The Puritan Anglicans of Sydney.(Religion)

ON MONDAY March 13 last year, Commonwealth Day was celebrated for the first time outside the UK in Sydney's glorious Gothic Revival St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral in the presence of the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Queen Elizabeth II. Superficially the service showcased modern Anglicanism as an inclusive branch of the Christian family proud of its own roots, but open to the polyglot religious traditions of the Commonwealth--as the cathedral played host Rajasthani dancers, Hindu priests, Muslim sheikhs, Buddhist monks, Catholic bishops, Jewish rabbis and more.

Nonetheless, even with all the colour and movement, a sharp observer like the Queen must have noted some surprising departures from Anglican tradition, not least the strange inconsistency in vesture between the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, in choir robes (but, in the Sydney tradition, minus a pectoral cross) as opposed to his brother, the Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen, who was dressed in a business suit and academic gown, looking more like a maths master at the King's School than an Anglican prelate.

The really amazing thing about this service was that it was held at all. Pronouncements in recent years from the Sydney diocese's ruling group have lambasted just the sort of "syncretism" and "liberalism" epitomised by this multi-faith exercise. Perhaps not surprisingly then, none of the service's religious or cultural diversity was so much as mentioned in the April 2006 edition of Southern Cross, the Sydney diocese's newspaper, from which readers could have got the distinct impression that the Queen had attended a revival meeting in St Andrew's Cathedral where "Archbishop Peter Jensen proclaimed the Gospel to a worldwide audience".

These equivocations point to the struggle for identity taking place within the Sydney Anglican diocese and its growing insularity from the larger Anglican communion. It is common knowledge that the Sydney diocese has for almost all of its history been a bastion of the "low church" Protestant version of Anglicanism, but since 2001 an ultra-radical clique led by the brothers Jensen has seized control of the diocese's organisational structures with the declared aim of stressing its exclusivity and particularity to the extent that "Sydney Anglicanism" is now considered by many to be on the verge of leaving the Anglican communion and setting itself up as a new Christian denomination.

Peter and Phillip Jensen came to power as the spokesmen for the Sydney diocese's Calvinist ideologues. This faction has its centre of gravity in Moore Theological College (half seminary, half party training school) and the Anglican Church League (a tightly disciplined cell of true believers that uses quasi-Leninist tactics to dominate the diocese's synod and its smaller standing committee). The prime aim of this group is to preserve at all costs the Reformed Protestant character of the Sydney diocese and to vigilantly seek out and correct deviationism small or large. Temporising archbishops (like the poor benighted Englishman Hugh Gough, Archbishop from 1959 until he was forced out in 1966) are as fair game for the purists as any dithering rector.

These developments have caused alarm to many, even on the old Evangelical/Low Church side of Anglicanism, who believe that a blank and intolerant Calvinism dead to everything not in its direct purview has become the diocesan norm, and that prayerful, reflective and tolerant strands of the broad Anglican inheritance are being ignored when they are not being actively disparaged. Dr Keith Mascord, a former Moore College staff member and long thought to be an insider, recently wrote an open letter to Sydney clergy and lay people warning that the diocese was becoming "a cult" ruled by "a culture of fear" and "censorship of thought" ("Diocese Like a Cult: Minister", SMH, December 10, 2006).

In an article, "Anglicanism Sydney Style" in the March/April 2004 edition of the English magazine Theology, the Reverend Humphrey Southern of the Diocese of Salisbury reflected on the Sydney diocese after a visit during which he met many of its key operatives. He noted that the "Puritanism" he found here was: