Tone-Deaf Canterbury Talks Unity to TEC's Bishops as the Anglican Communion Heads for Divorce

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I September 29, 2026

There is a word for someone who has no argument to make but blows warm smoke about "unity," "joy," being "overwhelmed by welcome," and "building understanding and friendship." The word is delusion.

Another name for it is dodging reality. Dame Sarah Mullally, Archbishop of Canterbury, did exactly that, and with considerable poise, when she turned up at the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops at Camp Allen, Texas, last week. Give her this much: she is a practised performer. A former Chief Nursing Officer for England knows how to walk onto a ward and settle the patients. She told the bishops that Anglican provinces differ geographically, culturally and linguistically, yet share much the same challenges and joys. They were warm words, well delivered.

She left out the one difference that matters, which is theology. Geography and language are not what divide the Communion. Theology is, and it puts her at odds with, by most reckonings, some 80 percent of the world's worshipping Anglicans.

A Communion in Two

The sexuality wars have split the Communion down the middle. In the progressive West the gospel has been quietly rewritten. Christ's atoning death has been airbrushed out, mission has shrunk to affordable housing, and transgender ideology is hailed as the new frontier to conquer.

Gafcon bishops will not sit at table with her. They will not receive Holy Communion with her, and they will not darken the door of Lambeth Palace. They have set about choosing their own "first among equals" to replace Canterbury's. They are in broken communion, and they say so.

The Global South Fellowship (GSFA) has taken a different road. Meeting in the Seychelles in January, its primates vowed to stay in the Communion and work to reform it. They said they were staying in order to choose light over darkness. The implication for Lambeth is hard to miss, and it is not far from the truth. But reform assumes a patient willing to be treated. With same-sex blessings now entrenched at the top of the Church of England, that pitch has been soured for good.

An Award, a Retreat, and a Welcome Mat

Then there was the small matter of the imam. On September 11, the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Mullally stood in Lambeth Palace and handed the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation to the Pakistani cleric Tahir Ashrafi. His past praise of Osama bin Laden soon surfaced. Six days later the palace withdrew the award without a word of apology, and calls for her resignation followed.

A week after the climb-down, she floated across the pond to sit among like-minded progressives who told her how wonderful she was. Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe hailed her as the very picture of the church's unity. It was cheaper than a London therapist, and the couch was more comfortable.

A House of Mirrors

The Communion is now a house of mirrors, a dystopian parody of itself, with its pieces scattered across the chessboard. In Canada, the Anglican Church's General Synod has authorised a trial liturgy for those dying by MAID, complete with confession and absolution for people who intend to end their lives. Shriven first, then the lethal dose.

In England, evangelicals are either heading for the exits or digging in behind The Alliance. Secular intellectuals talk openly of disestablishment. The Lords Spiritual are so irrelevant they might as well sip tea in the Upper House until it is time for the Scotch.

Roughly ninety-nine English people in a hundred never set foot in a parish church on a Sunday. The buildings crumble while £100 million goes to slavery reparations and millions more feed a bloated central bureaucracy, even as local parishes wither and die. England's green and pleasant land no longer rings with the building of the New Jerusalem. It rings with the bulldozers of housing estates and the queues outside asylum hotels.

John Cleese could send the whole thing up in an afternoon. Had Robin Williams lived, the two of them would have sold out the West End.

Two Drunks in Times Square

There is little hope now for the Church of England or TEC. They are like two drunks staggering across Times Square, each holding the other up. If one goes down, both go down. Not even the Rapture could save them.

Mullally came, she saw, and she was consoled. She will fly home to Lambeth, perhaps to a good London dinner with Eamonn, because there is always a silver lining. Meanwhile the Church will continue its Gadarene slide into the sea, and nothing, it seems, can stop it.

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