It was over 30 years ago that the Wall Street Journal ran an analysis of the Episcopal Church that had the unforgettable headline, “The Episcopalian Goes the Way of the Dodo.” So we’re talking here about extinction just in case any listener missed the point. This was a prediction made over three decades ago that the Episcopal Church in the United States would go extinct, and that was simply from a dispassionate look at the statistics, and it wasn’t coming from the theological right. It was coming from sociologist Wade Clark Roof, who was a professor of religion at the University of California at Santa Barbara and one of the most respected experts when it came to religious research in the United States.

He went on to say this was part of a larger pattern in which America’s Protestant majority has declined from about 67% of the population to 57%. That was between 1952 and 1987. That tells you how long ago this remark was made. We’re talking about more than 30 years ago. But the fact is that the situation has grown only more catastrophic, and when you look at the Episcopal Church, you’re looking at the loss of more than 50% of its membership just in the last several decades. So that’s why it is very interesting that the Office of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has announced that there is now a study officially underway about selling the denomination’s property in Manhattan.

So Michelle Boorstein of The Washington Post reported it this way, “The Episcopal Church, once the spiritual home of America’s founders, presidents, and other members of the elite, announced last week that it wants to sell or lease its 12-story New York City headquarters.” And then, the post goes on to say, “It’s a sign of the shrinking of mainline Protestantism and institutional religion in the United States as well as the way religious groups are radically reshaping their commercial footprint in the 21st century.” So let me just state that the sale of an office building is not necessarily headline news, and if it were just in the context of moving from strength to strength or even some kind of just, say, horizontal move, this would not be big news.

The reason why it’s big news, even to The Washington Post, is because we are talking about the denomination that once represented the political and cultural elite in the United States overwhelmingly. You look at the number of presidents of the United States, you look at major leaders in universities and cultural institutions, you look at massive wealth, especially in 19th century and early 20th century America, you’re looking at Episcopalians. You’re looking at members of the Episcopal Church. And when, at this point, you have the headline that the Episcopal Church is putting its multimillion dollar New York headquarters on the market, it is not a sign of denominational strength. It is a sign of denominational decline and, in particular, when you look at liberal Protestantism.

Now, let me be clear. We’re looking at a reshuffling and a transformation of the religious landscape in the United States. So one of the things we need to know that is not our main concern today is the fact that the middle is disappearing. Now, that’s true in American politics. There used to be this vast middle, and you had a rightward polarity and a leftward polarity, a more liberal polarity on the left and a more conservative polarity on the right, and millions of Americans said, “We’re somewhere in between.” Well, fewer Americans say that, and even many of those who say that don’t vote that way. And so, we have the disappearance of the middle, and that’s because the issues have just become so fundamental. We’re not talking now about marginal tax rates or talking about the definition of marriage, so we’ve reached an entirely different scale. But, it is also true that when you look at the denominational left and you look at the old “Seven Sisters of mainline Protestantism,” the old major brands of liberal Protestantism, they’ve been in fast decline.

Now, as I say, the sale of an office building is not in itself that big a deal, but this is a story that’s actually traced back a matter of decades when this first was proposed, and we’re talking about the Episcopal Church that built this massive headquarters there in New York City, as a sign of denominational strength at the center of American culture. So we’re talking about prized real estate in Manhattan. We’re talking about a major statement that was made decades ago. The building was completed in 1963. It cost $4 million then, but it’s a prestige address, 815 2nd Avenue, Midtown Manhattan, New York, New York. Again, 815 2nd Avenue. Think massive cultural power. 

But now, the Episcopal Church is in decline, and by the way, it is hardly recognizable in many ways to what it was before. I wrote an article that ran yesterday at WORLD Opinion entitled: “The Episcopalian Heads for Extinction.” Again, I’m echoing that Goes the Way of the Dodo comment by Wade Clark Roof, but it is really a big story that deserves our attention, and I want to say it deserves the attention of Bible-believing evangelicals, of gospel-loving, gospel-preaching evangelicals because it is a huge warning to us. It’s also a big reminder of the great shifts in the religious landscape, the denominational landscape that have taken place over the course of the last several decades. So one of the things you can think about here is just, for example, political power as represented in the United States Congress. And you could think of particularly the Senate, which is often referred to as something of an Episcopalian prayer meeting, and that’s because there were so many Episcopalian senators. They were there very much a part of the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church was the symbol of access, the symbol of elite.

