that trial is speedy!)

But if they’re found innocent, they can get that money back. This creates yet another massive conflict of interest: once you’ve been detained, private prison companies have a strong incentive to ensure you’re found guilty—because otherwise, they have to eat the costs of your room and board.

If this is also the firm you hire to protect you on a regular basis, they’d have access to all kinds of intimate details about your life, your associations and your daily routine that they could selectively deploy. They could leak information to a judge, jury or whoever’s overseeing the trial to cast you in a bad light. (I’ll write more about Smith’s view of courts and trials next week.)

Whichever way it works, there’s no one in this legal system whose only motive is seeing that justice is done. Everyone ultimately serves the interests of their profits and their paymasters—and if those don’t align with the facts of who’s innocent and who’s guilty, too bad. That’s the only outcome we’d have any right to expect in a society where money reigns supreme and there’s no such thing as law to check its power.

L. Neil Smith insists that none of these things will ever happen, because everyone in his North American Confederacy has ironclad principles that they’ll never bend or break—even when staring into the face of someone who just tried to kill them.

But if everyone was so unimpeachably moral, it wouldn’t matter what kind of society we had. The reason we have rules is because some people, sometimes, will try to harm or exploit others for their own benefit. How does society respond when that happens? What, if anything, prevents the rich and the powerful from trampling on everyone else? An anarcho-capitalist system like this one has no answer for that.

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New on OnlySky: A cure for Huntington’s disease?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the hope of genetic therapy to cure a particularly nasty disease.

Huntington’s disease is the paradigm example of DNA as destiny. If you have the mutant gene that causes it, you’re guaranteed to develop the disease. No lifestyle change can prevent it or slow its progression, and Huntington’s is inevitably fatal. It gradually kills brain cells, causing a host of terrible symptoms, from uncontrollable jerky movements to memory lapses to mood swings, and eventually dementia and death. From the first onset of symptoms, typical life expectancy is at most twenty years.

Until recently, there was nothing whatsoever that doctors could do for sufferers. But now medical science has provided a ray of light, in the form of an audacious experimental treatment that combines genetic therapy with brain surgery. It’s the first treatment that has clinical evidence to show that it slows the progression of the disease, and more advances may be coming soon, holding out the hope of a true cure.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

Targeting most internal organs is a challenging task as it is. But the brain, which is protected by the blood-brain barrier that blocks most drugs, seems like a nigh-impossible target for genetic therapy.

However, one team of scientists has made a breakthrough. uniQure, a gene therapy company from the Netherlands, has developed an experimental therapy called AMT-130.

AMT-130 uses an adeno-associated virus or AAV, a harmless virus that’s easily engineered to deliver genetic material of our choosing. The hard part is getting it where it needs to go: the striatum, a region deep inside the brain that’s involved in motor skills and cognition, and that suffers some of the most severe damage from Huntington’s.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Crime and punishment

A gavel resting in front of a set of scales

The Probability Broach, chapter 10

When he arrived in this alternate universe, Win Bear was shot and almost died. Lucky for him, the North American Confederacy has super-advanced medical technology. The high-tech cast that’s healing his bullet wounds is supposed to come off tomorrow. He’s giddy at the prospect, feeling like a kid the night before Christmas.

His counterpart, Ed, tells Win he’s going out to check up on a client. Among Win’s belongings, he notices a pen with a “Paratronics” logo, which he recognizes as his and asks to have it back—except Win brought it from his own world. It’s the one he found in the murdered physicist Vaughn Meiss’ office.

That seems like a clue, especially since Paratronics is the corporate client Ed was going to visit. They both vow to investigate it.

That night, Win is drifting off to sleep when he’s suddenly jerked awake by an alarm. A mechanical voice blares: “INTRUDER AT FRONT GATE!”

He grabs his gun, leaps out of bed and runs outside, to find a melee at Ed’s front door:

At the gate a cluster of forms wrestled just inside the entrance… One guard lay on the ground, blood seeping ugly black onto the driveway, someone in charcoal-colored coveralls standing over him. Ed was on his back, arms outstretched and empty. A huge figure, also in gray, was pointing a weapon at his face. I lined up on the stranger’s chest and pulled the trigger, launching a blinding fireball in the semidarkness. The figure leaped and crumpled.

