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Ryan Burge has written the most honest ledger of American religious decline in a generation. His remedy is the disease that produced it. By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 16, 2026 Nine people in a room. That is how Ryan Burge opens The Vanishing Church, and it is where any honest reckoning with the man must begin. He counted them himself, from the front of his own dying Baptist congregation in Mount Vernon, Illinois, at the close of 2023. Seventeen years in that pulpit, and nine souls to show for a Sunday. He does not soften the arithmetic. By the old measures — baptisms, attendance, giving — he calls his own ministry a failure, and he means it. There is no cant in the man, and there is little in the book. That is precisely why it must be taken seriously, and precisely why its conclusion must be refused. Credit Where It Is Owed Let no one mistake this for a dismissal. Ryan Burge is the finest data man American religion has produced in a generation, and The Vanishing Church is his most personal and most searching work. Where lesser commentators traffic in nostalgia or panic, Burge brings charts, and the charts do not lie. He has spent his career puncturing comfortable myths, and he punctures them here with a craftsman's patience: that Christianity and Republican politics were always fused (they were not); that the faithful are fleeing the Religious Right (they are not — the mainline is emptying fastest); that faith is good but religion spoils it (the measurable goods come precisely from the religious practice). Every chapter is built on the data and then explained in plain speech. It is a rare gift, and Burge deploys it honestly. The Diagnosis Is Devastating, and Largely Right The numbers are an indictment of the last fifty years, and they deserve to be read slowly. Mainline Protestantism, which once claimed nearly a third of all Americans, now holds less than a tenth. Evangelicalism reached its numerical summit in 1993, when three Americans in ten wore the label — and that summit, Burge shows, was reached when evangelicals were at their most politically diverse, their votes split nearly evenly between the parties. Then came the rupture. Between 1991 and 1998, in the space of seven years, the share of young adults claiming no religion at all climbed from eight percent to more than twenty, while the share calling themselves Christian fell from eighty-seven to seventy-three. Burge names the mechanism the “Big Church Sort”: Americans filing themselves into congregations that flatter their politics and their class. The result, he argues, is an “all or none” faith — hard conservative religion or no religion whatever — with the old moderate middle hollowed clean out. And he adds a wound that most Anglican commentators miss entirely: church has become, in his phrase, a thing of privilege, its pews filled ever more by the married, the salaried, and the college-schooled, while the poor and the irregular drift away untouched. On the diagnosis, Burge is a physician of rare clarity. Then He Reaches for the Prescription Here the statistician lays down his charts and takes up the chaplain's stole, and here the book fails. Burge's cure for the vanishing church is this: go back anyway. Find a congregation that is “good enough.” Do not wait to believe before you belong. Hold your doctrine loosely, resist the fringes, and darken a church door on Sunday morning — because, he warns, the fate of American democracy may hang upon it. It is a humane vision. It is also a milder dose of the very poison whose effects fill his own pages. For what is Burge describing, when he prescribes a low-doctrine, high-belonging, politically bashful church that asks little and welcomes all — if not the mainline itself? The Episcopal Church, the ELCA, the American Baptists of his own affiliation have practiced exactly this creed for two generations. They lowered the threshold of belief. They preached belonging before conviction. They made a virtue of holding nothing too firmly. And they are the fastest-dying bodies in the country. Burge has assembled, chart by chart, the autopsy of latitudinarian religion — and then recommended the deceased's own regimen to the patient. The Contradiction at the Center The book cannot escape its own findings. If ideological consolidation is what fortified the evangelical churches — and Burge's data says plainly that it did — then by what logic does ideological moderation revive the churches that moderation emptied? He shows that the demanding congregations, the ones that ask everything, retain their people and run on twice the volunteer strength of their tepid neighbors. He shows that where a church asks little, its members give it little in return, and eventually give it nothing at all. The mainline did not perish because it was too dogmatic. It perished because it was too accommodating — because, as the older sociology Burge himself cites concluded, it tried to be too many things to too many people and ended as nothing in particular to anyone. Nor will the civic frame bear the weight he puts on it. A church summoned back to save the republic is a church asked to exist for something other than God, and a church that exists for something other than God will not long exist at all. The martyrs did not go to the lions for social capital. Athanasius did not stand against the world for the health of the body politic. The creeds were not hammered out at Nicaea and Chalcedon to lower the temperature of public discourse. The church that converted an empire did so armed with conviction, blood, and a confessed and risen Lord — not with the counsel to find a fellowship that was good enough and keep one's beliefs to oneself. Grounding the faith in its usefulness to democracy inverts the whole order of things. Democracy may indeed need the church. The church does not need democracy, and it must never be recruited into democracy's service as the price of its own survival. What the Anglican Realignment Already Knows The global Anglican story is Burge's thesis run as a live experiment, and it renders the verdict his conclusion resists. Where the Communion moderated — Canterbury, the Episcopal Church, the accommodating provinces of the West — it hollowed out, its cathedrals turned to museums and its rolls to obituaries. Where the Communion confessed — the Global South, GAFCON, the churches of Nigeria and Uganda and the GSFA — it multiplied. ACNA was born not of a search for a church that was good enough but of a refusal to settle for one that had become an abomination. The realignment is the standing empirical rebuttal to Burge's remedy: it is conviction, not moderation, that fills a sanctuary, and costly truth, not comfortable breadth, that holds a people together across every difference of class and color and tongue. Burge's charts, read against his own counsel, are Exhibit A for the case the orthodox have been making for a quarter century. The Word He Would Not Write So let the tribute stand and the dissent stand with it. Ryan Burge has given the church the truest ledger of its decline that we possess, and every pastor and bishop who ignores it does so to his peril. But he has mistaken the coroner's report for a course of treatment. A church with nothing worth dividing over will soon have nothing worth attending for. “Good enough” is not the gospel, and it never filled a pew that conviction had not filled first. The vanishing church will not be recalled to life by Americans returning to save their democracy. It will be recalled to life, if at all, the only way it ever has been — by men and women returning to a crucified and risen Christ, and to a church with the nerve to name Him Lord. Burge has written the autopsy. The resurrection is a different discipline, and it begins where his book leaves off. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found here: www.virtueonline.org and at his Substack: davidvirtue2.substack.com