It was the symbol of, well, of course, the Anglophile tradition. It is, of course, the American representation of the Church of England, and we’re on that story in just a moment, but it was big power, big wealth. It was big address, big Manhattan, and now, they’re looking at selling the property. But the point that Wade Clark Roof, that sociologist at the University of California, was making 30 plus years ago is that mainline Protestantism in general and the Episcopal Church in particular, in this case, the Episcopal Church is leading this trajectory, and so the church had millions of members, something between four and five members at least within this time period, but then it has fallen to where it’s now somewhere around, say, one and a half million. And then, you also look at the demographics, and we’re talking about a rapidly aging population. So it’s one thing if you have 1.5 million 30 somethings, it’s another thing if you have 1.5 million 70 somethings.

When you say Episcopal church, and you say the United States and you’re speaking in just, say, the city of New York, you just think of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, think of Trinity Church. They’re so close to Wall Street. You can think of just all of those parish churches. You could think about St. Thomas Church and others, just massive, massive statements of cultural power, cultural influence, and unbelievable wealth. I mean, you look at many of these churches, and they look just like they were picked up in some kind of Gothic picture from England and brought over. And that’s because the Episcopal Church became historically the main representation of the Anglican tradition in the United States. Remember that it was the American Revolution that was, in so many ways, the transformation. This had been the Church of England back when you had the presence of the Church of England as the Church of England in the American colonies and, in particular, in a city like New York, in a state like New York.

There was a moment when, if you’re looking at Manhattan, it would have been more Dutch Reformed because of the fact that it was, at one point, a colony of the Netherlands. But once it got into British hands, the Anglicans moved in quickly. This became a huge problem, and of course, it became a problem at Columbia University, which had been King’s College, just to say you have to rename things if you’re going to start a revolutionary war. And one of the big questions is how in the world the Anglicans, in what would become the United States, could continue separate from the Church of England. There were huge succession questions, huge ordination questions, huge Episcopal questions having to do with the bishops. There were huge questions about order, but all of that had to be worked out in the aftermath of the American Revolution, and thus, the Episcopal Church became the main American and, in so many ways, for a long time, the exclusive American representation of Anglicanism in the United States.

And it was, in many ways, the most Anglophilic, the most British-like, the most intentionally sort of like being in England experience for many Americans. And when we talk about the elites of American culture, we are talking about big money. We’re talking about big culture. We’re talking about the Oval Office. We’re talking about how many presidents were Episcopalians. And so, all right, out of the emergency situation represented by the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church emerged, and it dominated so much of culture through America’s history. The Washington Post summarized it this way, “Half of America’s founders were Episcopalians, the American counterpoint to the Church of England. More United States presidents had been Episcopalian than any other faith group, and until recent decades, the denomination was shorthand of creme de la creme of American society.” The theological liberalism that began to show up within Episcopal circles, it really became very apparent, and it followed developments on both sides of the Atlantic, but in terms of the big institutions, the institutions looked culturally rather conservative, but they became theologically very liberal.

And so, I think there were a lot of Episcopalians that just didn’t know. They didn’t recognize at first all that was going on. The Episcopal Church began to ordain women as priests in the 1970s. They consecrated their first woman bishop in 1989. They consecrated, this was huge, this was the big eye-opener for an awful lot of Episcopalians and others. They consecrated an openly homosexual man, the Reverend Gene Robinson, as the Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. So just think about this. 1970s, they began ordaining women. In 1989, a woman bishop. 2003, an active homosexual bishop in a gay relationship as the bishop of New Hampshire. This is where this caused convulsions throughout the Anglican communion. It led to the great polarization that we see. We also see that this led to the development of Anglican groups associated with other Anglican bodies here in the United States. That’s one of the reasons why the Episcopal Church US has been headed even further and further to the left.

