Our predictions about Episcopal Journal and Cafe have come to pass: the combined publication has announced that it is closing due to financial constraints. Today is its final day of publication.
Following the death of Ann Fontaine, Episcopal Cafe chose new editors. Those editors did not engage with readers, ignored submissions, and ousted at least one contributor because he was not sufficiently politically correct.
In addition, moderation was mercurial and irrational. And unfortunately, editor Amy Haynie suppressed anything critical of the church, leading to the Cafe becoming nothing more than an alternative to Episcopal News Service. In short, while it claimed to be inclusive, that notion only applied to those who never made waves. Thus, Ann Fontaine, an advocate for the marginalized and disenfranchised and a fierce friend, would have herself been unwelcome.
Comments and interaction plummeted, and the Cafe merged with Episcopal Journal.
The merger did little to slow the decline, and the combined publication today announced it is suspending publication.
While we lament the passing of the publications and the lively interaction of the old days, we believe the failure to engage with stakeholders ultimately killed the publication.
Also worth noting is that this publication got its start with Ann Fontaine. Once she realized that the Episcopal Church was not interested in addressing the abuse Anglican Watch editor Eric Bonetti and his family were experiencing — and even Michael Curry would ignore the situation — she urged Bonetti to take to social media.
This site, initially nothing more than an online repository for documentation, quickly expanded. Today, the site gets more than 400,000 visits a year, and readership is rapidly growing.
And Ann’s faith was strong enough to welcome and embrace criticism of the church.
The debacle of the publications’ closure is a lesson for the larger church: don’t forget to engage. Built and they will come is not guaranteed.
And don’t forget the positive impact even a single person, like Ann Fontaine, can bring to the church.
Nor should we forget that true inclusion extends to those with views different than ours, even when that includes criticism of the church and its conduct.
We’re also saddened that the demise of the publication shutters a progressive voice in the church.
We also welcome anyone from the publications who would like to be part of things at Anglican Watch. Yes, we ARE a platform for advocacy. But we will sincerely welcome you and treat you with respect.
Disclosure: Anglican Watch editor Eric Bonetti regularly contributed to Episcopal Cafe. He removed his content from the publication due to dissatisfaction with the direction of things under the new editor, the Rev. Amy Haynie.
We lovingly remember Ann Fontaine, a force of nature and friend to all; and the much-loved Episcopal Cafe. May they rest in peace and rise in glory. And may their memories be a blessing to all who knew them.
“I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President…Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land…”
With these words, spoken from the pulpit of the National Cathedral at the post-inauguration prayer service, the Rt. Rev. Marriann Budde asked the President of the United States to be mindful of both the political and the religious truths that lie at the heart of the foundations of republican government laid down after the War for Independence. Spoken with firm conviction and gentle compassion, those words have been characterized by right and left as an act of resistance, an act of defiance or as a simple plea. However, those words are much more profound than any of these.
As Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC, Bishop Budde is a leader in what came closest to being the nation’s church. She follows many before her in bearing the grave responsibility to speak from within and to the nation’s political and religious establishment and remind those elected to offices of highest responsibility of their duty to embody the values upon which the United States was founded. Far from crossing the line separating church and state Bishop Budde articulated that boundary and its necessity as one of the nation’s foundational values.
The Christian nationalists surrounding Mr. Trump are dedicated to tearing down the boundary that separates church and state. They assert, correctly, that most of the founders were men of faith and that the values they derived from their faith influenced their work in establishing United States and its Constitution. However, reaching far beyond that they craft a false vision of the founders as priestly theocrats and the Constitutional Convention as something akin to God handing Moses the ten commandments. If that were true, and it is not, the Constitution would be replete with scripture, continuous invocations of God’s will, and would provide for the establishment of a National Church as a fourth branch of government. Men of faith though the founders were they were not Christian nationalists—they were, many of them, Episcopalians. These men of faith, having broken away from England, its King, and its Church, chose loyalty to their newly founded country over religiously enforced political power and would brook no return to government beholden to lords of a state church or the whims of a king ruling by divine right.
As the Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Washington DC, Rev. Budde inherits the responsibility from our Episcopalian founders to reassert their faith and those values. They were men of faith who would kneel to nobody and would have a free and self-governing people kneel to no one and most certainly not to one anointed by Christian nationalists to “divinely” sanctioned autocracy. Standing in the pulpit of the National Cathedral she understands that she has one foot in the mainstream of the political world established by those Episcopalian forebears among the nation’s founders and has the other in the world of faith in Christ who calls the faithful to speak truth to power, protect the powerless, and remind elected leaders of the true foundational values of this country.
Tracing this arc of our nation’s history, Dr. Thomas B. Pepinsky, Professor of Government and Public Policy, at Cornell recently wrote:
“It is that understanding of the responsibility of the faithful towards the American people—a nation just borne then, and being remade still now—that Bishop Budde instructed President Trump and Vice President Vance to uphold. This is the faith tradition that welcomes Catholics, Baptists, Jews, Muslims, atheists, and all others into the nation.” (https://tompepinsky.com)
It is this tradition of separation of Church and State and these values that allow the people of this land to live as the free and self-governing people that those men of faith, those Episcopalian founders, intended us to be.
Rev. M. Paul Garrett is a retired Episcopal Pastor, School Chaplin, and Social Worker living in Bayfield, Colorado.