Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity

by William Murchison

It's not that the dignified and rarefied old Episcopal Church quit believing in God. It's that the God you increasingly hear spoken of in Episcopal circles is infinitely tolerant and given to sudden changes of mind--not quite the divinity you thought you were reading about in the scriptures. Episcopalians of the twenty-first century, like their counterparts in other churches of the so-called American mainline--such as Methodists and Presbyterians--seem to prefer a God that the culture would be proud of, as against a culture that God would be proud of. While they work to rebrand and reshelve orthodox Christianity for the modern market, exponents of the new thinking are busy reducing mainstream Christian witness to a shadow of its former self. Mortal Follies is the story of the Episcopal Church's mad dash to catch up with a secular culture fond of self-expression and blissfully relaxed as to norms and truths. An Episcopal layman, William Murchison details how leaders of his church, starting in the late 1960s, looked over the culture of liberation, liked what they saw, and went skipping along with the shifting cultural mood--especially when the culture demanded that the church account for its sins of "heterosexism" and "racism." Episcopalians have blended so deeply into the cultural woodwork that it's hard sometimes to remember that it all began as a divine calling to the normative and the eternal.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mortal Follies is an account of the Decline of the Episcopal Church, from being one of the Major Mainline Protestant Churches in America to its current state of disorder threatening to fracture itself along previously downplayed fault lines. The beauty of the story of the Episcopal Church's decline, is that it offers a window in to Mainline Protestant Churches in general, and even American Christianity as a whole.



Far from accusing the state of disrepair and the current "Culture Wars" as being the fault of "those damn hippies" as some would say, Murchison sees that even during the Glory Days of the 1950s that much uncertainty and anxiety existed underneath, and that the roots of social fragmentation already were present.



As in all cases of social decay, for whatever reason people no longer were being rooted in traditional society and the people who could formulate responses to the contradictions of society such as institutionalized racism either chose not to do so, or provided inadequate answers to the need for change. As a result, radicals were capable of formulating "new" answers and through positioning themselves in places of authority were capable of bringing great changes, some necessary, but many weren't and as a result important things (e.g traditional morality) were cast aside.



While this only scratches the surface of a very large and complex issue, the book does well to highlight how the Episcopal Church went from being a body that shaped peoples' souls for their salvation and betterment of society, to being shaped by society to placate their desires of "progress" and "equality", with the occasional reference to God if that doesn't happen to offend anybody.