NOTES,  19 NOVEMBER 2022

Welcome, blog reader. The 232nd annual meeting of the Diocese of South Carolina has concluded. It was held yesterday and today, Nov. 18-19. I watched the sessions that were live streamed on Facebook and also the Eucharist service at Grace Church Cathedral. Here are my thoughts on the convention, for whatever they are worth.

There were two visitors of great interest. One was the archbishop of Ghana and primate of the Anglican Communion province of west Africa. His presence in the convention proved that not all of Equatorial Africa is going along with GAFCON's assault on the Episcopal Church in an attempt to replace TEC with its proxy in the U.S., the Anglican Church in North America. GAFCON has cut off communion with the Episcopal Church, specifically over issues around homosexuality. The other visitor was the bishop of the Diocese of the Dominican Republic. His presence demonstrated his diocese's attachment to the mainstream of the Episcopal Church. Both of these important visitors were morale boosters for the convention-goers.

As for the legal issues of the schism, nothing specifically came out in the sessions. The new chancellor of the diocese, Bert Utsey, made brief remarks and said his written report would have more substance. Unfortunately for me, that report was not posted online, or at least I could not find it.

Of course, there was rejoicing at the return of Episcopal services in five returning parishes (St. John's, St. James, Christ Church, St. David's, and St. Bartholomew's) and at the restoration of Camp St. Christopher which had been hijacked by the breakaways and held captive for nearly ten years.

I found it interesting and a bit curious that the overall theme of the convention was racial reconciliation. To be sure, South Carolina needs racial reconciliation given its distinct history and culture. That is not debatable. The point is that this was not the substance of the schism. The direct cause of the schism was the church's interface with homosexuality. The secondary cause was misogyny, that is, institutionalized subjection of women to male authority. These two have been well documented as the wedge issues of the schism. I believe racism was also a factor in causing the schism but was much more in the background when the break happened in 2012. Some people have speculated that the schism was actually delayed reaction to the Episcopal Church support of the Civil Rights movement, mainly in the 1960's. That may well be, but it has not been documented. Race was not an overt issue boiling up in the diocese in the thirty years leading up to the schism of 2012 the way homosexuality and women's roles were. Yet, equality for and inclusion of homosexuals and women were barely mentioned in the sessions yesterday and today.

The keynote speaker, Stephanie Spellers, certainly did a great job of making the case for racial reconciliation. Her bring-down-the-house "homily" at Grace was a stem winder. As a student of history, I was delighted at her emphasis on recognizing and embracing the past, all of it, as a guide to a better future. Amen. God, and everybody, knows lower South Carolina has an abundance of the past to deal with and much of it is uncomfortably ugly. It is hard to imagine anyone doing a better job of the theme of racism than Spellers did.

I kept waiting for someone to say the word "reparations." I did not hear it. Friend, we are not going to get serious about racial reconciliation until we deal with the question of reparations for slavery. I did not really expect the subject to come up in the meeting. Right now the diocese has all it can do to recover and rebuild after the devastating house fire of ten years. Yet, reparations must be dealt with somewhere down the road if the diocese really means to heal racism in lower South Carolina.

Many dioceses in the Episcopal Church have set up payments of reparations or have established commissions to do so. Even the neighboring diocese of GEORGIA has set aside 3% of its unrestricted endowments for a racial reconciliation center. Virginia, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, and numerous other dioceses have either set up substantial reparations programs or are moving to do so.

In my view, racial reconciliation in the diocese of South Carolina must have two big parts. The first is recognition of and contrition for the evil of slavery. Germany gave us a model on how to do this. In 2015, on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Chancellor Merkel led her cabinet to the German Parliament for a most remarkable event. After historians laid out the highly uncomfortable details of Nazi history, in the name of the German people, the assembly embraced the guilt for enabling National Socialism to come to power and the guilt for the war and all the evil that ensued. They begged forgiveness from the rest of the world and promised that they would never again allow such a regime to come to power in Germany. They committed themselves to true democracy and human rights. No nation-state in the history of the world has ever done such a thing. Even before this, Germany had been paying Israel many billions of dollars in "reparations" making Germany second only to the United States in financial support of Israel. Of course the money could never repay the apocalyptic Holocaust that Germany made but it was significant given that Germany itself was struggling to rebuild after a war that destroyed virtually every German city and town.

The second big part has to be material. Talk is easy and cheap. Only when the diocese of SC commits to share a significant part of its wealth to heal the disparities caused by racism can it really call itself doing racial reconciliation. So, down the road, when the diocese is back on its feet, the diocese as an institution should 1-formally apologize for the evil of racism and 2-pay reparations as a goodwill gesture to help make amends. What forms these take would be up to the people and their leaders. In my view, there will not be significant racial reconciliation until both of these things happen in the Diocese of South Carolina (or any other southern diocese for that matter).

On the whole, the convention was a joyous event. It showed the remarkable health and vitality of the diocese. Although only a fraction of what it was before the schism, the diminished old Diocese of South Carolina is bouncing back as well as it can and moving on into the future bravely self-aware of its mission to do God's work in the world.