From Anglican Mainstream August 15, 2026 To all who have been supporters of Barnabas Aid: There will be a Thanksgiving Service for the founder of Barnabas Aid the late Dr Patrick Sookhdeo on Wednesday September 2 in Oxford. We apologise that we have not been able to contact those who have been supporters directly but our requests for an invitation to be sent to the 100,000 supporters of Barnabas Fund have been consistently refused. Those wishing to attend and give thanks for Dr Patrick’s life and ministry should please email adminsa@ocrpl.org for details of the time and the place. The service will also be livestreamed. We ask that church pastors and leaders make this known to their congregations many of whom will include those who supported Dr Patrick and Barnabas Aid Thank you Canon Dr Chris Sugden Rev Fr Gavin Mitchell

Press release issued by the Anglican Diocese of Jos August 11 2026 The Anglican Diocese of Jos has noted with deep concern and sadness the circulation of misleading reports and images on social media regarding the recent attempted kidnap of the wife of the incumbent Bishop of the Diocese and the wife of the immediate-past Bishop of the Diocese. While acknowledging that the attempt is true, we wish to state the following for the records and for the benefit of the general public: 1.⁠ ⁠We condemn in the strongest terms the criminal attempt to kidnap the innocent women, and we are grateful to God and to the security agencies for their swift intervention. We continue to uphold them and their families in prayer. 2.⁠ ⁠It is true that one of the suspects is a person who presents himself as a clergyman – having worked in the Diocese of Jos before he was dismissed in 2022 by the former Bishop of the Diocese. However, we categorically state that: a. He was NOT reinstated by the present Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Jos. b. He is NOT a clergyman in the employment, authority, or jurisdiction of the Anglican Diocese of Jos. c. The Anglican Diocese of Jos has no working relationship whatsoever with this individual. 3.⁠ ⁠It is unfortunate and malicious that the picture of the Rt. Rev. Prof. Ephraim J. Gongden, FSTAN, the incumbent Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Jos, is being used and circulated in connection with this incident as if he is the suspect. 4.⁠ ⁠To suggest that “the clergyman is from the Diocese of Jos” and to attach the Bishop’s image to the story amount to deliberate blackmail, wickedness, misrepresentation, and an act of hatred. 5.⁠ ⁠It is misleading, sad, and unjust that the victim is now being made to look like the criminal. This is a deliberate attempt to damage the image and reputation of the Diocese, the office of the Bishop, and the Church of God. 6.⁠ ⁠We call on all media houses (electronic and conventional), bloggers, and social media users to desist from spreading unverified information, false images, and defamatory contents. 7.⁠ ⁠We urge the public to verify facts before sharing. The Church is a house of peace and truth, and we will not allow the name of Christ and His Church to be dragged into criminality. 8.⁠ ⁠We have reported this misinformation and cyber-bullying to the appropriate security and legal authorities for necessary action. 9.⁠ ⁠We call on all members of the Diocese and the entire Christian community to remain calm, prayerful, and united. Evil will not have the last word. “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.” – 1 Peter 2:23. Signed, Harrison N. Ugwuala Esq., Registrar, Anglican Diocese of Jos.

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org August 13, 2026 This month the Anglican Church in North America removed Archbishop Abraham Elavata an Indian Christian leader based in Patna, Bihar, from the program of its Matthew 25 conference, where he was to speak on the persecuted church in the East. His offense was not heresy, nor scandal, nor any failing of his own. He had attended a worship conference for Kenyan congregations in the Northwest — a gathering sponsored by Archbishop Derek Jones of the ARCC and co-hosted with bishops of the Church of Kenya, who were themselves present. For standing in that room, beside those bishops, he lost his place at a conference named for the mercy of Christ. [For the benefit of VOL readers, the Matthew 25 Conference is a Christian social‑justice and discipleship gathering built around Matthew 25:31–46.] Weigh what was named against what was done. Matthew 25 is the chapter in which the Lord tells us the nations will be judged by how they treated the hungry, the stranger, and the prisoner. The ACNA took that chapter for a ministry, and then struck from it the one man coming to speak for imprisoned Christians — because he had stood in the wrong room, beside the wrong bishop. Elavata is not the only one. The same Kenyan conference, held in Seattle this past weekend, had invited Archbishop Buba Lamido, former Dean of the Church of Nigeria, to attend and speak. He too was threatened and punished by the ACNA — his offense, having provided ministry at the ARCC’s synod in June. Had the Primate, Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, not intervened, Lamido might well have been barred from ACNA churches altogether. And the Kenyan bishops who did travel to Seattle, men whose names sit on GAFCON’s own statements? They have quietly disappeared from GAFCON’s listings. The old articles naming them remain, if you know where to look. The record was not corrected. It was scrubbed. Then there is Dr. A.J. Nolte, among the foremost scholars of Christian persecution and antisemitism, invited to lecture at a coming conference on those very subjects organized by the Anglican theologian Dr. Gerald McDermott. When Bishop Felix Orji learned that Nolte serves under Archbishop Jones in the ARCC, he instructed the organizers to disinvite him. His reason deserves to be quoted in full: “It’s not personal as I don’t even know him. It’s just where things are at this point with the ACNA and Archbishop Derek and I don’t want to be caught in the middle.” Read that admission slowly. No charge of false teaching. No question of character or competence. The bishop grants that he has never met the man. A serious scholar was removed from a conference on antisemitism — a sin that exists precisely because men are condemned for their associations rather than their deeds — for no reason but his associations. The irony would be comic if it were not so grave. The pattern reaches the mission field. ACNA bishops