The new year could be climactic for two aspects of LGBTQ issues, first, the rights of religious and conservative dissenters within liberalized western culture, and second, the ongoing conflicts within church groups.
What should journalists be prepared to cover?
By June, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the 303 Creative case, in which a website designer — based on First Amendment claims — seeks exemption from Colorado’s anti-discrimination law to avoid work on postings that celebrate same-sex weddings (background here). The Court might broadly define what rights various forms of religious traditionalists have in a host of legal conflicts facing e.g. U.S. religious colleges, social-service agencies and individual businesses now that same-sex marriage is legalized.
Inside a specific religion brand, this could be a pivotal year for the global Anglican Communion with its 46 national branches and some 85 million baptized members. A mid-January meeting of bishops in the “mother” Church of England may well decide dioceses can permit same-sex weddings. That historic change would then need approval from clergy and lay delegates at the February 6–9 General Synod.
Such a move would add explosive potential to the April 17-21 meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (“GAFCON”), long vexed by liberal moves in England, the United States and elsewhere in declining First World churches. GAFCON unites the heads of 10 Anglican branches, three of which alone (Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda) encompass half the world’s Anglicans. GAFCON’s chairman, Archbishop Foley Beach (admin@anglicanchurch.net and 724-266-9400), heads a church of conservatives who’ve left the U.S. Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada.
Already, key archbishops have boycotted global Anglican confabs, continuing a slow-motion breakup that began decades ago. Will the maneuvers in England and elsewhere provoke a huge, definitive break from the London-based Anglican Communion by churches in GAFCON and the related Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches?
The United Methodist Church could be on the brink of the biggest U.S. Protestant split since the Civil War. That’s a huge story at the local, regional, national and global levels.
Last month, all five “jurisdictional conferences” in the U.S. vowed to create a church “where LGBTQIA+ people will be protected, affirmed, and empowered” as bishops, clergy, laity and agency staff. That’s a major change in the doctrinal status quo.
Unhappy conservative congregations have untill December 31, 2023, to leave the denomination with approval from the 54 regional conferences under a once-orderly plan scrambled by COVID-19, following rules in this headquarters memo. At least 1,500 congregations are already departing and evangelical activist Mark Tooley estimates a 3,000 to 5,000 total by the end of 2023. Here’s the question journalists need to ask: What percentage of the denomination’s growing congregations have voted to exit?
Reporters will want to closely watch key developments among overseas Methodists who form a slight majority of membership boosted by conservative Africans, and monthly Judicial Council meetings that settle disputes on church law.
Though far smaller denominations, reporters might monitor the Reformed Church in America’s June 8-13 General Synod amid its ongoing schism, and the Christian Reformed Church’s June 9-15 Synod for any dealings on liberal dissent at its Calvin University. [Disclosure: The Guy is an RCA member formerly in the CRC.]
The annual Southern Baptist Convention (June 13-14 in New Orleans (with ancillary meetings June 11-12) always produces news, and particularly so with roiling right-left jockeying and the ongoing struggle to overcome sexual-abuse scandals in America’s largest Protestant denomination.
By New Year’s Eve, 2023, we’ll likely know whether former President Donald Trump faces criminal trials, how much white evangelicals and Catholics want him to be president again, and the chances that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis might become the Republicans’ first Catholic nominee. And there’s an April defamation trial over a sordid sexual harassment charge against Trump.
Pope Francis has summoned bishops to a Synod on Synodality(repeat that five times!) in Rome next October 4-29 with a second assembly in 2024. The gatherings conclude multi-year discussions around the world on Catholic parishioners’ sharing in “Communion, participation and mission.” Germany’s related “Synodal Way” process has provoked open dissent on many significant and ancient church teachings, per this conservative updater.
Russia and Ukraine are the two largest Eastern Orthodox nations, so the former’s blood-soaked campaign to conquer the latter is creating church turmoil within Ukraine, with a clash between the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the historic Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as well as a painful moral crisis at the top of the mighty Russian church that affects all of world Orthodoxy.
Yaroslav Trofimov, The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign correspondent, wrote on December 17 that President Vladimir Putin, a former agent for atheistic Soviet Communists, now hopes to uplift Russia as the global exemplar of traditional morals (especially anti-LGBT) under Orthodox Church guidance. But the vast majority of the world’s Orthodox leaders have condemned Russia’s invasion, even if they have not backed the creation of the new OCU.
In Israel, the unprecedented influence of hard-right religious parties in the incoming coalition government will roil liberals there and many American Jews’ warmth toward the nation. The hed on a New York Times editorial contended that “The Ideal of Democracy in Israel is in Jeopardy.”
Appropriately enough, the Pew Research Center released survey results on December 8 indicating that 39% of U.S. adults say yes when asked “do you believe we are living in the end times?” with 63% among evangelicals and fully 76% of those in historically Black churches.
There’s also apocalyptic secularism. The International Union of Geological Sciences, scanning Earth’s 4.6 billion years, is debating whether to designate the mid-20th Century as the start of the new Anthropocene age, defined by massive ecological change driven by humanity, what the Times summarizes as the “age of nuclear weapons, human-caused climate change, and the proliferation of plastics, garbage and concrete.”
There’s more. What if humanity will soon vanish, as pondered by poet Adam Kirsch in his January book “The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us”? An Atlantic magazine excerpt depicts both “anti-humanist” thinkers, who predict our extinction through destruction of the natural environment, and “transhumanists,” who say we’ll survive and become so superior we’re no longer homo sapiens. Both movements yearn for “worlds in which we have disappeared, and rightfully so.”