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.
If i were to try to create a racist caricature of a benightedly stupid Nigerian bishop’s name, I don’t think I could come close to anything as funny as “Funkuro Godrules Victor Amgbare”.
I’m sure it sounds much better in Yoruba. Most of these West African names that contain the word “God” followed by an attribute are English calques of Yoruba names.
Even untranslated, his name still sounds less stupid than that of the most benightedly stupid Anglican bishop ever to live, Dean Burgon of Chichester.
… they and they alone understand what God really wants.
They really should check in with the nominal head of the Church, Charles Windsor, for his opinion.
Or maybe hold a seance and inquire the same of Henry Tudor.
Funny that you posted this now. Just today, I was wondering what denomination (if any) the mega-church down the road claims, and checking their website, I see they’re PCA (Presbyterian Church of America). That led me to the wikipedia page of PCA, where I learned it’s just one of many flavors of the Presbyterian sect of Protestantism. The explanation of how various sects calling themselves Presbyterian schismed off each other, combined, then recombined and then schismed again…is downright dizzying. In short, the various sects have varying beliefs on whether or not different races can worship together, and also vary on just how worthless and subordinate women must be. They all agree that gay people are an abomination.
The one unifying thread is that all the sects claim they follow every word of the old and new testaments (Ned Flanders: “Even the parts that contradict the other parts!”). The sects just disagree with what the words of their shared holy book actually say.
They don’t all think that. I was raised in the Presbyterian Church USA, which is quite liberal and accepting of gay people, over conservative objections.
The thing is, inherently, Presbyterians are very much a ‘bottom-up’ group rather than a ‘top-down’ group (the Catholic and Anglican churches being the epitomes of top-down.) The name comes from the ‘presbyter’ (essentially ‘parish’) being the defining unit of the church, so different Presbyterian churches having different beliefs is pretty normal, and the overarching organization is a council that can only really do anything by a majority of the representatives of the churches that agree to operate under that umbrella. The council can’t really force much out of any of the member churches; one of its primary purposes is to allow for all the members to pool purchasing power. That said, any churches that significantly disagree with the council will tend to split off and find like-minded groups to form their own council so they don’t feel like they’re being disrespected.
In short, Presbyterians were never a united group by definition.
In Canada most of the original Presbyterian churches formed a larger group with Methodists, Congretationalists, and smaller grassroots Protestant groups mostly across Western Canada, and together they formed the United Church of Canada under the theory that while the Catholics and Anglicans could afford to open up separate churches in every town across the West, the smaller groups couldn’t, so by banding together and admitting they had more commonalities than differences, they could basically open up one ‘United Church’ in small towns rather than trying to open up three or four smaller non-denominational groups competing with each other, and that would allow them to share buying power as well as staff and organizational tips.
These days the United Church of Canada has kept the ‘more commonalities than differences’ approach and is generally one of the more LGBTQ+-affirming churches in Canada; the big Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church in Toronto usually has a Pride flag outside and has a little dedicated garden as a memorial for all the children taken in the residential school program.
(One of my great-grandfathers was a United Church minister; another great-grandfather was an Anglican minister. Me, I was baptized Anglican but am now agnostic, but that’s mostly out of ‘don’t see a point in church’ rather than any particular story about being driven from the church.)
swear i saw a lesbyterian church with a pride flag in downtown puyallup
I’ve seen a tiny bit of this asinine schism in the Falls Church, VA, area. AIUI, the original Falls (Anglican) Church, which the “city” of Falls Church is named after, decided to let women be ministers, and maybe be a bit less stupid and hateful to LGBT+ people; which caused a lot of old-school bigots to leave the church. That was many years ago, and more recently a rather sizeable new church got built next to a medical-office building. Turns out that’s the new church the bigots finally got built, and now they’re all so happy because “we finally have a home again!” (after running out of the home they’d had ‘cuz they didn’t like the other people who called it home, I guess). It’s called “The Falls Church Anglican,” which name has also been on the front of the medical-office building; so I guess they had offices there alongside the medical offices…
The Law of the Land says quite clearly that anything a man can do, a woman can do, and anything a woman can do, a man can do. And not requiring Churches to conform to exactly the same laws every other business has to conform to, makes a mockery of the law.
If a woman wants to pretend to subjugate herself to a man for the sake of entertainment, I guess that’s fine as long as she is feeling entertained; but the moment she cries “OOC!”, he’d better stop whatever he is doing, or else it’s abuse.