have urged congregations to cut off financial support from a missionary serving the war-torn people of Ukraine — not because the work has faltered, for by every account it is thriving, but because the missionary remains under Archbishop Jones and the ARCC. Ministries to the pro-life cause, to children, to the marginalized have been told to sever ties with Jones or forfeit their funding and access. The severity is selective. The same communion that cannot abide a scholar or a missionary standing near Archbishop Jones has proved willing to share platforms, dialogues, and partnerships with leaders whose theology it claims to reject. Courtesy is extended across genuine doctrinal chasms. It is withheld from fellow Anglicans who confess the same creeds, hold the same orders, and preach the same gospel. That contrast tells you what the real objection is. It is not theological. It is territorial. The ACNA will call this church discipline — a matter of order and jurisdiction. The evidence says otherwise. Churches must guard their order, and disputes over the reception of congregations are as old as the church itself. But discipline addresses the party to the dispute; it does not hunt the bystander. What has taken hold here is retaliation against a whistleblower, and it reaches past the dispute to punish those who had no part in it: an advocate for the persecuted church, a scholar of antisemitism, Ukrainian families in a war zone, ministries to the least visible. When the instrument of discipline falls again and again on the least of these, it has stopped being discipline. It has become leverage — power exercised for its own sake, with the vulnerable and the faithful left as collateral. The gospel is not abandoned in a single vote or a press release. It is abandoned one disinvitation at a time, one defunded missionary at a time, one scrubbed name at a time, one slander at a time — until a communion that claims to preach Christ crucified no longer seeks Christ first, nor knows Him in the stranger it has turned away. David W. Virtue DD is president and Managing Editor of Virtueonline, the Anglican communion’s longest running Anglican online news service. His Substack on the Middle East can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com Please consider becoming a paid supporter.

A church cannot summon the world to Christ while it summons its own to court COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 12, 2026 Attorneys for Archbishop Derek Jones and his Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy filed a motion on August 6 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division, to dismiss the defamation complaint brought against him by Bishop Julian Dobbs, the acting archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America. It is a sad state of affairs, and it did not have to come to this. These suits should never have been filed. Bishop Dobbs, of all men, knows his New Testament. He knows what the apostle Paul told a quarrelsome congregation that had taken to dragging its disputes before pagan magistrates — that believers are to settle their grievances within the household of faith, for the sake of the Church's unity, her honor, and her witness, reserving the courts for the rare cause where justice truly requires them. What Paul actually said “Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints?” (1 Cor. 6:1). Paul's concern is twofold. There is the witness of the church before a watching world — every believer hauled before a secular court is a sermon preached against the Gospel. And there is the maturity of the church before her Lord — a people schooled in forgiveness, reconciliation, and the long-suffering of Christ ought to be able to settle a quarrel without a docket number. Paul does not soften it: “Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?” (1 Cor. 6:7). To win such a suit, he says, is already to have lost. And here is the hard part for Bishop Dobbs, and I say it as a friend of the ACNA. He may well be in the right. Bishop Jones charged that Dobbs “absconded with” some $48,000 in chaplaincy funds; the disputed sum turns out to have been $3,750 misdirected into the wrong account back in 2019, tracked in the books and spent as intended. A provincial investigation under then-Archbishop Foley Beach in 2020 found no impropriety, and that very report now sits as an exhibit in Dobbs's own suit. On the merits, a court may vindicate him entirely. But Paul's counsel is not addressed to the man in the wrong. It is addressed precisely to the man in the right — the one who could win — and it tells him to rather be wronged. The higher ground is available to Bishop Dobbs at this moment. It will not be available forever. What the world sees The rest of the world does not follow the canonical fine print. Bishop Jones has separated himself from the ACNA and formed his own jurisdiction; rightly or wrongly, the die is cast, and there seems to be no going back. One bishop may frame all this as a matter of church discipline. The man in the pew reads a newspaper headline, sees a suspended archbishop, sees clergy suing clergy, and quietly wonders what became of the church that was supposed to be different. Across the aisle, Episcopal Church leaders watch and murmur that perhaps the schism was not worth it after all. And it is about to get worse. Next month — September 7 through 12 — Archbishop Steve Wood, suspended from ministry since last November, goes to trial before the Court for the Trial of a Bishop on three charges: violation of his ordination vows, conduct giving just cause for scandal or offense, and sexual immorality. Whatever the verdict, none of it will leave him, or the province he led, looking anything but wounded. The harder, better road So let me say plainly what many are thinking. Bishop Dobbs should withdraw his defamation suit now — before a trial he might lose, before compensatory and punitive damages are argued over in open court, before the whole miserable arithmetic of it is printed in the papers. And Archbishop Wood should spare the church the spectacle: step down, own what is his to own, offer the apology the body of Christ is owed, take his pension, and go. A resignation is a wound that heals. A public trial is a wound that scars. If they do not, the Washington Post will be all over this again, and again, keeping every unhappy detail before the public eye. So ask the only questions that finally matter. How does any of this advance the kingdom of God? How does it make one disciple for Jesus Christ? How does it commend the Anglican way to a single soul weighing whether to walk through the door? The ACNA already carries the strain of its unsettled debate over the ordination of women; it does not need these self-inflicted encumbrances heaped on top. There is still time to choose the harder, better road — the road of the wronged man who lays down his right for the sake of the Body. But the window is closing. End it now, brothers, before the damage is done that cannot be undone. Paul told us how this story ends when the saints go to law against one another. He called it a defeat. Let us not prove him right. David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and editor of VirtueOnline.

