Episcopal boredom
Hans Zeiger
Posted: June 15, 2006

Let me see if I can capture the mood at the 75th General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Columbus, Ohio.

The main thing about it is the generation. It is a gathering, chiefly, of baby boomers on the older end of their cohort. If they preceded the boom, they at least participated in the '60s. I half expected the long hair and dope to flow with the crowds that came yesterday to hear the debates about homosexuality and the consequently precarious relations of the Episcopal Church to the global Anglican Communion. But these are bald and gray heads, most of them.

It is not exactly the grayness and baldness of Rotary and Kiwanis. It has some resemblance to a university faculty lounge, or a mainstream pressroom, or a bureaucratic social service agency conference. It is at once endowed with the sanity of political correctness and the boredom of disappointed age. One committee report to the convention declares, "The Episcopal Church has the lowest birth rate and highest mean age of any mainline denomination." the rest