Predictably, the roles have been tumbling, and according to most major newspapers, you’re now looking at, again, something like 1.5 million on the roles today. But when you look to the future, it’s just a big story. So I just want us to look at this, recognize theology has consequences. This is, in cultural terms, a very big story and just as a theological parable, it’s a wake-up call for conservatives. There’s other stuff going on, as other denominations is likely to be some upcoming meetings in which it’s going to be very interesting to see how different groups within the Episcopal circles begin to reflect on this. And for one thing, just think of all the interesting questions that are going to come up about alternative plans and uses of the money that might come from selling this very valuable property.

All right, so there’s another big denominational story we need to talk about, and this one is not in the Episcopal Church. This has to do with the Presbyterian Church (USA). And so, the headline from the Associated Press in an article by Kathryn Post is simply this. Here’s the headline: “As Polyamory Fains Visibility, Monogamy Faces a Vote in the Presbyterian Church USA.” Okay, so let’s just remind ourselves of something that’s vitally important. When you look at Presbyterianism, we need to keep our initials very straight. There is a very large, very faithful, conservative, evangelical Presbyterian group known as the Presbyterian Church in America, and it happens to be meeting right here in Louisville, Kentucky in its general assembly right now. But the Presbyterian Church (USA) is the union of two more liberal Presbyterian denominations. These are the old liberal mainline Presbyterian denominations that became, a generation ago, just one united denomination, and they’ve been on the far left and moving further left, LGBTQ. You just name it, The PCUSA has been marching to the left. 

But here’s a headline that might surprise even many people who knew that already because the second word in the headline is polyamory. So that means multiple loves, and that is supposed to go in reference to both males and females and I guess any mixture thereof when you have more than a husband and a wife, or for that matter now, even in homosexual relationships, you have more than two. Even in the view of the PCUSA, you now have the possibility of polyamory. Kathryn Post reports it this way. It was run by the Associated Press News, also Religion News Service, “A proposal that would require ordained clergy to be monogamous is on the docket of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s General Assembly this summer.”

All right, so every word of that turns out to be important. A proposal that would require ordained clergy, so we’re not talking about everybody here, just ordained clergy, to be monogamous. Now, you’ll notice that monogamous is used here just flatly, and that is because the Presbyterian Church (USA) already has the approval of openly gay LGBTQ clergy, and thus of LGBTQ couples. And so, the issue here is just monogamy. In other words, it’s math, two and only two. All right, we’re talking about mass theological, and biblical confusion here, but you know, we’ve got to ask a fundamental question, such as where does this come from? Well, you have the Reverend Claudia Aguilar Rubalcava who says, “I think it’s the next big conversation that most mainline denominations will have.” And she’s identified as the director of engagement for the LGBTQ affirming nonprofit More Light Presbyterians.

All right, so the board and staff of the group known as More Light Presbyterians released a statement last month that says about this proposal on monogamy. They’re against it. So they are against any affirmation or restriction of monogamy, the number two, and they go on and say, “It centers a single model of relationship as the only faithful expression of Christian life, ignoring both the breadth of biblical witness and the lived realities of many faithful people.” Scripture says the statement, “speaks richly about covenant, mutuality, justice, and love, but does not prescribe one uniform relational structure against all context.” Of course, let’s just hold on a minute, except, of course, for the very clear statement of Jesus.

Let me just remind you, and I guess here, I need to remind the PCUSA of, yes, the Gospel of Matthew, the very first Gospel in the New Testament, Matthew 19 when the Pharisees confront Jesus, and Jesus answers their question about divorce by saying, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they’re no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” So let’s just say that is incredibly clarifying, and we’re not talking about something that’s in any way obtuse or hard to understand. Jesus here is saying it is the Father’s intention from the beginning. It’s revealed in creation order that a man and a woman should come together solitarily. They’re to come together, just one man, one woman. They’re to come together in a monogamous union of marriage. This is God’s intention from the beginning.