The Church of England will spend £100 million to atone for a sin its own ledgers may not record By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 12, 2026 Give the Church of England its due. When it resolved to repent, it did so with the full apparatus of the modern conscience — forensic accountants, an oversight group, an archbishop's tears, and a hundred million pounds laid on the altar of history. The instinct behind Project Spire is not, in itself, contemptible. A church that discovers blood in the foundations of its wealth ought to be troubled by it. Penitence is a Christian reflex, and the Commissioners reached for it. The trouble is that penitence without truth is not repentance. It is theatre. And the longer one examines the fund the Church now calls Healing, Repair and Justice, the more one suspects that the sin being atoned for was, in the crucial particular, misread. The American precedent VirtueOnline has watched a version of this play out in The Episcopal Church for more than twenty years, and the American experience is worth setting beside the English one — if only because it exposes how loosely the word “reparations” is thrown about. It is often said that The Episcopal Church seeded reparations with $1.7 million. It did not. The national church's contribution was a resolution, not a cheque. At the 2006 General Convention, Resolution A123 apologized for the Church's complicity in slavery and directed every diocese to document that complicity — but it moved no money. The dollars, when they came, came piecemeal and from below: from seminaries and dioceses, not from any churchwide fund. The $1.7 million was Virginia Theological Seminary's, established in 2019. Unlike England's still-unspent commitment, it has actually paid out. The seminary began issuing cash payments in February 2021 — roughly $2,100 a year to each identified descendant of the Black laborers, enslaved and free, whose work built the institution. More than two hundred descendants have now received payments, the endowment has grown to $2.8 million, and the money is structured to continue in perpetuity. The Diocese of Maryland took a different road. Its $1 million seed, voted in 2020, made its first disbursement in 2022 — but $175,000 to six community organizations, not a penny to individual descendants. That contrast, cash-to-descendants versus grants-to-institutions, is precisely the design quarrel now surfacing in England, where £100 million has been promised and no one can yet say who is to receive it, or how. The Americans, whatever one makes of their theology, at least settled that question before they wrote the checks. The ledger that wasn’t The whole English edifice rests on Queen Anne's Bounty, the fund founded in 1704 to relieve impoverished clergy, and on its eighteenth-century holdings in the South Sea Company. The Commissioners' researchers concluded that the Bounty had grown fat on the slave trade. Archbishop Welby apologized for it. The Bishop of Manchester likened the Church to a burglar who cannot in conscience keep his loot. A hundred million pounds followed the apology out the door. Then the historians arrived. Professor Richard Dale — a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of a study of the South Sea Company — pointed out what the accountants had missed. The enterprise had two distinct parts. One traded in human beings. The other was a vehicle for government debt. Queen Anne's Bounty put its money in the second: South Sea annuities, which were in plain terms gilts — loans to the Crown. To confuse the two, Dale wrote, was an elementary error. And the trade the Church now weeps over was, in cold fact, a chronic loss-maker; no investor grew rich on it, least of all one who never bought the trading shares. As Dale summed it up, the Bounty's investments, in stock or in annuities, earned nothing from the slave trade. This is not the grumbling of a partisan. Even the Commissioners' own historical advisers have conceded, in print, that the annuities and the trading securities were two separate instruments. When your own witness concedes the point, the case is in trouble. The parish left in the cold Set the history aside and a second scandal remains. The endowment the Commissioners are dipping into exists, by law and by intent, to keep parish clergy in post and parish roofs from falling in. Twenty-seven members of the Commons and the Lords reminded the incoming Archbishop of exactly this. At a moment when churches across the country are struggling to keep their doors open, they wrote, it is wrong to divert £100 million to a project entirely separate from the Church's core obligations. They called it what much of the pew already suspects it to be: a legally dubious vanity project. The pew agrees. In a poll of Anglican churchgoers, eighty-one per cent said the money should go to the parishes; sixty-one per cent said they might close their own wallets if Spire proceeds. Meanwhile the meter runs: the Church has confirmed that more than £1.15 million has already been spent on the project — on research, consultancy and legal advice — before a single grant has been made. A church that cannot fund a curate in a dying market town has found a hundred million pounds for a fund whose historical premise its own scholars cannot defend. One struggles to imagine a parable that flatters the arrangement. Repentance as performance What is most revealing is the Church's conduct under scrutiny. Faced with detailed, sourced, scholarly objection, the Commissioners have not answered it. They have closed ranks. At a Synod fringe meeting in July, Project Spire's own research co-ordinator, Charmaine Simpson, accused the critics — named historians of standing — of “deliberate misinformation.” That is not the language of a body confident in its evidence. It is the language of an institution that has committed itself publicly and cannot now afford to be wrong. And still it presses on, though it cannot yet press far. The Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice cannot even be registered with the Charity Commission; a legal challenge has seen to that. Yet from the slave fort at Cape Coast, Archbishop Sarah Mullally renewed the pledge, insisting that “part of the Christian belief in repentance is about action.” Action, yes — but repentance for what, precisely, and on whose reading of the books? A harder word There is a true repentance available to the Church of England, and it is not this. It would begin with the humility to let the historians finish their work before the cheque is written. It would remember that the endowment in question was given to feed shepherds, not to burnish the reputation of their managers. It would treat the eighty-one per cent not as an obstacle to be managed but as the faithful to be served. Scripture is not silent on offerings made to cover a fault the offerer will not honestly name. The prophets had a word for sacrifice brought in place of obedience, and it was not a word of comfort. If the Church of England wishes to repent of slavery, let it do so on the ground of what actually happened — no more, and no less. A fund built on a footnote, defended by anathemas against its critics and paid for out of the parish collection plate, is not justice. It is a mirror the institution holds up to admire its own contrition. And the God who sees in secret is not deceived by mirrors. David W. Virtue, DD is the founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline, an orthodox Anglican news and commentary website read by Anglicans in more than 100 countries. Some 21,000 stories are archived at www.virtueonline.org.

