My magnificent local Episcopalian Church, built by an earlier and very different generation of New Englanders, did not get an offering from me this Sunday—admittedly, the first time I've attended since the birth of my new daughter on August 4; our routines have been disrupted, by God's ineffable grace.
My general feelings of thankfulness and benevolence were brought to a screeching halt when my teenage daughter pointed, with a mischievous grin, to an insert in the Order of Service: We must join immigration dialogue, by the church's appalling Presiding Bishopess, Katharine Jefferts Schori.
I haven't yet been able to find out if Episcopalian churches were required to distribute this tissue of treason and untruth, every line of which has been refuted repeatedly on VDARE.COM over the past ten years. I suspect they were. I do know that (at least in Connecticut) they were required to endorse the black church burning hoax that was the fashionable liberal cause of the late 1990s.
Even beyond the usual national and racial self-abasement is Schori's absolutely unreconstructed economic left-looneyism:
We cannot separate the immigration issue from the economic systems in which we all participate and from which only some profit.
While revealing Schori's real anti-capitalist agenda, the implication here is not merely analytically untrue: it is the precise inverse of the truth. A central point in the immigration patriot critique of the current mass immigration policy is that it redistributes income from labor to capital, and is significantly responsible for the inflation-adjusted wage stall of the last few decades.
I have personal reason to regard the liberal Episcopalian hierachy with contempt. But also I contrast Schori with Len Munsil's powerful defense of American sovereignty from an Evangelical Protestant standpoint, published August 28 in the Arizona Republic: Christian stance on immigration: "Obey the governing authorities"
Munsil ran against Janet Napolitano for Arizona Governor in the Bush-cursed year of 2006. What a different world it would be if he were now standing in RINO Jan Brewer's place, a national figure as a result of signing SB 1070.
Like most Episcopalians, I take refuge in form rather than content—the architecture and the stained glass, the beautiful liturgy, the historic and powerful hymns. But it was a bitter irony that we sang, with no apparent awareness of irony, Samuel Wesley's great The Church's One Foundation, which includes this verse:
Though with a scornful wonder we see her sore oppressed,
by schisms rent asunder,
by heresies distressed,
yet saints their watch are keeping;
their cry goes up, "How long?"
And soon the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.