So as a matter of fact, going all the way back to, say, 2011, the PCUSA removed language in the denomination’s Book of Order that required ministers to live in “fidelity with a covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity and singleness” and instead, they took out the reference to man and woman, and so the current Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the liberal Presbyterian group as the Washington Post says, “currently defines marriage as a unique commitment between two people, traditionally a man and a woman, to love and support each other for the rest of their lives,” so just traditionally a man and a woman. What an interesting little historical note.

All right, so there has to be a story behind this, right? There has to be a story behind this, and at least from Presbyterian friends, I can tell you, and that’s conservative Presbyterian friends, I can tell you what I think the story is. And the story is that there are those in the Presbyterian Church (USA) who do not want to see the church allow polygamy, and they want to force a discussion and some kind of clarification now. And you know, this is a problem in liberal Protestantism, mainline Protestantism as it was known, and the fact is that almost all of these efforts come too late. They come too late because the door is wide open. The bull’s already left the barn. The cat’s already out of the bag. That’s just what is going to happen. I have to say it’s going to be very interesting to watch and see what happens.

Again, you have even people on the left who are saying, “This is a trap. This is a trap.” However, they’re trapped by their own words because it was the LGBTQ affinity organization that came out and said, we’re absolutely against this. We’re absolutely against anything that would oppose polyamory, polygamy. You name it, all good. Multiple lovers? Yes. And here’s the thing. This is the big point in terms of the Christian worldview. Once you decide that marriage can mean anything other than what the Bible says marriage is, then here’s the big lesson, marriage will become virtually everything or anything other than what the Bible says it is because once you say that definition in Scripture, that definition set down in creation order doesn’t matter, well, if you say it doesn’t matter, guess what? It doesn’t matter. Of course, there are complications such as the fact that babies require, let’s just say, a cell from both a mother and a father.

And so, there are some very resolute biological issues, and it also tells you why some of the people who are arguing for this kind of moral revolution, are also calling for a revolution in terms of reproductive technology so they can get around that little constraining necessity of a male cell and a female cell. There are those who are getting ready to celebrate the fact that you can now say that a baby has two mothers, and you can mean it in a whole new way or two fathers or for that matter, who knows, any permutation thereof. So that’s a big story, and frankly, it’s hard to imagine a bigger story, especially for Christians looking at the news. We’ll be tracking this because in both of these denominational contexts, there will be decisions coming in. There will be a further unfolding of events.

But speaking of the unfolding of events, I want to turn to a big issue in American history that also comes with worldview consequences, and that was the death just in the last several days of Alan Greenspan, who had served longer than anyone else as the chairman of the Federal Reserve and had really been a very important figure in American economics and American politics through four presidential administrations. In so many ways, Alan Greenspan became the Federal Reserve, and it’s also interesting because the new head of the Federal Reserve who has just taken over is someone who, in many ways, has said he wants to emulate at least some of the legacy of Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan was a fascinating figure. And as I said, he was basically head of the Federal Reserve for four presidents. He was initially appointed by President Ronald Reagan, and he was identified with the conservative economic revolution that took place in the second half of the 20th century.

But as we’re going to see, there were some very interesting, let’s just say, individual particularities when it came to Alan Greenspan. He was married to the NBC News anchor Andrea Mitchell, and they had lived together for a number of years. And by the way, that’s a part of the worldview here. When it comes to Alan Greenspan, he was understood to be a towering figure in American economics, but his total worldview was something that really ought to interest Christians. He was a follower of Ayn Rand who was the creator of a worldview known as objectivism. It was based in radical libertarianism, a radical notion of human freedom. She believed that the very concept of God was a restriction on human liberty, and she basically said human liberty can’t give way to anything.

And so, she said that the idea of God subverts reason and is a constraint upon human libertarian freedom and therefore has to be rejected. She basically considered religious believers to be pathetic, and she basically also held up an absolutely ruthless form, I don’t want to mischaracterize, an absolutely unrestrained form of capitalism as an extension of this understanding of radical libertarianism. There should be very few restrictions on the economy, very little regulative state and all this. And of course, some of these are ideas that overlap with American conservatism, but the point is this is a radical vision, and it’s a theologically driven vision. In this case, the theology would be atheism, but it’s still a theologically driven form.