Three independent reasons necessitate dismissal they argue Bishop Derek Jones Bishop Julian Dobbs David W. Virtue I www.virtueonline.org I August 10, 2026 BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Attorneys for Archbishop Derek Jones and the Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy filed a motion Aug. 6 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division, to dismiss a defamation complaint by Julian Dobbs, the acting archbishop of ACNA. The motion also seeks “all such relief as the Court may deem just and proper.” In his complaint, Dobbs alleged Jones defamed him in comments Jones made to his own clergy during a closed, confidential, intra-church meeting held to discuss the events leading to a pending federal lawsuit. Dobbs also claimed Jones defamed him in statements that were part of a sworn declaration and a verified amended complaint filed in that lawsuit in South Carolina, as well as in a national newspaper article covering the South Carolina litigation. Jones’ motion to dismiss is first based on constitutional limitations on the authority of secular courts to intervene in ecclesiastical disputes, which are at the heart of Dobbs’ defamation complaint. Truth is the ultimate defense against defamation, but to determine the truth in this case, the court would have to resolve contested questions of canonical authority, ministerial discipline and church financial accountability – all of which is outside the court’s authority. Thus, permitting Dobbs’ “defamation claims to proceed would establish a dangerous precedent under which any ecclesiastical dispute could be recharacterized as a tort claim and subjected to judicial review,” the motion says. “Religious leaders would be deterred from defending their ecclesiastical authority, communicating with their congregations about church governance, or exposing what they believe to be ecclesiastical wrongdoing for fear of civil liability,” it continues. “This chilling effect would violate the Free Exercise Clause and undermine the autonomy of religious institutions. “The First Amendment protects not only the right of religious organizations to govern themselves according to their own rules, but also the right of religious leaders to speak freely on matters of church governance and discipline without fear that their statements will be subjected to judicial scrutiny in tort actions.” Furthermore, Alabama law provides an absolute litigation privilege that bars defamation claims made in, or preliminary to, judicial proceedings. That privilege extends to all the statements Dobbs is challenging, the motion says. Not even malice can undo the privilege, it adds. As for the newspaper article, the motion notes that Dobbs conflated independent journalism with a statement by Jones. “Bishop Jones did not author the article, select its subject, determine its contents, or serve as the source of most of the information it contains,” the motion points out. Additionally, Dobbs’ complaint does not identify any false, defamatory statement Jones made to the reporter. “Instead, it alleges generally that the statements ‘need not all be specifically listed’ and treats the article as another dissemination of accusations Bishop Jones had previously made elsewhere. … That intentional formulation avoids the central relevant question at hand: What false statement did Bishop Jones actually communicate to [the reporter] that was subsequently published? The Complaint cannot establish that, because no such statement exists,” the motion says. Also, in reference to the newspaper article, the motion argues that since Dobbs is a public figure, he must show actual malice in making a defamation claim. “Bishop Dobbs has thrust himself into the vortex of this public controversy and sought to influence its resolution. He is therefore a public figure for purposes of the JAFC-ACNA dispute and must prove actual malice by clear and convincing evidence,” the motion says, adding that Dobbs “cannot meet this standard” as the statement attributed to Jones is consistent with the factual record. Another issue with Dobbs’ claims about the newspaper statement is that they infringe Jones’ free speech rights. “Because the statement addresses a matter of public concern, is based on disclosed and substantially true facts, and does not contain a provably false assertion of fact about Bishop Dobbs, it is entitled to full First Amendment protection,” the motion asserts. The motion to dismiss concludes by returning to the ecclesiastical argument: “The federal courts and the Supreme Court of Alabama could hardly be more clear: church defamation cases, especially those intrinsically connected to ecclesiastical discipline, simply cannot be adjudicated in a secular court. … Bishop Julian M. Dobbs subjected himself to a life of ministry and to its consequences and sacrifices, including, poignantly, the tensions surrounding church discipline. He cannot now come to this Court and ask it to subvert the very process he chose to live by.”

