VIRTUEONLINE VIEWPOINTS

May 15
13 min read

The Ascension means Caesar is not lord. The state is not lord. The market is not lord. Ideology is not lord. Technology is not lord. Nations rise and fall, rulers come and go, civilizations flourish and decay, yet above them all reigns the ascended Christ. — Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore

Christianity is in its very essence a resurrection religion. The concept of resurrection lies at its heart. If you remove it, Christianity is destroyed. — John Stott

The mainline churches became too much like a country club. With just a little bit of Jesus sprinkled on top. They didn't take Jesus seriously enough, and a lot of people said, "Well, why don't we go to the country club then? We'll have more fun, and I can drink there." Mainline churches catering to things in society, such as same-sex marriage and transgenderism, are also contributing factors. — Ryan Burge

There are only two possible ends to human existence: living for oneself alone, or living for the transcendent Other, and through him for all others. — John Doherty, the Witherspoon Institute

The Church of England today produces almost no significant theological work that is recognizably orthodox. Its intellectual energy goes into managing diversity, navigating competing truth-claims, and finding language capacious enough to hold together people who disagree on everything fundamental. This is not theology. It is conflict management costume-playing in vestments. — Gavin Ashenden

The Gospel has been undermined by occultism. Consider Bishop James Pike's involvement with mediums, Bishop William Swing's syncretism inspired by a Hindu swami, Bishop John Spong's heresies inspired by his involvement with the Theosophical Society, and Gene Robinson's flagrant disregard for the authority of Scripture inspired by "Queer Occultism." — Alice Linsley

Denominations that embrace the evangelical/born-again identification and those that don't. Assemblies of God is most likely to ID as evangelical: 92%. The mainline is all below 40%. Episcopalians are the lowest: 13%. — Ryan Burge

Protestantism is Christianity stripped of Roman Catholic excess and man-made superstition. It is not megachurches, strobe lights, or smoke machines. True Protestantism is grounded in strict, Bible-centered belief. The Reformers did not invent something new. They returned the Church to what it was always meant to be. Female archbishops, LGBTQ flags, and dancing vicars do not represent Protestantism. — The English Remnant

Dear Brothers and Sisters | www.virtueonline.org | May 15, 2026

THE STRANGE MELANCHOLY

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 19th century, he observed that despite our prosperity, there was a "strange melancholy in the midst of abundance."

Fast forward to the 1990s. In Fight Club, Tyler Durden captured his generation's growing sense of discontent:

We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Skip ahead to today. Most Americans have luxuries that the prosperous in the 1800s couldn't imagine and the movie gods of the 1990s only dreamed of: supercomputers in our pockets, AI to do our bidding, entertainment always at our fingertips. And yet amid this abundance, Tocqueville's "strange melancholy" persists.

Deaths of despair have reached alarmingly high levels. Loneliness has been declared a public health epidemic. Student mental health has never been worse. And, like Durden, many of us are regularly pissed off. Psychologist Richard Beck sums it up:

The data is pretty clear. While America is the most affluent nation in the history of the world, our rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and addiction are all skyrocketing. We're not doing well. We are a deeply unwell society.

This raises an urgent question: What's the matter with us?

We could blame many culprits — the rise of the smartphone, the media, those "other" people. Yet each of these points to a deeper underlying problem. As Andrew Root argues, something more fundamental is worth a closer look: the way we're pursuing happiness.

The Way of Disappointment

In a million subtle ways, we're told that personal fulfillment is something we can win. Happiness is something we can achieve — if we just put in the work. Whatever we think will make us happy, we can go after it and get it.

The pressure starts early and never lets up in our modern meritocracy. "You can be happy by way of marriage if you just find the perfect spouse." "You can have the family, the career, the body of your dreams, if you just ___."

But what happens if you fail? If you can't rise through the ranks? Either you're a loser with no one to blame but yourself for not measuring up, or you find someone, some group, some system to blame as the oppressor. If you can't play the winner, playing the victim at least deals with the guilt.

Or what happens when you do achieve your dreams — get the job, find the right spouse, accomplish everything you set out to do — and still have a gnawing sadness that won't go away? Then what?

