First Things: Charlotte Allen writes:

Back in early July, right after the Episcopal Church USA finished its general convention, declining to “repent”—as requested by the Archbishop of Canterbury—of its confirmation of the openly gay, openly cohabitating V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, I wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times. The gist of my article was that the Episcopalians’ capitulation to secular liberal culture hadn’t simply catapulted their church into severe demographic decline”—a drop of nearly one million members since 1965, and a median number of eighty worshippers per church on any given Sunday—but its literal disintegration.

In the wake of the convention, which also included the election of a female presiding bishop in contravention of Anglican norms and a refusal to reaffirm the bedrock Christian principle that salvation comes from Jesus Christ, seven bishops of Episcopal dioceses announced they would seek oversight elsewhere in the worldwide Anglican Communion rather than from the new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, a gay-union advocate who also prayed to a female Jesus during the conventions. The seven bishops’ decisions were precipitated by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ declaration that the Episcopal Church USA was no longer in full communion with its fellow Anglican churches, whose numbers of members dwarf those of the U.S. church by some seventy-four million. the rest