"Let the Christians of Africa and their Crusader armies know that there is no security for you except by Islam or jizya." — Islamic State Central Africa Province, in a statement claiming the massacre of worshippers in Ituri, north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 7, 2026 More than 388 million Christians now live under high to extreme persecution for the name of Jesus Christ. That is one in every seven believers on earth, a record, and the number climbs with each passing year. Open Doors' 2026 World Watch List, released in January, put the figure eight million higher than the year before — not a plateau, but an escalation. Behind the number are faces. Among the persecuted are 201 million women and girls and 110 million children under the age of fifteen. In the last reporting year alone, 4,849 Christians were murdered for their faith, 4,712 were imprisoned, and more than 3,600 churches and Christian properties were attacked. This is not a distant abstraction, a line on a chart, a cause for a committee. It is the Body of Christ, and it is bleeding. The Epicenter: Africa Bleeds Nowhere is the wound deeper than sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 4,849 Christians killed for their faith last year, 3,490 — more than seven in ten — died in Nigeria, where Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and Fulani militants raid Christian villages at will while a paralyzed government looks the other way. Whole communities have been erased from the map. Girls carried off a decade ago have never come home. The slaughter has grown so routine that the world has all but stopped counting. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Islamic State Central Africa Province — the successor to the Allied Democratic Forces — has claimed more than 800 Christian lives in the northeast since December 2024. Its message is not coded. After butchering worshippers at prayer, it announced that there is "no security" for the Christians of Africa "except by Islam or jizya" — the tax of the subjugated, the ancient badge worn by the conquered dhimmi. This is the oldest demand in the long history of Islamic conquest, revived in our own century and preached with machine guns: convert, submit, or die. Persecution by Statute: India Elsewhere the sword is exchanged for the statute book. In India, Christians have raised an urgent call to prayer as Parliament, in its monsoon session, weighs the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026. Its now-notorious Clause 16 would empower a government-appointed "Designated Authority" to seize the assets of any organization — churches, schools, hospitals, charitable NGOs — whose foreign-funding registration lapses, is cancelled, or is merely left unrenewed. The confiscated property could then be sold or absorbed permanently into the state, with no court hearing and no judicial review. Institutions built and sustained over generations could be stripped away at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen. The pretext is drawn straight from the authoritarian playbook: foreign money, national security, the specter of "conversion." The subtext is plainer still — that Christians are agents of alien powers, a fifth column to be dispossessed and disciplined. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India has already held a national day of prayer, and a delegation of Christian leaders has pressed Union Home Minister Amit Shah to withdraw the bill or refer it to a Joint Parliamentary Committee for genuine scrutiny. As these words are written, the outcome hangs in the balance, and the churches of India are on their knees. Scapegoats: Iran In Iran, a regime cornered by its own failures has found in its Christians a convenient scapegoat. The 2026 report from Article18 — aptly titled Scapegoats — records 254 believers arrested in 2025, nearly double the previous year, the overwhelming majority charged under a penal code that criminalizes "propaganda contrary to the holy religion of Islam." After the twelve-day war with Israel last June, the Ministry of Intelligence fanned out across nineteen cities and hauled in Christians as suspected foreign agents. Their crimes were prayer meetings, baptisms, Holy Communion, and the celebration of Christmas. The Vanishing Church: Gaza Nowhere has an ancient Christian presence been squeezed closer to extinction than in Gaza. Believers have prayed on that strip of land since the earliest centuries of the faith; the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, raised over the tomb of a fifth-century bishop, is among the oldest churches on earth still in use. Yet a community that numbered some five thousand souls a generation ago had dwindled to barely a thousand on the eve of the current war, and by last Christmas to an estimated six hundred, scattered among three surviving congregations. The strangling began in earnest when Hamas seized the enclave by force in 2007 and set about ruling it as an Islamist statelet, with sharia as a source of law and the cross tolerated only on sufferance. Within months the Teacher's Bookshop — the last Christian bookstore in Gaza City, run by the Baptist church — was firebombed. Its manager, Rami Ayyad, a devout young father who had for years refused to be frightened into closing, was abducted in broad daylight and found tortured and murdered in October 2007. A wave of bombings against Christian schools, libraries, and institutions followed. No one was ever brought to account. The pressure since has been quieter but relentless: Christians treated as second-class dhimmi in their own homeland, converts paraded on Hamas-linked television, and, in 2012, a spate of alleged forced conversions that drove hundreds of Christians into the streets to protest, accusing Hamas-affiliated clerics of kidnapping and coercion. Families read the writing on the wall and left. Each departure thinned a church that had endured for nearly two millennia. Now the war that Hamas ignited on October 7, 2023, has brought that remnant to the edge of oblivion. Its churches have become shelters for the starving and the displaced, Christian and Muslim alike, even as the fighting has battered them and the faithful have died. Whatever share of blame the wider conflict must bear, the deeper truth is older than this war: under Hamas, the church in Gaza has been dying by degrees for a generation. What Islamist rule could not convert, it has driven out. Squeezed From Both Sides: Israel and the West Bank The Holy Land is the one place in this survey where Christians are pressed from two directions at once, and where honesty is hardest to come by — for each political camp brandishes one set of grievances and buries the other. The truth is that the dwindling remnant in the land of Christ's birth is menaced by radical Jews and radical Muslims alike, and served faithfully by neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians who claim to speak for it. From one side come the extremists of the Israeli far right. The interreligious Rossing Center in Jerusalem documented 111 anti-Christian incidents in 2024 and 155 in 2025: clergy spat upon in the Old City by ultra-Orthodox zealots, crosses and icons defiled, churches and cemeteries vandalized. In June 2025 settlers assaulted the Armenian Convent in Jerusalem; weeks later they torched the fifth-century Church of St. George and the old Christian cemetery in Taybeh, the last wholly Christian village in the West Bank. A widely shared video showed a Catholic nun shoved to the ground and kicked. To Israel's credit, the state is not the author of these acts: its police have condemned them, formed investigative units, and made arrests, and the Prime Minister himself called the spitting a disgrace. Within Israel's own borders, remarkably, the Christian population has held steady and even grown — an exception in a region where the church is everywhere else in retreat. From the other side, and over a far longer span, comes the slow strangulation of Christians under Palestinian rule. Here the damage is measured not in viral videos but in vanished generations. Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, was roughly 85 percent Christian within living memory; today Christians are perhaps a tenth of the town. Across the West Bank they have fallen from about a tenth of the population in 1948 to barely one percent. Behind that collapse, Christian residents and clergy describe a grim machinery: extortion and "protection" rackets, the seizure of land held since Ottoman times, the intimidation of families, the desecration of churches — a Maronite church in Bethlehem ransacked in 2019, Christmas trees put to the torch, worshippers menaced at prayer. The Nassar family, tending their farm near Bethlehem, have been beaten and dragged through Palestinian courts for ground that has been theirs for a century. And here is the cruelest turn. The Palestinian Authority pressures its Christians to keep silent, so that the harassment they endure from their Muslim neighbors goes unreported, while every grievance against Israel is amplified across the world. A frightened remnant learns to blame the safer target. Thus the persecution that has done the most to empty the Holy Land of its Christians is precisely the one least spoken of. Let both truths stand together, and let neither be flattened. A cross defiled by a settler is a cross defiled; a family driven from Bethlehem by an Islamist mob is a family driven out. Yet neither the spitting of a fanatic nor the extortion of a militia is the same as the beheading of a believer in the Congo, and to call them all by one undifferentiated word is to empty "persecution" of its meaning. The honest verdict is narrower and sadder: in the very land where the Church was born, she is being crushed slowly between two stones — and too many who claim to defend her are content to point only at the stone they dislike. The Bible as Contraband: Pakistan and North Korea In Pakistan, the blasphemy laws remain a loaded gun leveled at every Christian in the land; an accusation alone — true or invented — can end a life or empty a village before any court is troubled. And in North Korea, first on the World Watch List for a twenty-fourth consecutive year, a single Bible discovered in a home can consign an entire family to a labor camp for the rest of their days. There the Word of God is contraband and faith itself is treason. It Does Not Stay Overseas And then there is the comfortable West, which imagines itself immune. It is not. In the United Kingdom, the Countryside Alliance recorded 3,809 crimes against churches and places of worship in 2025 — more than ten every single day — theft, arson, criminal damage, and violence visited upon the sanctuaries of a civilization that no longer troubles to guard them. Not every act was ideological. But a culture that will not defend its holy places has already forgotten why they were holy. Not every sign is grim. In Texas, on March 3, some 95 percent of Republican primary voters backed Proposition 10, an advisory measure calling for the prohibition of Sharia law in the state — a blunt, grassroots refusal to let the ideology now devastating Christians abroad take root at home. One may argue over the measure's legal necessity; one cannot mistake its meaning. Nearly two million voters stood up and said: not here. The Law of Christ The lesson of this survey is not that persecution is far away. It is that persecution travels. What begins as a massacre in Ituri or a seizure order in Delhi arrives, in its own time, as a shattered window in an English parish and a warning on a Texas ballot. The same spirit that beheads in the Congo defaces in Yorkshire; it merely changes its clothes. The Western church has grown fat on its freedoms and forgetful of its own family. While our brothers and sisters are shot in their fields, arrested at their prayers, and stripped of their schools, too much of the comfortable church busies itself with the furniture of its own decline — its commissions, its causes, its endless self-examination. Canterbury readily finds its voice for every fashionable grievance and loses it entirely for the martyrs. But Paul did not write to spectators. "Carry each other's burdens," he told the Galatians, "and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). That is not a pious suggestion to be filed and forgotten. It is the law of Christ — and the persecuted church is calling in the debt. David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. Some 21,000 stories are archived at Virtueonline’s website: www.virtueonline.org His substack on Israel can be found here davidvirtue2.substack.com

By David W. Virtue, DD www.VirtueOnline.org August 7, 2026 CHARLESTON, SC — The ecclesiastical court that will try ACNA Archbishop Steve Wood next month has slammed the door on his attempt to obtain the confidential files of the Board of Inquiry that recommended charges against him, ruling that the Board's work is sealed — as to both its participants and its contents — and that the court “will not breach that confidentiality.” The order, denying Wood's Motion to Compel Production of Board of Inquiry Investigation Documents, was signed by the Rt. Rev. Ryan Reed, President of the Court for the Trial of a Bishop, and by presiding officer Katherine R. Grosskopf. It leaves the archbishop's six-day trial on track to begin September 7 in Charleston, with each side allotted fifteen hours to present its case, cross-examine witnesses, and argue before the court. The court could have rested on confidentiality alone. It said so plainly. But “in the interests of transparency for the good of the Church,” it chose to lay out its reasoning — and in doing so drew a bright line between two processes that Wood's motion had sought to blur. A Closed System The Board of Inquiry, the court explained, had one job and one job only: to review the accusations and decide whether there was enough evidence that a canonical offense may have occurred. It did that. Its investigation, the order states, “does not overlap with this Court's inquiry. It is its own closed system, and this Court will not second-guess its processes nor with it breach the confidentiality.” The analogy the court reached for is one every reader will recognize. The Board of Inquiry, it said, “is like a Grand Jury proceeding in the secular system.” Grand jury evidence and proceedings are kept secret and stand entirely apart from any trial that follows. So it is here. The trial court does not see the evidence the Board reviewed. It does not speak to the Board's members. It will decide the matter of Archbishop Steve Wood, the order says, “solely on the Presentment pleading, the responses by the archbishop, and the evidence submitted at trial.” The Back Door At the heart of Wood's motion was an insinuation. The Provincial prosecutor has stated that she turned over everything the Board of Inquiry handed her, and Wood conceded — the court was careful to note — that he is not suggesting she withheld anything. Yet the Archbishop pressed on: he had, he said, “been contacted by a witness who submitted exculpatory and/or impeachment information to the BOI through the Director of Safeguarding and Canonical Affairs.” The implication was that favorable evidence had reached the Board, never reached him, and that the province had somehow behaved improperly. The court was unmoved, and it dismantled the argument with a single observation: by his own words, Wood knows who the witness is. That witness knows what he or she submitted. That evidence can be handed to the archbishop directly, and the witness can be called to testify at trial — provided he or she has made himself available for deposition. “Therefore,” the order reads, “there is no need to breach the confidentiality of the Board of Inquiry process, and this Court will not entertain what seems to be a back-door way of casting doubt on the Board of Inquiry process.” It is a sharp rebuke, and a revealing one. The court plainly read the motion not as a genuine discovery dispute but as an attempt to relitigate the very existence of the charges by impeaching the body that brought them. No Surprises The order closes by reaffirming the rules of engagement. The court has already directed that all documentary evidence either side might submit be exchanged between the parties, and that every witness either side wishes to call make himself available for deposition. The conclusion follows with the cadence of a gavel: “There will be no surprise evidence submitted at trial. There will be no surprise witnesses. Both parties have had AMPLE time to review all evidence and prepare their cases.” The trial will run six days beginning September 7, 2026. The Scheduling Order of July 6, 2026 remains in effect. For an archbishop who came to the office as a reformer, the ruling is a setback on procedure that carries a heavier symbolic weight. Wood cannot go behind the Board of Inquiry. He must meet the charges on the trial floor, in the open, on the evidence — the same standard to which the province's clergy and laity have been held. The court has made clear it will not permit the trial of a bishop to become a trial of the process that produced him. VirtueOnline will continue its coverage as the September 7 trial approaches.

