Down the Same Rabbit Hole: The Church of England Follows TEC Into the Abyss

David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueOnline | May 23, 2026

Those of us who have watched the Episcopal Church’s long, self-inflicted decline have seen this film before. We know how it ends. And now, with Professor Helen King’s Private Members’ Motion heading to the Church of England’s General Synod in July, we are watching the Church of England queue up to buy a ticket to the same screening.

The parallels are not incidental. They are structural.

The Episcopal Church did not wake up one morning and decide to abandon orthodox Christian sexual ethics wholesale. It moved by increments, each step described as modest, pastoral, and theologically careful. Each step made the next one inevitable.

In 2003, TEC consecrated Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire — the first openly partnered, non-celibate gay man to become a bishop in the Anglican world.

The reaction was immediate: nine provinces declared impaired or broken communion, the Windsor Report was commissioned, and scores of orthodox congregations began the painful process of leaving. But TEC pressed on.

In 2009 it formally affirmed the right of gay and lesbian persons to be ordained. In 2012 it approved a same-sex blessing liturgy. In 2015, just five days after the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the legal right to marry, General Convention voted to amend the canons of the Episcopal Church to permit any couple the rite of Holy Matrimony.

Twelve years from gay bishop to gay marriage. The progressives called it progress. The pews called it something else — and left.

Average Sunday attendance in TEC stood at 856,579 in the year 2000. By 2015 it had fallen to 579,780. By 2019 it was 518,411. Marriages conducted in the Episcopal Church totaled 19,017 in 2003 — the year of Gene Robinson’s consecration. By 2019 that figure had collapsed to 6,484, a decline of 66 percent. By the late 2010s TEC had fallen to 1.7 million members, down from 3.4 million in 1992. This is not a church experiencing the general cultural drift away from religion. This is a church that traded its theological birthright for cultural approval and got neither in sufficient quantity to survive.

Now look at the Church of England and the King motion.

Professor King, a lay member of Synod for Oxford Diocese and vice-chair of its Gender and Sexuality Group, has brought a motion that reads: “That this Synod affirm that there are no fundamental objections to being in a committed, faithful, intimate same-sex relationship, and that such a relationship can be entirely compatible with Christian discipleship.”

The TEC playbook is recognizable in every line. TEC also began not with marriage but with affirmation — affirming the dignity of gay persons, affirming their place in the life of the church, affirming that their relationships deserved pastoral recognition. Each affirmation was carefully worded to stop short of doctrinal revision while making the next step feel not only natural but obligatory. If there are “no fundamental objections” to a same-sex relationship, on what grounds does the Church subsequently refuse to bless it? Marry it? Ordain those in one?

The King motion is not an endpoint. It is a ratchet.

The differences between the two churches are real but they are differences of pace and procedure, not of trajectory.

TEC moved through its General Convention by majority vote; the Church of England’s canons require a more complex process involving the Houses of Bishops, Clergy and Laity. The CofE has the additional anchor — or dead weight, depending on one’s view — of its established status and the involvement of Parliament in doctrinal change. These are genuine speed bumps. But TEC had its own procedural obstacles and navigated around every one of them. The revisionists are patient. They have demonstrated, across decades and across denominations, that they are willing to wait, regroup, and try again with cleverer wording.

John Dunnett of the Church of England Evangelical Council has put his finger on the strategy precisely: the King motion “shows that the revisionists will find new and different ways to continually push their agenda — away from Scripture, away from our Church’s doctrine and towards liberal change — even when the House of Bishops is not doing so.” That is exactly what TEC’s revisionists did for thirty years. They worked around resistant bishops, around procedural obstacles, around every orthodox countermotion, until the institution itself was reshaped in their image.

The tragedy is that the Church of England has the evidence of TEC’s experience directly before it. It has watched a once-great church hemorrhage members, close parishes, and lose its theological coherence in real time. It has received refugees from that wreckage into ACNA and other orthodox bodies. It has debated, studied, and produced the vast LLF process, which after years of costly work concluded that consensus cannot be reached — meaning the orthodox position cannot simply be voted away.

And yet here comes Professor King’s motion, and here comes General Synod preparing to debate it in July as though the last twenty years of Anglican history had not happened.

The July General Synod vote on the King motion is not a procedural footnote. It is a kairos moment — a point of decision that will reveal whether the Church of England has learned anything from watching its American cousins dismantle orthodoxy one carefully worded resolution at a time.

A Synod that votes to affirm Professor King’s motion will have placed itself, whatever legal fictions it maintains about doctrine, on the same road TEC traveled — and will deserve the same destination. The bishops, clergy, and laity who will cast those votes should understand what is at stake: not a gesture of pastoral warmth, not a mild expression of synodical opinion, but a repudiation of Scripture, of the Church’s historic teaching, and of the Global South Anglicans who have staked their communion on the conviction that the Word of God is not subject to revision by committee.

If the Church of England will not learn from TEC’s catastrophe theological and moral error, it has chosen, with open eyes, to repeat it. And those who engineered that choice — with their clever wording, their strategic ambiguity, their patient incrementalism — will own the consequences. History will not be kind to them. More importantly, neither will God. As the apostle Paul reminds us in Galatians 6:7, "God is not mocked; for whatever a person sows, this he will also reap.” The same goes for the church.

David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline, a global orthodox Anglican online news service.