“This church has about 30 more years before it is dead,” stated one young man at a 2016 forum at the Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS) in Alexandria, Virginia, as quoted in the recent book The Seduction of the Episcopal Church.  Therein Anglican author David Virtue, a longtime critical observer of worldwide Anglicanism, reviews the Episcopal Church’s decades-long fall from grace in an exposé of Christian folly in accommodating a secularized, sexualized modernity.  

Virtue tells the depressing, detailed “story of a once proud Christian denomination that stood as a landmark church in a nation that has seen presidents, senators and business leaders pass through its hallowed red doors.”  “Spiritual and ecclesiastical death marks the present and future state of this denomination” today as Episcopal Church membership has cratered from a 1966 peak of 3,647,297, to 1,676,349 in 2018.  Particularly the 2003 consecration of noncelibate homosexual V. Gene Robinson as an Episcopal bishop unleashed an “ecclesiastical tsunami wave” and the “worst single outflow of Episcopalians in modern history,” over 100,000.

In an Episcopal Church “intoxicated with the spirit of the age,” 31 percent of Episcopalians according to the latest statistics are 65 or older while 79 percent do not have a child under 18.  Procreation seems a secondary concern for Episcopalians, 79 and 74 percent of whom, respectively, think abortion should be legal in all or most cases and favor same-sex “marriage.”  Rather than walking any orthodox straight and narrow, 47 percent of Episcopalians say the Bible is not God’s Word and 51 percent of Episcopalians seldom or never read Scripture. 

Biographical portraits of contemporary Episcopal false prophets form the milestones along Virtue’s mapping of the Episcopal road to ruin, such as James Albert Pike, who became Bishop of California in 1958.  Pike was the “Episcopal Church’s first public heretic,” who questioned numerous Christian doctrines like the Trinity and deeply dabbled in the occult in order to contact his son who had committed suicide.  His “personal life was as messy as his later theological ramblings,” for after one divorce and one annulment, a 56-year old Pike married his third wife, age 31.  Meanwhile he had a secret telephone installed in the San Francisco episcopal office for his mistresses.

Rutgers University professor and homosexual activist Louie Crew founded the Episcopal homosexual group Integrity in 1974.  He would begin his Bible as Literature classes by dumping a Bible into a bowl of muddy water and mockingly note the absence of wrathful, divine lightning bolts.  Largely due to his lobbyist “inglorious victory for one man,” the “Church had gone from thoroughly heterosexual to pansexual in one generation,” Virtue notes, a “feat that present day cultural Marxists could only stand back and admire.”

The actual record of Crew’s legacy was hardly gay, as the Episcopal Church’s “first ordination of a noncelibate homosexual went unbelievably badly” in 1989 with the AIDS-infected Robert Williams, Virtue observes.  As Williams’ cohabitation with his live-in homosexual partner predicted, the “narrative did not go as planned, with Williams announcing that neither celibacy nor monogamy were natural to human beings.”  Bishop of Newark John Shelby Spong, a notoriously heterodox Episcopalian and inveterate opponent of House of Bishops “Homophobes,” pressured Williams into resignation and he shortly thereafter died of AIDS.

Elected Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop in 1998, Frank Tracy Griswold decided that the mind of Christ was a conglomeration of worldly culture, social confusion, and Islamic beliefs couched in mystical language,” Virtue notes.  Reflecting the “mind of a declining western culture,” Griswold’s writings “tossed numerous quotes and buzzwords at the reader, even though they were meaningless.”  “His only absolute is that there are no absolutes,” Virtue observes of a clergyman who has condemned Jesus’ unique salvation claims as “Jesusolatry.”  

It was perhaps fitting that Robinson, who has revealed himself as an alcoholic, two-time gay divorcee, became bishop under Presiding Bishop Griswold.  “His own sexuality was the private talk of many,” Virtue notes.  One Episcopal bishop had claimed to Virtue that the married “Griswold consorted with known drag queens and homosexuals in Paris in the late 80’s.”

Griswold’s support for Robinson’s ordination has “torn the fabric of the Anglican Communion,” Virtue observes.  “In 2004, the Episcopal Church stood on the edge of being publicly reprimanded, if not thrown out of the Anglican Communion for doctrinal and moral infidelity.”  Additionally, Griswold’s “public affirmation of pansexuality jeopardized the lives of Anglicans in northern Nigeria, who daily face the onslaughts of Islamic fundamentalists pushing Sharia law, who laughingly mock Christianity as a ‘queer’ religion.”

Succeeding Griswold in 2006, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori launched a “personal Inquisition” against any Episcopalians who would not accept the new sexual (dis)order, Virtue writes.  Against congregations that attempted to leave the Episcopal Church with their church property and dissident clergy she “fought in every legal venue open to the church; salaries and pensions would be cut off.”  Episcopal Church legal fees exceeded S22 million.

The vengeful Griswold testified in court that she preferred selling church properties for “saloons” rather than to other, orthodox Anglican entities.  Thus “properties were sold to start up evangelicals, fundamentalists, even to Muslim Imams for mosques,” Virtue writes.  Moreover, “Schori defrocked, humiliated and destroyed hundreds of Anglican priests” in a “bonfire of the Episcopal vanities.”

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, a supposed “moderate,” followed in 2015 the “ultra-liberal” Schori, who had traded “The Great Commission (to preach the gospel to all the world) for Millennium Development Goals,” Virtue notes.  Yet “even as his preaching revealed the old-style cadence of black preachers,” Curry merely “would be a different shade of gray.”  One young Episcopalian dismissed Curry’s proclaimed “Jesus Movement” as “all that 1960s stuff we are trying to avoid.”

Virtue’s dismal conclusion concurs with the young VTS visitor.  “Within two generations, most of the Church will be gone.  There will be hold out parishes like Trinity Wall Street, the richest church in the world, and a number of large Texas parishes.”  The watchman Virtue has given his alarm; now other Christians must heed this writing on the wall.