Anglican split goes far deeper than gay dispute
Tom Heneghan, Reuters
Published: Friday, February 09, 2007

PARIS -- It’s not all about gays.

The worldwide Anglican Communion is on the brink of schism, with African prelates leading a charge against the U.S.-based Episcopal Church for consecrating a gay bishop. A showdown is shaping up for an Anglican summit next week in Tanzania.

But the split in the 77-million strong Communion runs far deeper than the dispute over Gene Robinson, the gay cleric made bishop in 2003, historian Philip Jenkins thinks.

Liberal Anglicans in rich countries and traditionalists in the Global South read the Bible in such different ways that they could be in quite different churches, he argues in his recent book “The New Faces of Christianity.”

“There is an absolutely fundamental division over the nature of authority,” Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University in the United States, told Reuters by telephone. Widely varying views are the result. the rest