by Kevin Jones:

When conservative Episcopal dissidents meeting in Plano crawled back Tuesday from the brink of saying they would break canon law whenever and wherever they wanted, to say they had decided to play by the rules, it was just the latest sign that the movement of schismatic conservatives has crested and is splintering due to internal divisions.

In the past couple of weeks the American Anglican Council and its newly created successor, the Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes, has had at least two of its most stalwart supporting bishops, John Howe of Central Florida and Don Johnson of West Tennessee, rushing to publicly disassociate themselves from it.

Those public defections of influential leaders occurred following the revelation that the group has as its intent to destroy the Episcopal Church and take its place in the Anglican Communion.

That was preceded by the AAC using its website to publicly repudiate a statement from its president, the Rev. David Anderson. It's hard to say what the group stands for on any given day, or who it represents, since the splintering and divisions are happening so quickly. In his repudiation, Howe, considered by most to be one of the in-crowd acted as if the network has no real formal structure or reliable leadership core.

The exploding memo said that the plan for takeover had been signed-off on by "AAC bishops." A former AAC board member, Howe professed himself to be unsure who this group of AAC bishops might be – certainly not him. " I'm never sure what people mean when they speak of 'the AAC bishops.'" There is a fairly fluid group of bishops that has worked together over the past several years… however, there is no 'official' membership."

While prominent AAC leaders the Revs. Ephraim Radner and Don Armstrong, have said the memo contained nothing new, Howe was so disturbed by its implications that he sent an email to his clergy saying that he almost considered not going to the Plano meeting at all, and that he was going to consign any affiliation with the new Network to the purgatory of "further study," within his diocese.

The bad news and confusing disarray for the conservative shock troops doesn't stop there. Its international support, the foundation of its pretensions to influence, does not appear to be as strong as they claim.

While the crater caused by the conservative's disastrous secret memo has grabbed most of the headlines, Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold said in an interview on Beliefnet that his confidential back channel communications with the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams make it clear that conservatives are misinterpreting Williams' pastoral support as an endorsement of their organizational plans. Either that or they are deliberately misrepresenting the Archbishop. Williams has made it clear to Griswold that he understands that he has no power to intervene in ECUSA.

Similarly, Griswold said in his interview that some of the primates who have been most outspoken publicly in their condemnation of the Episcopal Church's position of including gays and lesbians have told him privately that those pronouncements are being made to appeal to their local constituencies. And that they want to remain in relationship with ECUSA but not be public about it.

It may seem odd to be writing a postmortem prognostication on a group that just gathered 2,000 people for yet another meeting on their home turf of Texas, the Baptist heartland. Nevertheless, I think the conservative's high-water point has passed.

Why do I think the conservative takeover seems to be breaking apart like a brittle glass onion even though they have dominated the post-General Convention debate? First, of course, is the fact that, unlike when their fundamentalist Baptist counterparts took over the Baptist Church, under Episcopal structure and the way courts interpret property-law as a result, this group can't take church buildings with them if they go. Assertions that they plan to break canon law only make things worse for them.

But their plans are not just running afoul of the court system or the structure of authority in the Anglican Communion, although that would probably be enough to doom their efforts.

I'd like to suggest that they are beset by some inherent incompatibilities that doomed them from the start. Fundamentalism is a foreign transplant in Anglican soil. It has started to publicly splinter and dry up like a seed that grew quickly but never had chance to take root.

I covered the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Church back in the 1980's, and learned to observe its three salient characteristics in action. Fundamentalism is militant, separatist and literal where possible, according to scholar George Marsden's classic definition and the AAC fits that definition perfectly.

That approach was a good fit in the Southern Baptist Church, where each church is independent and each believer is considered a priest. Separating into tinier and tinier groups of the acceptable elect, while at the same following the lead of an increasingly militant core, fit the Baptist DNA well, where faith was often like taking a test that got increasingly more rigorous each time around.

The fundamentalist surge, relying on its militant and separatist instincts, did not succeed nearly as well in a hierarchical church like the United Methodists. The Methodist governance structure, or polity, robbed separatism of its power, which in turn weakened the fundamentalist militancy. You cannot be both connectional, as the Methodists call their polity, and separatist.

Now the fundamentalist attempt to take over the Episcopal Church is foundering on that same polity issue, which is why the bishops who had formerly supported them are running from the contagion of the AAC now. But the AAC's deeper incompatibility with Anglicanism is in its approach to scripture.

The AAC's third fundamentalist characteristic, taking scripture literally whenever possible, has been on a collision course with the Anglican view of authority from the start.

First, the Episcopal Church's liturgical form makes worshippers more comfortable in the role of people taking a part in a drama rather than sinners struggling to pass a test. The fact that Anglican tradition relies on authority and truth founded on the three-legged stool of Scripture, Traditions and Reason runs smack against the AAC's demand that certain verses of scripture be taken literally, or else we will all fall down a slippery slope.

That appeal to fear and demand for allegiance to a single view of scripture worked well with the Baptists but it is like trying to transplant a tuft of Arctic tundra in an overgrown English garden to try to make it take root in the Episcopal Church.

As we at Every Voice have produced via media, the seven part evangelism video and curriculum series these past weeks, I have come to appreciate the incredible genius of the 16th century Elizabethan Compromise, which found a way for Protestants and Catholics in England to stop killing each other and come to worship together despite their differences. I have seen with fresh eyes its relevance for the current conflict. It is a method that consumes the fire of the angry zealots and brings those who remain back to the table.

A Church founded on a compromise that lets sworn enemies worship together is not a natural home for the AAC's militant demands. The way the fundamentalist AAC understands truth is not the way Anglicans understand truth.

That is a deep incompatibility, similar to the incompatibility of the Indian Hindus in the face of the incursion of the Islamic Moguls in the early 16th century. The people who owned the land, the Hindus, had always been able to absorb every other invader and religion who had come to the subcontinent. The Moguls had enough military power to conquer the country and they have had to live together uneasily ever since. The AAC does not have the power. It has no access to the billions in the pension fund or the property and is just as foreign to the Anglican culture. This is an attempt at conquest that seems doomed to fail.

Finally, there is the response of Griswold and most of the two-thirds majority who voted at General Convention for the local option of blessing same-sex unions. Despite the attempt by conservatives to polarize the issue, Griswold and others have said that it's possible for people to disagree on same-sex blessings and still worship together.

Griswold's approach and that of those who followed his lead has, I think, had the effect on conservatives that the Russian's retreat had on Napoleon's Grand Army or Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope tactics against George Foreman; it has caused them to spend their energy in increasingly desperate attempts at solidifying their power against an opponent who will not stand and fight.

The moderate Baptists stood and fought and were overrun by the fundamentalists. The retreat by the Episcopal mainstream to the traditional via media, the messy middle way of Anglican compromise, has caused the conservative armies to bog down and start swinging their swords at themselves or imagining they can claim territory they have no way of possessing.

Their frantic efforts are causing increasing numbers of their most influential supporters to defect from their increasingly desperate cause.

It may not look like it now, but I think the January 20 meeting in Plano will prove to have been a couple of weeks past the high-water mark of the AAC and their new Network.