And by the way, when it came to moral issues, Ayn Rand, who had immigrated from Russia to the United States, and by the way, she was a hero of some people on the right, but the more you looked, her great books, novels, including The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957, I mean, we’re talking about very influential works among some on the American right, but this is where true conservatives are in a very different place than the Randian objectivists. And the point is that when it came to Alan Greenspan, he was not just sort of influenced by Ayn Rand. He was actually pretty much among her devotees, and she actually showed up at at least some public events when Alan Greenspan was operating in a public capacity.

Now, you translate that into Alan Greenspan’s role at the Fed, and by the way, he was chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. So that included President Ronald Reagan, President George H. W. Bush, President Bill Clinton, and President George W. Bush. Just think about all those years. We now think of Fed chairman serving a much shorter time, but Alan Greenspan dominated the American economic scene that long. He was credited for a very long time with basically a position against regulation, increased liberty in the market, a lack of government restraints. He was very, very careful in that he allowed things to go on in terms of the expansion of the economy, even at the risk of inflation at certain times, because he felt that what you had were natural impulses that were being filled out in entrepreneurial investment.

And so, when you look at Alan Greenspan, you look at someone who had a vast impact. After the 2008 recession, he was blamed at least in part. Now, he had been out of that role for two years before that, but he was blamed basically for a position against financial regulation that at least some people said might have mitigated the effect of the 2008 recession. But the point is there have been very few people who have had the kind of influence and power that Alan Greenspan had over American economics over a period of four presidential administrations. That’s just massive. It’s also interesting that when Alan Greenspan spoke, he began to speak in ways that were very technical and confusing, and eventually, the American political class, and the journalistic class caught on to the fact that he really didn’t expect to be well understood at all. In other words, he became very adept at using a lot of words to say nothing because he didn’t want to make headlines. He really didn’t want to affect the economy with what he said.

Now, there was an exception to that when he did use a phrase known as irrational exuberance, and he meant of that that there were people who were coming into the market with money with expectations that were too high, and that led the next day to a correction in terms of lowering of values on the stock market. And so, Alan Greenspan had pretty much decided he’s not going to make a comment like that again. He went on to make comments, but no one could really figure out exactly what he was saying, which evidently was his strategy. In terms of his own legacy, he said after he had left the office, he said, “I was praised for things I didn’t do,” and he said, “I’m now being blamed for things I didn’t do,” And that from a report in the Wall Street Journal. And the journal then went on to say, “Yet with the benefit of hindsight, Greenspan’s legacy is clear. It wasn’t market acumen or a grasp of economic theory, but how he combined both with a temperament for navigating relentless political pressure.”

And so, one of the reasons that the federal government established the Federal Reserve System was to try to insulate all of this in politics. But as we’ve seen, let’s just say, just think of the last several months and weeks of American presidential politics, this has not insulated American economics from political influence. I can understand that was at least the intention on the part of some, but you know, you’re looking at a clash of economic worldviews here too, and this is where the Keynesians who had been very much in influence throughout most of the second half of the 20th century, they gave way to more free market economics in terms of more recent chairman of the Fed. Right now, we’re also looking at a recalibration of all these things under President Trump.

And of course, we have Kevin Warsh who’s just taken over as the head of the Federal Reserve, and you know one of the interesting things that was said after his first press conference, they said he reminds us of Alan Greenspan, not because of the clarity of what he said, because we’re not sure exactly what he said and what it means. That appears to be, like Greenspan, something of a strategy. And as a matter of fact, the new chairman, Kevin Warsh, has instructed those who are in authority and who work for the Federal Reserve that they are not to speak to the press in order to make too many comments that would confuse Americans about what the Fed is up to. Make the words few and the achievements many appears to be the general strategy here.

But again, the reminder about Alan Greenspan who died, by the way, at age 100, how was that? It’s a reminder to us that worldview really matters. It’s also a reminder to Christians that when you look at economic issues, there’s virtually always a worldview behind them, and that becomes very clear when you look at the history of economics as a discipline. And now, we’re looking at a clash of worldviews in terms of modern economics, and a lot of the issues are coming to the fore right now. Alan Greenspan would understand, but he died just a matter of days ago at age 100.