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.