As Westerners, we typically respond to these letdowns in one of two ways. We dig deeper, grind harder. We jump on the achievement treadmill — move faster, work harder, fill up the schedule, get people to like us, prove to everybody that we're somebody. Until we burn out.

Or we cope by quitting. We binge on Netflix. We attach our self-worth to a college football team. We shop, scroll, drink, or do whatever we can to escape the burden and boredom of life.

Sometimes we do both in the same day and call it "work-life balance."

Here's the paradox: you can't find true happiness by aiming for it. You can only discover it by living a life worth living. We live in sad times because we don't know who we are as humans, or how to live worthily. The Psalter offers us another way — a way to attend to life and answer the question "What's the point?" Psalm 8 is a gateway to that answer, inviting everyone to a new and life-giving way to live into our humanity.

The Way of Worship

Psalm 8 begins: "O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens" (v. 1).

The Psalms offer a way of life centered on God. We're called into the worship of the God whose name fills the earth and whose glory towers above the heavens. Theologians describe this dynamic as God's immanence and transcendence.

God is wholly different from us. His glory surpasses anything we can compare it to — the most majestic mountains, the most beautiful flower, the most riveting story, the thrill of a first kiss. None of it compares. And yet, as Augustine says, "God is closer to you than you are to yourself." He knows you better than you know yourself.

Worshiping God releases us from the trap of self-focus. It frees us to live according to the logic of the universe. When I say worship, I mean the raw and beautiful diversity of worship we see throughout the Psalms: telling God our sadness, confessing our sins, arguing with him, praising him for his goodness and majesty. Instead of navel-gazing our way through life, we're pulled out of ourselves — and begin radiating outward, reflecting our Creator and Father. (H/T TGC)

AI: GIFT AND THREAT

Barna reports the following: 66 percent of practicing Christians say AI is improving their lives, yet 57 percent also say AI is a threat. Gen Z and Millennials are particularly sensitive to the rise of AI as a high risk. Pastors diverge sharply from the Christians they lead: 72 percent of pastors say AI is a threat, compared to 57 percent of practicing Christians.

Seventy-two percent of American teenagers are already turning to AI for companionship. That's not just extreme cases or troubled kids — that's three in four teenagers going to a machine for connection.

And it doesn't stop with teens. More and more people are turning to AI than to clubs, churches, or other social spaces. There's a married man in your church who's said more to a chatbot in six months than to his wife. And to him, it's not a problem. He's just processing. Right? Besides, his marriage went flat years ago.

CHURCH OF ENGLAND: ON LIFE SUPPORT

Private Eye reports that the Church of England is a very unhealthy organization. Their account:

"When the new Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally glances around the House of Bishops at its next meeting, she may be forgiven for wondering where everyone has gone. Of the 42 dioceses in the Church of England, seven have no bishop in post, two more are suspended, one is on long-term sick leave, and a further five bishops have set a retirement date. For more than a third of dioceses to be effectively vacant is unprecedented in modern times.

"The Crown Nominations Commission, which appoints diocesan bishops, is used to appointing three or at most four each year. No doubt they will find 16 ambitious clergy willing to step up to the top jobs. But finding so many at once may require scraping of the talent barrel."

With a population close to 62 million and only one million regular worshipping Anglicans — average weekly attendance just over 702,000 — the Church of England has nothing to boast about. There are some 3.1 million practicing Muslims in England today with an average age of 24. You might be forgiven for thinking Christianity is dead on arrival. King Charles has made it clear he is the king of all faiths, not the Faith. If someone quietly padlocked Lambeth Palace, would anybody notice? Would anybody really care? One doubts it.

ACNA: WAGONS IN A CIRCLE

Are the wheels coming off the ACNA? It certainly appears that way. The bishops are circling the wagons before Archbishop Steve Wood's trial has even begun. Bishop Phil Ashey of the Diocese of Western Anglicans put his foot none too gently in his mouth when he delivered a statement wrapped in canonical legalese, declaring that Wood might be exonerated of the sexual charges. When confronted by acting Dean Julian Dobbs, Ashey immediately backtracked and issued an apology. But the damage had been done — revealing just how close-knit the ACNA House of Bishops is, and what they will do to keep that club together no matter what. They succeeded with Bishop Stewart Ruch. Will they succeed with Wood? Time will tell.