With Win blazing away at them, plus the rest of the private security team converging on the spot, the attackers scatter.

Ed and Captain Forsyth were both sucker-punched. They’re concussed, but alive. The man that Win shot—actually a gorilla, because that’s a thing here—is dead, and another of the attackers, this one a human, was wounded in the leg.

They carry the wounded into the house. Ed’s neighbor Lucy, awakened by the gunshots (“frustrated at missing all the excitement”) shows up in short order, and again calls for Clarissa the healer to treat their injuries.

That left our friend with the hole in his leg parked sullenly in a corner, two angry chimpanzees holding him none too gently and exchanging interesting notions about what to do with him if Forsyth got worse. That gave me an idea, so I went upstairs to put some clothes on. Draped in a bathrobe, I came back with my forty-one… The prisoner stiffened visibly when I caught his eye, kept looking over at Ed, then back at me, with an occasional wild glance at the S & W.

“Okay, asshole,” I said in my best backroom rubber-hose voice, “You gonna come clean, or do I hafta ventilate you some more?”

… “Barbarian!” he spat. “You don’t frighten me!”

“Is that so?” I shifted the muzzle to rest between his eyebrows. “I got two more slugs left. Think the boys here’d mind if I splatter your brains all over their uniforms? I’ll pay for the dry cleaning. Or would you like it somewhere neater, fellas?” I pointed the gun at his crotch.

“Get this savage away!” he screamed. “I stand on my rights!”

Yes, mock executions are a war crime. Win notes that he made sure the gun was unloaded before pulling this stunt, as if that makes it better.

We’ll get into this question more next week, but as an intro, let me point out that the idea of a person—prisoner or otherwise—having “rights” in the North American Confederacy is a contradiction in terms.

A right is a freedom or protection that the government can’t legally deprive you of. But there is no government here. There might be rights in the sense of moral principles that most people voluntarily agree to respect, but that’s not the same thing at all. You can do anything to anyone if you’re powerful enough or clever enough to get away with it. You won’t be breaking any laws, because there are no laws.

For example: L. Neil Smith is clear that in this society, killing someone in self-defense is completely fine. No one will give you any problems for it. What he seems less clear about is the obvious implication: if you kill someone, you just have to say it was self-defense.

It doesn’t matter if it’s true; it shouldn’t even matter if your story is contradicted by the evidence. There are no police who’ll investigate, after all. Your story only has to be plausible enough to pass minimal scrutiny, to convince everyone else to mind their own business.

(Wait, you say—wouldn’t friends or relatives of the deceased investigate their death, and come after you if they think you’re lying about what happened? Logically, yes. But the same thing should happen even for a justified killing, and yet Smith is adamant that there are no endless blood feuds here—despite that being a common feature of societies with weak or ineffective governments.)

There’s another unpleasant implication that Smith glides past. All of his protagonists—including Win himself, despite his fake execution ploy—have a rigid code of morality and would never actually harm a prisoner. But we can hardly assume that everyone in this society is so principled.

Basically, if someone tries to commit a crime and you capture them, you can torture them as much as you want, just as long as you kill them afterwards so they can never complain about it.

As we’ll see, Win’s friends are upset with him for threatening a captive, but really, he’s the one acting logically. That should be the way to handle this problem: break out the thumbscrews and the hot irons, make the hitman spill his guts about who sent him, then shoot him and bury his body in the wilderness.

In an anarcho-capitalist society where you’re solely responsible for protecting your own life, that’s the proper way to handle this problem. Why respect these imaginary, unenforced “rights” and let him go, when that just gives him a chance to try again?

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New on OnlySky: What would it take to raise the birth rate?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the trend of falling birth rates and what, if anything, we can do to reverse it.

The birth rate is falling across the world, in both wealthy and developing nations, in societies that seemingly have little in common culturally or politically. If this trend continues, the global population will level out within a few decades and then start to shrink. If this is a problem we need to collectively address – and not everyone agrees that it is – then the first thing we need to do is to figure out the cause.

This column proposes one possible explanation, and a solution to go with it.

