Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity [Hardcover]

William Murchison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Using the Episcopal Church as a window onto the general decline of the Protestant mainline, William Murchison has here given us a graceful and absorbing account of a great tragedy: the story of a grand and historically rooted church that sold its birthright for a pot of message. For any reader who wishes to understand, not only what the Episcopal Church has become, but also what it once was, and why that loss matters so greatly to us all, this is the book to read. --Wilfred M. McClay, Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center

About the Author

WILLIAM MURCHISON is a nationally syndicated columnist and a retired senior columnist for the Dallas Morning News. He recently served as a Radford Visiting Professor of Journalism at Baylor University. He contributes regularly to National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and First Things.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (April 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594032300
• ISBN-13: 978-1594032301
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,031,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Accounting of the Decline a Once-Influential Denomination, May 28, 2009

By 

Classic Music Lover (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Hardcover)

To Anglicans/Episcopalians who have lived through the denomination's steady slide into irrelevance over the past 35 years, they'll find very little information that's new or revelatory in this slender volume. But it's the best book I've come across yet that delivers a succinct (and compelling) exposition of the key trends and events that have caused a once highly influential church denomination to atrophy into near oblivion on the religious and social scene -- save for the occasional eyebrow-raising news headline about consecrating an openly gay bishop or embarking on lawsuit witch hunts against individual dioceses or parish vestries that have sought to disassociate themselves from a national church that has become a major source of embarrassment.

Non-Episcopalian readers will find in this book a cautionary tale of what can happen when a Christian denomination puts man ahead of God. "Christianity-lite" may do wonders for promoting a guilt-free, anything-goes lifestyle, but it'll put your denomination out of business within the span of two or three generations.

Of course, with the Episcopalian crowd, it's always been more about "money, prestige and power" than spirituality. And therein lies the huge irony: Despite all of their efforts to remain popular and relevant in today's world, the Episcopal Church has actually ended up with less money, less prestige and less power rather than more, as this book chronicles quite clearly.

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Primer on the Current Irrelevance of the Mainlines, May 27, 2009

By 

Andrew Freborg (Stow, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Hardcover)

This compact volume provides a concise, tight summary of the forces that have worked over that last 50 years to bring mainline protestantism, the the Episcopal Church in particular, to a state where they are little more than social justice organizations. A good treatsie, but about 30 years to late to do much good.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Episcopalian Church - what went wrong?, June 10, 2011

By 

J. Smith (South Africa) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Hardcover)

MORTAL FOLLIES

This is an informed and serious book that seeks to answer the question: what went wrong in the Episcopalian Church?

Murchison covers the history of the Episcopal Church over the past half a century, beginning with the 1950s until the year 2003 which, as everyone knows, saw the consecration of the first openly homosexual bishop, Gene Robertson.

However, Murchison does not make the mistake of focussing solely on what has become known as the "gay issue". Instead, he takes the EC to task for the following:

(1) Its enthusiasm for, rather than critique of, prevailing secular culture.
(2) Its constant revision of a time-honoured and much-loved liturgy in favour of what the leaders of the EC, in the 1970s, regarded as contemporary, even "hip" forms of expression.
(3) Its gradual transformation into an organisation committed primarily to social activism and its quiet, but persistent, abandonment of Christian metaphysics ("The oddness of Mrs Jefferts Schori's catalogue consists in the unspoken implication that the Episcopal Church is the Peace Corps in ecclesiastical vestments" - page 197.)
(4) The fact that, from the 1950s onwards, at least some of its opinion-makers were, in fact, not really Christians at all. Here Murchison cites the Rev Joseph Fletcher, whose book Situation Ethics, was highly influential throughout the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Fletcher later admitted that he had never been a "religious man and never pretended to be".
(5) The fact that some of its leaders, while espousing "inclusivism", have been quite prepared to bully and harass both traditionalists and the wisely cautious.

This book should be read by anyone who takes the claims of the Christian religion seriously, particularly if he or she is a member of a church ruled by a hierarchy whose members are only accountable to each other.

Highly recommended.

Jane Smith (Pretoria, South Africa)