First Things: The First Openly Muslim Priest
By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
July 19, 2007

The day before the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops voted to confirm the church’s first openly gay bishop in the late summer of 2003, conservative humor website ScrappleFace satirized the move with a piece entitled “Episcopal Church Appoints First Openly-Muslim Bishop.” It was a fine example of reductio ad absurdum humor: If the Episcopal Church sacrificed a long-held moral doctrine, would it next have a bishop of another faith? The point worked as humor, but would not work as argument precisely because the possibility seemed absurd. Yet less than four years later, the Episcopal Church has been faced (albeit briefly) with its first openly Muslim priest.

The Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, who was ordained in 1984 and has been affiliated with St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle for the past six years, became Muslim in early 2006. Redding first became intrigued by Islam in the fall of 2005, when a local Muslim leader spoke at her cathedral. Her interest deepened after an interfaith class the following spring. Redding told the Seattle Times that her mother died around that time, and she could not cope with that death except by “total surrender to God.” In March 2006 she recited the shahada, the declaration of faith that makes one a Muslim.

When Redding went public with her conversion fifteen months later, in June 2007, she felt that she did not need to relinquish her position at St. Mark’s. “I am both Muslim and Christian,” Redding said. “I’m 100 percent both.” the rest