Within the last two decades, for the first time ever, humanity became a majority-urban species. But cities are crowded and expensive, and tens of millions of people around the world are struggling with the burden of sky-high housing prices. Could this also be the cause of our birth woes: people forgoing having kids just because they can’t afford enough space for a family? Would building more affordable housing increase the birth rate as well?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

In spread-out rural regions, land is cheap and there are few barriers to population growth. However, in an urban setting, space comes at a premium. If your apartment doesn’t have an extra bedroom, having kids requires moving to a bigger place. That can be a costly proposition, if it’s financially feasible at all.

The repercussions of super-expensive housing don’t stop there. It also makes it harder for young adults to move out from their parents’ houses, delaying them from starting families of their own. It causes a trickle-down effect that increases the prices of everything else, including school taxes and daycare. It forces even people who have homes to devote a greater and greater share of their budgets to upkeep, leaving less for everything else.

With the deck so heavily stacked against them, it’s no surprise that some people decide kids are a luxury that’s simply too expensive to afford.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Ook ook

A close-up of a chimpanzee

The Probability Broach, chapter 9

Win Bear keeps getting attacked by unknown assailants, and he’s narrowly escaped death twice. In the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy, there are no police. If you’re in danger, you have to pay for private security to protect yourself. Win’s counterpart, Ed Bear, has done just that:

Captain Forsyth, head of the security contingent, was an old friend of Ed’s, a grizzled, wiry customer in a gray herringbone lava-lava and long black cutaway coat—right in style for Confederate rent-a-cops, and not the least bit funny once you took in the wide leather gunbelt and heavy automatic strapped around his waist.

…Oh yes. He’s also a chimpanzee.

On the day he arrived in the NAC, Win remembers seeing funny-looking strangers on the street. He thought they were mutants, but actually, they were apes. Now that he’s met Captain Forsyth, he learns how this came to pass:

I remembered the discovery in my own world that simians can’t talk only because their vocal apparatus isn’t up to it. We’d only just begun teaching them sign language. It had started here a hundred years earlier, maybe because Darwin’s opinions were more graciously received, or maybe because Confederates view innovation as a blessing instead of a threat. Or maybe because they haven’t wasted so much time and effort, so many useful lives, on war and economic disaster. Anyway, science and philosophy have never been separate departments here. Any critter who can handle more than a few hundred words is human.

We saw how, in Smith’s alternate history, racism just melted away when government was abolished. Now it appears the same is true of religious fundamentalism.

We’re never told if religion still exists in this world. Are most citizens of the NAC Christian, Muslim, or something else entirely? Are there still churches, and if so, what do they look like? Smith is uninterested in that subject; he never addresses it in any meaningful way.

But whatever their beliefs, everyone in the North American Confederacy welcomes science. There’s no ideological resistance to new discoveries. Smith says evolution was “more graciously received” than in the real world, where it faced (and still faces) stubborn opposition from religious literalists who believe their book of myths is absolute truth.

(This is a contrast to Ayn Rand, who got the heebie-jeebies about evolution. She didn’t outright deny it, but she refused to say if she thought it was true. She was an atheist, but she found it icky that humans might be related to other animals.)

I can’t deny it’s an attractive idea, but again, the causality cries out for an explanation. In the absence of government, it seems likely that religion would get stronger, since churches would claim to offer a source of stability in a world otherwise lacking it. That’s what happened in Europe during the Dark Ages.

With no public schools, religious schools would be some of the main providers of education, and they’d be free to teach children anything without oversight or standards. And while some denominations don’t deny science, many do. Why wouldn’t biblical literalism, young-earth creationism, and every other kind of pseudoscience and superstition run amok in this world?

As soon as they understood the setup, chimps, gorillas, a couple of other species waded right in and began exercising their rights.

…Lacking vocal speech, simians wear a device which translates tiny muscular movements—subliminal sign-talk—into sound. As with individual handwriting and telegraphy, each “voice” has its own personality: natural variations in bone-structure, muscular development, perhaps even character.

…Gallatin and Spooner believed it: any creature who can think is, Q.E.D., “people.” It’s calmly anticipated here that someday there’ll be computers with rights—and they’ll be welcome too.

There’s something missing from this chapter. The more sci-fi you’ve read, the more likely you are to overlook it—because it’s such a familiar and expected element, it’s easy to assume its presence and not notice that it’s never mentioned.

