A CHURCH ASUNDER.(Gene Robinson)

In the late summer of 1965, a high-school valedictorian named Gene Robinson anxiously set off from Lexington, Kentucky, for college. He was the first in his family to come so far, and the school he'd chosen, the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, was not an obvious fit. Sewanee, as the school is known, was conceived, by an Episcopal bishop turned Confederate general, as an elite institution of learning for the sons of the landed class. A century later, when Gene Robinson arrived on campus, Sewanee remained an insular place, a mountaintop sanctuary known for its academic rigor, its cultivated airs, and a full measure of that particular Southern regard for tradition. A Sewanee man, dressed always in jacket and tie, was a gentleman of breeding, who had likely attended a preparatory school. Gene Robinson had grown up on a dirt farm, the son of tobacco sharecroppers, and had gone to Sewanee on a scholarship after graduating from public school.

Sewanee was owned and operated by the Southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church, and the school, which included a seminary, had a distinctly Anglican character. Every student was required to attend services at the university's All Saints' Chapel, as well as morning worship on most Sundays. Robinson, who had grown up in a conservative congregation of the Disciples of Christ, found himself immersed in the Episcopal practice of faith. It was a form of worship that, to an outsider, could seem so wholly foreign as to be impenetrable, with its candles and censers, the processions of robed priests and acolytes, and the recitations of ancient rites that the initiated followed in a Book of Common Prayer. The country church where Robinson's family had worshipped for generations didn't believe in creedal formulas of faith; the Holy Scriptures alone were enough. But Episcopalians ritually enunciated their beliefs at every service, through the utterance of one creed or another.

For Robinson, this saying of creeds intensified a spiritual crisis that had been gathering since high school. He had accepted Jesus Christ in his early teens, submitting, as was the custom in his church, to a full submerging in the baptismal pool following a public profession of faith. By high school, though, he had begun to harbor doubts about some of the particulars of the Christian faith--doubts, he felt, that would not be a welcome subject of inquiry either in his church or in his deeply religious home. At Sewanee, he found himself regularly obliged to proclaim some of the very assertions he questioned. The Nicene Creed, that fourth-century statement of Christian orthodoxy, particularly vexed him:

I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible: , And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God; Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father; By whom all things were made: Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man: And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried: And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures: And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father: And he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; Whose kingdom shall have no end. , And I believe in the Holy Ghost, The Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spake by the Prophets: And I believe in one Catholic and Apostolic Church: I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins: And I look for the Resurrection of the dead: And the Life of the world to come. Amen.

To be expected to repeat these sentiments, Robinson decided, was an offense against conscience. He took his protest to one of the school's chaplains, who listened to him and told him that he saw no problem at all. If joining in the Creed distressed him, why not just speak only those portions of it that didn't offend? The chaplain's counsel disarmed Robinson, but it also revealed to him that although the Anglican faith had cherished creeds, it had no absolute doctrine, a paradox rooted in its beginnings as the Church of England.

Anglicanism's founding event was a sixteenth-century political fix, engineered by Elizabeth I as a means of avoiding the Reformation-era wars tearing at Europe. Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, for reasons of dynastic and connubial ambition, had broken with the Medici Pope Clement VII and declared himself the "Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England." Elizabeth's half sister and predecessor, Bloody Mary, imposed a Roman Catholic restoration upon the kingdom, in the process dispatching some three hundred Protestants to the stake. When Elizabeth ascended to the throne as a Protestant, the realm faced a third religious about-face in a dozen years, and the prospect of civil war was real. Elizabeth's elegant solution allowed her subjects to believe whatever they wished but insisted upon a uniform worship service.

The vehicle for this "middle way," as Anglicanism came to be known, was the Book of Common Prayer, which gracefully blended Roman Catholic liturgy with Protestant principles. The prayer book allowed for the coexistence within one institution of distinctly different interpretations of Christianity, with the unofficial designations of High Church (those parishes inclined toward a more Roman Catholic orientation), Low Church (evangelicals), and Broad Church (those Anglicans tolerant of wide doctrinal interpretations). The Anglican way proved remarkably resilient, absorbing the shocks of the English civil war and the Enlightenment, and ultimately planting itself worldwide in the footsteps of the British Empire. In the United States, the Church of England became the Episcopal Church.