At the same time, ACNA faces a deeper crisis of identity: Who and what is the ACNA? I invited a theologian and a canon lawyer to address the question directly — Is the ACNA a confessional body or a body governed by conciliarism? Canon theologian Chuck Collins and canon lawyer Phil Ashey duke it out for the soul of the church here: Confessional or Conciliar: The Battle for ACNA's Soul

THE ABUJA CONTRADICTION: THREE VIEWS

Global Anglicanism came in for serious attention this week when Jay Thomas, an Anglican priest in the Diocese of The South, published a scathing piece in First Things titled "Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction."

Thomas argues that the Abuja Affirmation marks a decisive rupture in Anglicanism, with GAFCON bishops effectively creating a second communion centered on the Jerusalem Declaration rather than the See of Canterbury. Though framed as a restoration of scriptural authority, the gathering produced not a reformed Anglicanism but a new institution with a Protestant confessional polity — one that claims to resolve the communion's fifty-year authority crisis while actually deepening it. His central charge: GAFCON condemns Canterbury's "hermeneutical pluralism" on sexuality while quietly tolerating the same disagreement within its own ranks on women's ordination. By enshrining this double standard, GAFCON has reproduced the very ecclesiological dysfunction it set out to cure.

George Conger at Anglican Ink pushed back. Thomas's charge, Conger argues, collapses on inspection. Classical Anglicanism has always recognized hierarchies of doctrine — the Thirty-Nine Articles themselves distinguish between matters necessary to salvation and things indifferent — and GAFCON's position that sexuality touches core doctrines of creation and the moral law in ways that ministerial ordering does not is a recognizable exercise in Anglican theological triage, not incoherence. Thomas doesn't refute this distinction; he simply ignores it. More damaging still, his appeal to natural law and magisterial tradition as co-equal authorities with Scripture isn't classical Anglicanism at all — it's Anglo-Catholicism's rehabilitation of a dual-source theory of revelation that the English Reformers explicitly rejected in Articles VI and XX. And Thomas offers no workable alternative. "Reject the Abuja affirmations" — and then what? Submit to a Canterbury that has spent decades dismantling biblical teaching on sexuality? GAFCON didn't dissolve the Communion; Canterbury did — through the consecration of Gene Robinson, the blessing of same-sex unions, and the steady marginalization of orthodox voices.

A Concerned Anglican responding at VOL goes further still. Conger's central counter-argument — that GAFCON's position mirrors the logic of the Elizabethan Settlement — is his most revealing error. The Elizabethan Settlement was not a principled theological achievement but a political accommodation that deliberately left the most contested questions unresolved. Comprehensiveness as a governing principle does not stay bounded by the intentions of those who first deployed it; it licenses progressive expansion of the tolerable. The broad churchmen of the 19th century and the revisionists of the 20th are not aberrations from the Settlement's logic — they are its eventual destination. GAFCON's designation of women's ordination as a second-order question is institutional arithmetic, not theological wisdom. Every province that proceeded from women's ordination to blessing same-sex unions did so with internal logical coherence. Canterbury did not abandon orthodoxy on sexuality despite accepting women's ordination; it did so because women's ordination had already installed the hermeneutical framework that made the next steps inevitable.

The instrument that resolves this impasse, the Concerned Anglican argues, already exists within the Anglican tradition: the Vincentian Canon — quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus (what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all) — deployed by the Caroline Divines who gave Anglican theology its most durable intellectual architecture. Applied with rigor, it confirms sexual ethics as first-order: grounded in creation, confirmed by universal patristic consensus across East and West, never seriously contested in the undivided Church. Women's ordination fails the same test decisively. This is not a Roman position — Lancelot Andrewes deployed precisely this methodology against Bellarmine without being on his way to Rome. It is more authentically Anglican than either the Jerusalem Declaration's confessionalism or the Elizabethan Settlement's comprehensiveness.

