On Human Sexuality: Two Narratives That Have Shaped the Anglican Communion Can Never Equate

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 28, 2026

It is now apparent to the world’s roughly 85 million Anglicans that the Anglican Communion is irretrievably broken, and that short of repentance it will never be repaired.

There is no glossing over it, no parsing it, no pretending otherwise, no hope that if we talk long enough and lovingly enough about unity, we will somehow arrive at a different conclusion. We will not.

The Fault Line and the Point of No Return

Lambeth Resolution 1.10, passed in 1998, was the starting point of the schism. GAFCON and the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008 were its ending point — the moment the orthodox declared, decisively and without apology, that there is no third way, no place at which anyone may say we have reached consensus and can now move forward together. There is no consensus to be had. There never was.

Every Remedy Has Failed

Consider what has been tried, and what has come of it. Neither the coercive maneuvering of the late Frank Griswold, nor the bullying of the late John Shelby Spong, nor the unctuous self-regard of Gene Robinson, nor the mailed fist of the LGBTQ lobby has moved the needle a single inch toward reconciliation. Just the opposite. Each hardened the divide while The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada raced headlong toward their own demographic extinction. Rainbow flags draped over every available surface, endless invocations of God’s indiscriminate love for absolutely everybody, and the ready cry of “homophobe” for anyone who dared question the new sexual theologians made one thing abundantly clear: compromise was never on the table. Never. Conform, or be gone.

The remedies offered by successive Archbishops of Canterbury resolved nothing. The Windsor Report, alternative episcopal oversight, the Communion Partners bishops — each was a bridge thrown across a chasm that could not be spanned. Rowan Williams, for all his genuine brilliance, could not resolve the impasse, because he was himself conflicted. The obscurantist theology of his “The Body’s Grace” — an essay that labored to baptize what Scripture plainly forbids — could neither persuade the global bishops nor kindle the faithful in the pews. One cannot, in the end, synthesize sin. God has not changed His mind.

Two Narratives, Two Religions

Here is the heart of it, the thing no committee can paper over and no communiqué can disguise. Two narratives now govern the Anglican Communion, and they do not merely disagree. They cannot be reconciled, because they do not share a common authority.

The first narrative receives. It holds that God has spoken — in creation, in Scripture, in the person of His Son — and that the church’s whole task is glad obedience to a word already given. The second narrative revises. It holds that God is still speaking, and that He speaks most clearly through human experience, through the felt truth of the self, through the shifting spirit of the age. The first asks, “What has God said?” The second asks, “What have we come to feel?”

These are not two points on a single spectrum. They are two different religions wearing the same vestments. You cannot average revelation against its denial. You cannot split the difference between “Thus saith the Lord” and “the Lord could not possibly have meant that.” No synod can legislate the gap away. No listening process can listen it into agreement. No carefully worded statement can make Scripture and the zeitgeist say the same thing. The revisionist has never wanted a seat at the orthodox table. He wants the table torn down and rebuilt to his own design.

Conform or Be Cast Out

The pansexualists grasp this more honestly than the institutionalists forever pleading for more time. They have made sex their identity and their identity their god, and before that god they will brook no rival and no dissent. Conform, or face ecclesiastical punishment. Ask Bishop Bill Love of Albany, hauled up under Title IV for the “crime” of holding the very line Scripture drew. Ask Charlie Holt, twice elected in Florida and twice denied his see, what it is to be cast into episcopal outer darkness for the offense of believing what every Anglican believed five minutes ago.

It would be screamingly Monty Python funny if it were not so tragic. It has cost hundreds of priests their livelihoods, their futures, and their pensions. It has broken congregations, split dioceses, and ended lifelong friendships.

What Becket Would See

One can only imagine what Thomas Becket would make of it — told, on his way to martyrdom in his own cathedral, that five centuries on a practicing homosexual would stand at that very altar in open defiance of Scripture and the holiness of God; that the nave which drank his blood would host a rave, a post-coital revel in the wake of Holy Eucharist. He might be vomiting still.

A Church That Would Sooner Die

So, the Communion is left with two irreconcilable stories. The Western version — culturally captive, theologically spent, and demographically on its last legs — will not repent. It would sooner die in its sin than change its mind. For this church, hell is evidently preferable to heaven, provided one may enter it unrebuked. Obedience to God’s word is not on offer. Scripture, we are informed, must yield to experience. We will not be told what to do, or with whom to do it. God — or perhaps she — has opened new eyes to a new age.

The Gospel Comes Home

But the Global South has risen from the ashes of colonialism, shrugged off its former paymasters, and declared open season on the West. We gave them the gospel; they received it, believed it, and are now handing it back to the senders who no longer want it. The missionary tide has turned and runs the other way. What Canterbury shipped out in the age of empire, Africa and Asia now ship home to a continent that has forgotten its own name.

And so we in the West wait — for a new resurrection, a revival ahead of the great and final coming of the Lord. It is long overdue.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.