As usual, Raging Bee explains more concisely what I was commenting on. The old Monty Python skit where The People’s Front of Judea is waging war on the Judean People’s Front applies to the Presbyterians–and I’d bet many other sects of Protestantism.
There used to be a little old country church at the end of my road. It had been a Methodist church for around a century, with the median age of parishioners in their 70s. I used to walk the dog down that road because it was quiet–sometimes it’d be a family walk (spouse and kids) and sometimes it would be solo (just me and the dog). The pastor and I crossed paths one day and he started carrying on to me about how he refused to perform gay weddings and the Methodist church was considering allowing it. I couldn’t imagine any of his elderly parishioners asking him to, and I didn’t even attend his church, so I don’t know why he was venting to me. But he was really, really upset about it, and not long afterward he abandoned the church over the matter of gay marriage, and the church was sold to another group.
Sorry–lost track of my thought: in the USA, one doesn’t think of the Methodists as being extreme in their faith, but the notion of allowing gay people to marry really set that pastor off–even though he’d never be called upon to do it, the very idea sent him fleeing to a more-extreme sect. And I’m pretty sure the Methodist church itself split itself into bigoted vs. slightly-less-bigoted lines.
That his parishoners are elderly doesn’t mean there isn’t among them a gay couple that was waiting all those years to finally have their dream wedding in their favorite church.
Yes, the Methodists had a somewhat recent schism (just checked, it was in 2022) over marriage equality.
For me, the funniest part about this is that the whole schism is about “the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage”… Do these people not even know the most basic history of their own church? The Anglican church owes its entire existence to Henry VIII’s desire to change the standard of Christian marriage.
(OK, that and steal a lot of land and money from the Catholics…)
I don’t think we can say that there’s no progress, and this split shows that. After all, they’re splitting over a more liberal doctrine and leadership.
I guess that’s a fair point, but it shows that even the smallest and most overdue steps forward, like putting a woman in a leadership position, are fiercely opposed by something like half of the denomination.
In some cases. Others though have long been even more liberal than this.
I think the bigger picture is that the Christian religion is flailing around and there’s a lot of in-fighting within the same sects.
Also, “biblical marriage” that some sects are ranting on about has many examples of one man/many women.
Yeah, they conveniently forgot that part so often.
Ah, the old Emo Philips joke strikes again.
We’re far past the point where most English people don’t give a monkey’s what the Anglican church – nominally and legally the national religion – gets up to any more, and whether a bunch of nasty, regressive, mainly African adherents don’t like the idea of being dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century. It’s all a bunch of arguing over who has the best imaginary friend, after all. This can only hasten its demise, in this country at least. And maybe the benighted former colonies will experience this level of enlightenment too, in a century or two. No hurry.
Canada is in the odd situation where at its formal founding it either had two national religions or none, depending on how you look at it: Quebec was pretty blatantly Catholic, and Ontario was largely run by the Orange Lodge for generations. This was to the point that, to keep the peace early on, both provinces had written into their constitutions that they would fund a separate religious education system (Catholic in Ontario, Protestant in Quebec) in order to ensure that children from one province wouldn’t undergo forcible conversion attempts in the other. The Quebec government secularized pretty seriously after several scandals caused the ‘Quiet Revolution’ in the 1960s, while the Ontario government’s secularization was less dramatic and more gradual (and arguably isn’t complete, as we still have separate Catholic school boards here 150 years later).
I think some of Canada’s attitude on religion is a result of this history and the early requirements to at least pretend to get along: there’s a general public attitude along the lines of the old joke that ‘religion is like a penis: it’s fine to have one, it’s fine to be proud of it, but that doesn’t mean you whip it out in public and wave it around’. Open religiosity has never really been the sort of partisan political thing here as it is in the U.S.
That’s not to say some people haven’t tried; the Reform Party that eventually became the Alliance Party and mostly took over the shell of the Conservative Party always had an undercurrent of conservative religiosity. Stephen Harper spent a good chunk of his time as Prime Minister trying to shut up the backbenchers of his own party who wanted to make abortion an election issue because he was smart enough to know that it was a losing issue at the national level and that pushing forward the rest of the party agenda required being in power. There is a streak of such, and it has been getting louder and encouraged by the successes south of the border, but it hasn’t overcome the general feeling that this isn’t a proper thing to campaign on, at least not yet.
(Paul Martin, the Prime Minister who set up marriage equality legislation here in Canada, was Catholic, and had to deal with some of the more conservative bishops trying to claim he should be denied Communion as a result.)