Read all three pieces:

Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction — Jay Thomas, First Things
The Abuja Contradiction That Isn't — George Conger, Anglican Ink
The Contradiction That Actually Isn't — A Concerned Anglican, VirtueOnline

MISSIONS: THE NEW PARADIGM

There is a new paradigm for missions sweeping over the Global South, especially in regions hard hit by Islamic fundamentalism. The old order of "come and hear" is over. "Go and tell" is the order of the day — but this begs the question of who is actually doing it. It is not bishops and most clergy, who prefer to see the rewards of other people's efforts, ending in performative behaviors that have very little to do with the gospel. Western Christian leaders have a 1950s approach to mission and it is not working.

In a piece titled ACNA: Imagination Forfeited, I argue that ACNA's identity was essentially negative — not the Episcopal Church — and no movement has ever been catalyzed by negation. Ask ten ACNA clergy what Anglicanism is and receive ten answers: Anglo-Catholic, Reformed, Charismatic, Prayer Book conservative. Each coherent on its own terms, none of them the same thing. That is not a communion. It is a coalition, and coalitions held together by a common enemy dissolve the moment the enemy recedes. Every tradition requires a commonly owned confession — a shared understanding of its particular grace and calling. Without it, disintegration is not a risk. It is a destiny.

We also assumed we would prevail because we were orthodox. But right beliefs held in the wrong spirit produce exactly what we have — a church confident in its legitimacy and uncertain of its purpose. We needed apostolic bishops freed from administration and devoted to catalyzing movement. Instead, we built a supervisory superstructure that consumed the resources mission required. Meanwhile the Spirit has been moving at remarkable scale — through Iran, China, and along the Swahili Coast, where High Church Anglicans with full liturgical inheritance and evangelical fire are multiplying communities of remarkable depth. They didn't choose between Anglican and apostolic. They refused the choice.

We have mule churches. We need rabbit churches. Rabbits multiply; mules do not. The difference isn't resources or liturgy or episcopal order — it is apostolic imagination. Jesus never said make church members; he said make disciples. Disciples multiply movements. Church members maintain institutions. We have spent fifteen years doing the latter and wondering why nothing multiplies. What we need is not another summit or reorganization, but a network of networks: institutionally lean, missiologically alive, held together by a shared rule of life and apostolic imagination rather than diocesan machinery. The tradition is sufficient. The moment is still — barely — available. But not by doing what has never worked with greater enthusiasm.

SAM ALLBERRY: WHAT THE CHURCH MUST LEARN

Sam Allberry's fall from grace continues to reverberate around the Christian world, particularly in the Anglican Communion and the ACNA. An excellent take comes from Elizabeth Woning, writing for The Christian Post:

Sam Allberry's recent moral failure has prompted reflection on a foundational question: how did activist pressure — rather than scientific research — come to reshape medical and cultural understanding of same-sex attraction? In the 1970s, LGBT activists successfully pressured the American Psychiatric Association to reclassify homosexuality, silencing dissenting clinicians in the process. That ideological victory established the framework we still operate within today — one that treats same-sex attraction as a fixed identity rather than an experience rooted in emotional and developmental history.

The consequences of that framework are measurable and troubling. Despite decades of growing legal and social acceptance, LGBT-identifying populations continue to show disproportionately high rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicidality — even in nations like the Netherlands with stronger civil protections than the U.S. A 2019 genome-wide study of nearly 500,000 individuals found no "gay gene," but did find genetic correlations between same-sex behavior and conditions like depression, anxiety, ADHD, and addiction — suggesting the distress is not simply a product of social stigma.

What's missing is a more honest clinical approach — one that explores the formative and emotional dimensions of same-sex attraction the way a therapist would explore chronic depression, rather than simply affirming it as immutable identity. The CHANGED Movement exists because many people have found healing through exactly that kind of honest interior work, supported by faith. Sam Allberry's situation, like others before him, points not to inevitable failure but to the cost of a cultural narrative that forecloses deeper questions before they can even be asked.

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