In many sci-fi works, advanced civilizations use genetic engineering to uplift other species to intelligence. If you read this part quickly, you might think that’s what Smith is saying, too.

But no. There’s no genetic engineering. What he’s saying is that chimps, gorillas and other apes were always intelligent, and the only reason we didn’t notice is because they lacked the capacity for spoken language.

The only thing they were waiting for was a political system to their liking. When they saw Smith’s version of anarchy and approved of it (were chimps reading the newspaper?), they came forward.

Once technology gave them the ability to speak, it immediately became obvious that they were equal in every other respect to human beings: written language, tool making and tool use, economic understanding, political participation, and scientific reasoning. As commenter andrewnotwerdna jokingly summed up Smith’s view: “Did you know that gorillas would be able to speak if it weren’t for taxes?”

(This does, ironically, echo the Indonesian mythology which claims that orangutans can speak but choose not to, fearing that humans would enslave them and put them to work if they knew.)

It’s true that great apes, our closest relatives on the tree of life, share some of our intellectual talents. They can learn language, to an extent, and use tools, to an extent. They can pass the mirror self-recognition test. They’re capable of feats of multi-step reasoning, like figuring out that they need to stack boxes on top of each other to reach a reward.

However, I mean no disrespect to our ape cousins when I say that they’re not intelligent in the same sense or to the same degree as humans.

Chimps use sticks to fish for tasty termites and rocks as hammers to crack nuts. But you’ll never see a chimpanzee constructing a fire drill or a rudimentary lathe – or even knapping stones into spearheads.

Similarly, apes can be taught some sign language (some have learned several hundred signs). However, they’ll never compose a sonnet or write an autobiography. They don’t have the capacity for complex syntax that human children learn intuitively.

Once again, I think Smith was trying to make a generous gesture toward inclusivity, but he went about it in one of the weirdest ways possible. Also, by asserting that these species were intelligent all along and didn’t need any help from us, it allows him to sidestep a different problem: Are there animal rights in the North American Confederacy?

If a creature can’t speak or advocate for itself, does it have any legal protections? Against cruel treatment, or abuse, or being hunted to extinction? Can NAC citizens bring back bear-baiting or dogfighting, or perform cruel medical experiments on them without oversight, or raise animals in cramped and filthy cages for food or furs?

Given that this is an anarchy where the only rights you have are what you can defend for yourself, the answer would seemingly have to be no. No hands means no firearms, which means no rights. That leads to some very ugly scenarios which, no surprise, go unmentioned in this book.

Image credit: Clément Bardot, via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

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New on OnlySky: Vaccine wars

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about anti-vax ideology on the ascent in America, and the utterly predictable consequences that are soon to follow.

Vaccines empowered us to banish the killers that have plagued humanity for thousands of years. It was a victory that would have seemed unimaginably miraculous to anyone who lived before modern medicine. But in our victory, we got complacent. We forgot why we’d ever needed them, which left room for anti-vaxers to slip in, sowing their poisonous lies. Now this anti-rational ideology has gained control of one of our two major political parties, and through them, the government.

Red states and the corrupted federal government are rolling back vaccine mandates, and as sure as night follows day, these preventable diseases are reappearing: measles, polio, diphtheria, and more. Tragically, it’s the next generation of children who will pay the price. If we keep going down this path, we may end up revisiting the era when childhood death was a normal and expected part of existence.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only (registration is free!). Members of OnlySky also get a subscriber newsletter:

The consequences of ignorance are completely predictable, and we’re already seeing them. In 2022, polio reappeared in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave in upstate New York.

Then, in 2025, the U.S. suffered its biggest measles outbreak in at least twenty-five years, mostly striking unvaccinated religious communities in West Texas. Dozens of people were hospitalized, and three died: two children and an adult.

Pertussis, or whooping cough, is also surging. We’ve had over 20,000 cases so far, more than at this point last year, which was itself a fivefold increase from the year before that. There have already been ten infant deaths.

How much worse could it get? A research paper from April 2025 simulates the result for the U.S. if vaccination rates continue to drop, and arrives at some grim numbers.

Continue reading on OnlySky…