ECUSA, abortion, and your pledges

An excerpt from my latest in Designated Giving Committee correspondence:

I will be there and happy to talk through this. However, let me say beforehand that my perspective has changed somewhat since this conversation began. Two days ago, I learned that on 12 January the Executive Committee of the Episcopal Church formally affiliated ECUSA with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. The ENS article detailing the Executive Committee meeting is here. The RCRC website is here. You may consider at this point that my heels are well and truly dug in. Formally, there was some ambiguity (some, myself included, would say incoherence) in the ECUSA General Convention resolutions re abortion – support for legality of the procedures, but questioning the morality of most elective abortions, indeed encouraging priests to be ready to offer sacramental absolution to women who have aborted their unborn children; the public policy question was separated from the moral-theological question. However, by affiliating with RCRC, the Executive Committee has now resolved that ambiguity in favor of a clear pro-abortion position. It is no longer a matter of connecting the dots between support of ECUSA and support of pro-choice organizations, but of a bright line running from the individual giver, to the parish, to the Diocese, to the National Church, to the RPRC and its agenda.

I will not materially support that agenda, or a church that supports that agenda; to do so is to become knowingly complicit in evil – and I use that word advisedly. So, I am holding out for a clear segregation of funds in the Diocesan budget. We can offer a method for doing this to the Annual Convention, or we can leave it to the B&C, but folks like me will not support the National Church, even if we must practice a kind of “civil disobedience.”

Finally, I would ask you to consider this: by taking such a strong position on the most contentious and morally-freighted issue of our time, and particularly doing so at the height of the divisions we already suffer, is it not plain that the entrenched powers-that-be in the Episcopal Church are not only being disingenuous when they speak of reconciliation and tolerance, but are actually intent on driving every evangelical- and/or catholic-minded Episcopalian out of the Church?