19 Dec American Episcopalians Breaking Away — to Africa
Religion has always been at the cutting edge of transnational association, and that’s proving as true today with this story: breakaway elements of the US episcopal church are putting themselves under the jurisdiction (if that’s the appropriate vocabulary) of more conservative Anglican churches in Africa. Earlier this week it was several Northern Virginia parishes which aligned themselves with the Anglican church of Nigeria, run by the anti-gay archbishop Peter Akinola who has been affirmatively seeking such American affiliates. In 2004, three Los Angeles area churches transferred their affiliation to the Ugandan diocese of Luwero.
I think this is a fascinating byproduct of globalization and the fact that associational relationships no longer have to bend to the logic of territory. Globalization creates exit options across the spectrum, at the same time that it facilitates more genuine transnational (here, in some sense antinational) connections. The episode is also interesting as a reversal of typical politics: white constituencies from the North subordinating themselves to an entity from the South, and (perhaps not coincidentally) an agenda coming out the South significantly more conservative than dominant views in the North.
By comparison, the last two generations of Buddhist individuals and groups in this country have long associated themselves with traditions and lineages of Asian and ‘Southern’ provenance and location, often ignoring those Buddhist ‘churches’ that arose in this country following Japanese, Chinese and Korean immigration, the latter seen as having conceded too much to ‘American’ religious ideology and practices, or simply as having been designed solely for immigrant communities. Of course universalist religious traditions are, or at least should be (Zionism/neo-Zionism an exception here insofar as it gives religious sanction to exclusivist territorial possession and identity), by nature or in principle, ‘transnational,’ hence this might not be the best case for illustrating ‘the fact that associational relationships no longer have to bend to the logic of territory.’ To be sure, in exploring religious worldviews and practices it is often the case that ‘it is not Christianity, but Catholicism we need to look at; not Catholicism but Spanish; not Spanish but in North Eastern Spain; not North Eastern but a particular county; not a county but a village. Such studies help[ing] to multiply our sense of the pluralism of Christianity itself’ (Ninian Smart). But the missionary and missionizing activities of, say,… Read more »