SLAVERY divided not only the United States, but also its churches. The Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists and others all split North from South, and some did not reunite for more than 100 years. Others, like the Southern Baptist Convention, never did.
Now some of these same churches are facing a rift over homosexuality that is proving more intractable than any social issue since slavery. It is not an explosion, but a slow burn that has been smoldering in some denominations for about 30 years — longer than the battle over women's ordination.
Women won those battles in mainline Protestant churches, and though the churches bled some members, they stayed largely intact. But it is far from clear whether the strife over homosexuality will end the same way. That is why all eyes are now on the Episcopal Church. With 2.3 million members, it is only the 15th-largest in the United States, but it is a venerable, wealthy institution that has produced one out of four United States presidents, the Washington National Cathedral — and a civil war over homosexuality that has brought it closer to schism than any other church. Last week, Episcopalians were handed an ultimatum by the top leaders in the Anglican Communion: stop authorizing blessings of gay couples and ordaining gay bishops — or face banishment from the Communion. They were given until Sept. 30 to decide.
The Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists have also had battles over homosexuality, but the conflict in the Episcopalian Church is magnified because it is playing out on an international stage. The Episcopal Church is a member of the Anglican Communion, a global affiliation of 38 member churches that grew out of the Church of England. The Communion claims a membership of 77 million — making it the world's third-largest church body after the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
Until the outcry four years ago, when an openly gay priest, V. Gene Robinson, was consecrated the bishop of New Hampshire, many Episcopalians said they had never even heard of the Anglican Communion. Now they are paying attention.
Power in the Communion was once concentrated in England and North America. But the real growth in Christianity in the last 40 years has been in Africa and other parts of the developing world, and the Anglican Church has been a part of that evangelization effort. The Anglican Church of Nigeria is now more than seven times the size of its American cousin — and its archbishop, Peter J. Akinola, has become the standard-bearer for the conservatives' cause. He has sought an alliance with American conservatives in the Episcopal Church, who are unquestionably a minority, but who are spread throughout the country.
In many American churches, the divide on homosexuality is neither generational nor geographic, unlike the North/South split over slavery. Homosexuality is not the cause of the divide, just "the last straw," said John L. Kater, a lecturer in Anglican Studies, at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, in Berkeley, Calif., a liberal-leaning seminary. The underlying differences are over the basic understanding of tradition and Scripture. The conservatives say they are something sacred and fixed, while the liberals say they can be open to interpretation and responsive to new information.
That approach has shaped their responses. The liberals insist that what defines Anglicanism is theological diversity, and the conservatives claim Anglicanism requires a commitment to doctrine. The liberals are saying, "Can't we all just get along," while the conservatives are saying, "Can't we all just get in line?"
Hardly a Christian spectacle, the rivalry has been more like a log-rolling contest where the conservatives and the liberals are battling to push each other off a spinning log, while trying to make it look as if their adversaries voluntarily jumped. Now, with the ultimatum, the liberals may need a lot of deft footwork to stay on the log.
Passions run so high that on the more than 150 Anglican blogging sites, the name-calling is vicious. The conservatives call their liberal colleagues "Episcopagans," apostates and revisionists, and refer to themselves as the "guardians of the faith." Liberal bloggers hurl epithets like "ChristiaNazis" and "Neo-con Anglicans."
Last week, Sarah Hey, a blogger in South Carolina who is popular with conservatives, wrote of a schism: "Permanent. Enduring. Wide. I can't wait." In her next post, she added: "And Broad. And Deep. And Bitter. And Expensive. And public."
Yet schism is not inevitable. The struggle over women's ordination, which raged in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, strained most of these mainline Protestant denominations, but did not split them. Some high-profile clergy members and some churches certainly did depart, but the Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopal churches now ordain women.
However, some conservative corners of the Episcopal Church and some provinces in the Anglican Communion still do not ordain women as priests or bishops. When the Episcopal Church elected a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, as presiding bishop last summer, it rubbed salt in the wound, Mr. Kater said. "The strength of the reaction by conservatives around homosexuality is partly because of a sense of offense around the ordination of women," he said.
Dale Basil Martin, a professor of religious studies at Yale University, said, "When women's ordination came up in the 70s, the African churches weren't nearly as strong as they are now."
Another difference is that the struggle for women's ordination was led by women already organized into mission societies and women's leagues, said Mark Alan Chaves, a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, and author of a book on the conflicts over women's ordination.
"They weren't activists, they were church women, part of the establishment, and they were often key players in terms of pushing their denominations to do this," he said.
The question now is whether the battle over homosexuality in these churches ends more like the one over women, or the one over slavery.
In the Anglican Communion, the churches have weathered doctrinal battles in the past by papering over their differences — literally issuing paper after paper that graciously agreed to disagree, or putting off the question until a cooler set of heads showed up at the next meeting.
The Episcopal Church is one of the few that did not split over slavery. Churches in the Confederate States did form a separate alliance, Mr. Kater said, but the national Episcopal Church met without them and "pretended they were out of the room," calling out the dioceses' names for a vote "as if they had just gone to the bathroom."
"After the war there was a simple reconciliation process, and they were all brought back in as if it had not happened," he said. "I was taught in seminary that this was the great strength of the Episcopal Church, that when all the other churches divided, it stayed together and this was a sign of its great sense of unity. I think it was shameful, that the church considered that unity was more important than slavery."
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