I asked the question, "What does Forrester have, that the others didn't?" Here's what I suggest is one answer.
I believe what Forrester has that the others didn’t, is an activated community connected by technology that allows it to disseminate large amounts of information, very quickly, very accurately, and to exactly the right people.
Within just a couple of weeks of his election - and months before the consent process was to end - bishops and standing committees all over the country received stacks of information about Forrester - some of it opinion, to be sure, but most of it, I’m guessing, was just copies of his Trinity Sunday sermon, copies of his 2008 Easter service, copies of the service in which he replaced the New testament reading with a reading from the Qur’an, copies of the diocesan newsletters and such in which he outlined his shaky Christology, view of sin and salvation (in other words, the core doctrines of Christianity itself), and probably that photo of "Genpo" standing in his Buddhist garb next to his mentor.
Forrester, in his mountains of written testimony, wrote his own indictment. The web, this site and others, and engaged clerics and lay people carried this information through the right channels and to the right destinations.
But Spong also had piles of evidence that he was a raving heretic - every bit as heretical as Forrester - but in the 70’s there wasn’t the means to collect it and distribute it accurately, quickly, and to the right people. The ability to do that changes the rules of the game by which bishops have to play in granting or withholding consent: In the 70’s, almost all the pressure placed on bishops to consent to Spong’s election was placed by a few energized and engaged liberals in close proximity to them at home, and the rest of the House of Bishops - the very definition of a "collegial" environment. To withhold consent to someone like Spong meant that you’d catch hell from those few people, while not getting any support from the masses back home, because the masses back home didn’t know who Spong was and what he believed. To grant consent to someone like Spong meant that the masses back home would be still be silent, but you’d get pats on the back from a few energized and engaged liberals at home, as well as your colleagues in the House of Bishops.
I’m not attributing the failure of the HoB to reject Spong, and what will perhaps be its success in rejecting Forrester, entirely to technology, but I do think it has helped decisively tip the balance.
Today, if you're a TEC bishop, granting consent to someone like Forrester means that a whole lot more people back home are going to be asking a lot of difficult questions of you. For some, those questions will be accompanied by implied or overt statements about your suitability for office, and about their willingness to continue contributing their money. Now, all of sudden the pats on the backs of a few liberals in your clergy order and tiny activist groups isn’t so compelling, compared to the consternation of a lot more “rank and file” types back home in the pews.
This is certainly not to say that everyone who needs to be engaged is engaged; far from it. We have a long way to go. But what has happened here with Kevin Forrester did not happen with, for example, Gene Robinson. Robinson was a complete unknown to all but the most deeply engaged Episcopalians during his consents period; Forrester and what he believes, on the other hand, I think it can be safely said is known to a significantly larger number of people, most of whom were not engaged in this debate in 2003. What’s more, those people came to know about him through the same medium that we’ve used to transmit information to the people who make the decisions about whether or not he will be seated in the HoB. They came to this medium because Robinson’s election awakened them, energized them, and prompted them to seek out whatever information they could get, as quickly as they could get it, and this medium was where they found it.
What I find interesting is that if you think of the blogs as Node One, the folks in the pews as Node Two, and bishops and standing committees as Node Three, we’ve spent the past several years establishing communications between nodes One and Two - where there’s plenty of fellowship and commiserating. Now, we're beginning to establish communications between nodes Two and Three, where noticeably different things happen.
Nodes One and Two can ping-pong information back and forth all we want - and that’s what we did, with Oakwyse, with Ann Holmes Redding, now with Kevin Forrester - but until information can flow between nodes Two and Three, little gets done in the way of effecting change in the church’s official bodies and actions.
I think it’s accurate to say that, had Kevin Forrester been elected in the 70’s, he would have easily sailed through and been seated in the House of Bishops, from which, barring any major scandal or health problems, he would be happily retired and in his eighties by now. What would the parishioner in Tennessee or Texas or South Carolina have known about Forrester then? Probably nothing more than “There’s a fellow who’s seeking consent to his election, and he’s somehow involved in Buddhism.” And what would that parishioner have been told by his bishop or rector? Probably “Oh, he just uses a few meditation techniques to enhance his Christian prayer.” Or maybe there would have been relayed to the concerned parishioner some of the “explanation” Forrester attempted a couple of weeks ago. The parishioner would have been hard-pressed to counter that explanation, and to continue exerting any pressure on his bishop or standing committee without any additional, detailed information.
But look at what happened in 2009: Instead of rumor and vague, unsubstantiated reports, there in the parishioner’s hands - and as a result, in the bishops’ and standing committees’ hands - was a stack of documents, displaying Forrester’s naked syncretism in all its incoherent weirdness. I don’t mean to take away from any bishop’s independent analysis and decision to withhold consent - certainly some of them would have rejected Forrester without the efforts outlined here - but I think the community that has grown up around the Anglican blogs, the amount and accuracy of information it can collect, the speed with which it can collect it, and the way it can disseminate it in a highly-targeted way, made the difference.
Now - just imagine what we could do if we really got organized.
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Comments:
) in 1974 to pick up any warning signs about him; I wasn’t really aware of him until he came out with Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, which I found to be a profoundly stupid book lacking in anything Anglican. My abbreviated reading of Tillich put me in the same boat as Lewis and Mascall responding to Robinson: I didn’t accept the premise that there was something wrong with the traditional rhetorical figures of Christianity, so I was not motivated to accept Tillich’s “improvements”. I found the radical feminists much more threatening, since for the beginning they wanted to change the liturgy to prevent “bad” gender thoughts. Now, by 1982 Urban Holmes was moved to specifically mention Tillich as someone whose theology was incompatible with Anglicanism, but I sense perhaps that the level of antipathy had risen by then.
I don’t mean to be confrontational about this, but what exactly was the evidence against Spong in 1978-79? I haven’t read This Hebrew Lord or Spong’s other early books, but I do not get the impression that any of them caused any great controversy when they were published. It is also perhaps possible that reading them retrospectively would cast them in a more negative light than they were read at the time.
I think Forrester is to some degree suffering from fallout from the Redding and Melnyk cases, but it may also be the case that the kind of tampering he has done with the liturgy might have been even more unacceptable thirty years ago. It’s hard to say: remember that the BCP itself was just getting its second pass through GC in 1979. My opinion only, of course.