NO NEW THING UNDER THE SUN

Monday, October 31st, 2011 | Uncategorized

If any of you believe that John Shelby Spong and the rest of the mitered atheists in TEO’s House of Squishops are modern phenomena, Kendall Harmon directs your attention to the story of Bishop William Montgomery Brown:

Some called him the Red Bishop, others the Bad Bishop, or even the Mad Bishop. But no one called Episcopalian William Montgomery Brown a boring bishop.

A Gilded-Age Ohioan educated at Kenyon’s Bexley Hall seminary, Brown cut a broad swath through life, a man of God who morphed into a man of Marx-and Darwin, too. He was the first Episcopalian bishop, and only one so far, to be tried for heresy.

Like so many others, Brown started out perfectly orthodox.

Some of the seminarians were reading Darwin at the time, but not Brown. “How foolish of them, I thought, to read such books!” he would later write in his autobiography, My Heresy. “This book was not a necessary part of our training for the ministry, and why should anybody in training for the ministry read anything that would tend to weaken his faith?”

Brown never got a degree but was ordained anyway since degrees were not required then.  He took an Ohio parish.

After three years of study, Brown left Bexley Hall. He never actually met all of the degree requirements. But a degree wasn’t actually required for the Episcopal priesthood. He was ordained and began his career at Grace Church in Galion, northwest of Gambier. There, he began to rise in ecclesiastical authority. And it would be in Galion that he later gained notoriety for his turn toward radicalism.

Let’s just say that Brown was an über-Episcopalian.

Brown devoted himself to his pastoral duties. He supervised missionary work in Ohio and lectured at Bexley Hall. But he also began to emerge as something of a militant Episcopalian. In 1895, he published The Church for Americans, a tract of nearly 500 pages arguing that every right-thinking American should join the Episcopal Church.

For completely religious reasons, mind you.

After all, he argued, many American governors, senators, and other notables were Episcopalians, among them William H. Vanderbilt, “the richest man the world had ever known.” Moreover, of the fifty-five signers of the Declaration of Independence, thirty-five were Episcopalians.

Which brought Brown to the attention of the national church.

The national church took note. In 1898, three years after the book’s publication, Brown was consecrated bishop-coadjutor for the Arkansas diocese and received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Kenyon.

In order to fit in Arkansas society, Brown went what he probably thought was native.

He tried to shore up his standing-to “mend his political fences,” as Carden put it-by embracing southern attitudes toward race. In a book called The Crucial Race Question, Brown proposed strict segregation for the Episcopal Church: one autonomous but separate church for blacks, another for whites.

“Amalgamation is a ruinous crime,” he wrote. Cain’s murder of Abel, by comparison, was “a crime that was venial compared with that of miscegenation.”

Then Brown came up with an idea to unify Protestantism under the benevolent guidance of guess who.

Seeking to wield influence, drawn to ideas on a grand scale, Brown continued to cobble together visions of Christianity and political philosophy. The Ohio seminarian turned Arkansas racist now developed a scheme for a sort of church egalitarianism.

In a 1910 book, he unveiled a plan for “leveling.” The idea was that members of all Protestant denominations would select their own bishops and all would come together under the umbrella of Episcopalianism. As part of the project, Brown dropped some elements his church held dear, such as apostolic succession and a priestly class.

For the sake of his health, the egomaniac bishop returned to Ohio in 1911 and promptly went full Spong.  Because of SCIENCE!!

In Galion, Brown’s physician, apparently looking for ways to reinvigorate the bishop intellectually, suggested he read Darwin. With time to read and contemplate, Brown began to change his views.

And the change was big. “I no longer believed in a personal God, nor in a six-day creation, nor in a literal heaven and hell,” Brown wrote. No fall of man, nor a redemption through the blood of Christ, either. Creeds, he decided, were symbolical, nothing more.

Others guided him towards socialism, and he began reading Marx, too. “That was another revelation,” Brown wrote. “Darwin was now my Old Testament, Marx my New.”

A number of factors may explain this change. Perhaps Brown’s boyhood as a farmhand planted the seeds of class consciousness. Then there was his temperament. Brown was a man of “monumental hubris and desire for attention,” wrote Carden. “He chose shocking positions to gain notoriety.” In addition, the bishop was influenced by several unorthodox advisers. One was his secretary, a German minister, who introduced him to nontraditional notions of Christianity.

In 1920, Brown summarized his new philosophy in Communism and Christianism, a 247-page book urging readers to “Banish the Gods from the Skies and Capitalists from the Earth.”

Brown wrote that capitalism had failed, that “millions are insufficiently fed, clothed, housed and warmed, and are doomed to a perpetual and exhaustive drudgery which leaves neither leisure nor energy for the cultivation of their soul life.”

He called for “economic levelism,” a spreading out of wealth and new respect for the worker. “Communism is for me the one comprehensive term which is a synonym at once of morality, religion and Christianity,” he wrote.

Amazingly, there was once a time when Episcopal bishops actually had spines.

Church officials pondered their options. Eventually, three bishops, the minimum required, charged Brown with heresy. Eight like-minded bishops gathered in 1924 for a trial in Cleveland. They served as judges and jurors. And they quickly convicted him.

The Old Catholics were okay with Brown, though.

Meanwhile, the deposed bishop surprised his Episcopal detractors by gaining a new religious rank: he was consecrated a bishop of the Old Catholic Church of America, a group which had ties with Episcopalianism. Not wanting to lose his title, Brown had been searching for a church in communion with the Episcopal denomination.

And does this sound familiar?  To the end of his life, Brown attended an Episcopal church even though he no longer believed the Christian religion.

And he regularly made the walk from Brownella Cottage across the street to Grace Church. “He renounced everything about Christianity and yet he was there in church every Sunday,” Clinger said. “He even took communion. They held his funeral at the church.”

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