The Church of England Joins the Chorus By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 5, 2026 In July 2026 the General Synod of the Church of England voted to “hear” and engage with a document that accuses the State of Israel of genocide. Set that sentence beside another: this is the Church of Arthur Balfour, whose 1917 declaration gave the Jewish people the charter to a national home, and of Winston Churchill, who as Colonial Secretary became that promise’s unflinching champion. The Church that once helped midwife Israel into being has now lent its chamber to those who would unmake it. The document is Kairos Palestine II, formally titled A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, published in November 2025. It brands the Jewish state a “colonial enterprise built on racism” and deploys the full lexicon of the age — “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” “Jewish supremacy,” “genocide.” Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, pleaded with the Synod to reject it, warning that it erases Jewish identity and experience and imperils decades of painstaking Christian–Jewish reconciliation. The Synod platformed it anyway. Members stopped short of formal endorsement — they swapped the word “receive” for “hear” — but everyone in that chamber knew the damage was done. What makes it beyond comprehension is the reversal. In 2019 the Church of England issued God’s Unfailing Word, its first authoritative statement on Christian–Jewish relations, confessing that Christian teaching had furnished a “fertile seed-bed for murderous antisemitism” and helped pave the road to the Holocaust. In 2022 the same Church knelt in a formal act of repentance for the medieval laws that expelled England’s Jews. Barely a few years later, it lends its pulpit to a text that many British Jews read as asking, in effect, when the last Jew will leave. The conceit that Jerusalem might yet be built on England’s green and pleasant land now curdles into a colonialism of the worst and most cynical sort. It is one of the most hostile postures toward the Jewish people ever struck by the established Church. Antisemitism in Diplomatic Dress To grasp what the Synod has done, one must name the thing it has joined. Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. For two millennia it has mutated — religious, then racial, then political — but it has never died. What is emerging now is newer and more insidious: the delegitimization of Israel as a nation-state. It is the claim that Israel is a non-state, that it does not truly exist, that it never had the right to exist, and that the whole of the land belongs to a Palestine that has never once existed as a sovereign nation. This is not, at bottom, about violence. It is about denial. It is the denial of a people whose presence in that land is traceable across some four thousand years — back to Abraham, through the kingdoms of David and Solomon, through exile and return. The Arab and Muslim claim, by contrast, dates only to the seventh century, when the armies of Islam conquered the Levant in 636–638 A.D. To delegitimize Israel is to declare the Jew a non-person. It is antisemitism dressed in a diplomatic vocabulary — and in July, that vocabulary was spoken from the floor of the mother Church of the Anglican Communion. England Is Not Alone The Synod’s vote did not fall from a clear sky. The latest voices have been rising from unexpected quarters. Ireland — home to fewer than 3,000 Jews — has erupted in a Jew-hatred wholly disproportionate to its tiny Jewish community. Australia has seen synagogues torched and Jews harassed in the street. But of all these, England is the gravest, because England is not merely another nation with a restive street; it is the seat of a Church that helped give Israel its charter and once confessed its own complicity in the Holocaust. When Canterbury joins the chorus, the chorus acquires a mitre. Iran Says the Quiet Part Aloud Behind the theology and the diplomacy stands the hard geopolitical fact: Iran means what it says. This is why Tehran feels no shame in seeking Israel’s annihilation — an Israel that today numbers some 7.7 million Jews living alongside roughly two million Arab citizens, many of whom call themselves Palestinian, in a single democratic state. “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” are not the overheated slogans of a passing mob. They are the settled policy of a regime that has spent four decades and untold billions trying to send Israel to hell — without once grasping that it is Tehran that is dispatching itself there. Physician, heal thyself. October 7, 2023 — the day Hamas murdered some 1,200 Israelis and dragged roughly 250 more into the tunnels of Gaza — is now recast as payback, as resistance, as a justified response to Israeli oppression. This is no longer the language of the old antisemitic trope. It cuts to the core of Israeli identity itself, to the very right of the Jew to defend his life. It is the same denial the Synod flirted with, carried to its logical end. Iran and the Unfinished Task Iran’s hatred of Israel is not rhetorical but programmatic, pursued through Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and above all through the relentless drive for a nuclear weapon — the one instrument that could translate “Death to Israel” from a chant into a mushroom cloud. Israel understood this, and in June 2025 it struck. Operation Rising Lion crippled Iran’s air defenses and its nuclear infrastructure in twelve days; the United States finished the blow when American B-2 bombers dropped fourteen bunker-busters on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan in Operation Midnight Hammer. In February 2026, when Tehran began quietly rebuilding, Washington and Jerusalem struck again in Operation Epic Fury. The mullahs’ program has been set back by years — but not, the intelligence tells us, destroyed. Iran now regards the bomb not as an ambition but as the guarantor of its survival. That is precisely why the job is not finished. A regime that preaches genocide and pursues the means to commit it cannot be permitted to catch its breath, rebuild its centrifuges, or resurrect the caliphal dream of a Shia empire stretching to the Mediterranean. President Trump was right to strike, and he must now stay the course — denying Tehran’s rulers, whoever they may prove to be, the time and the materials to finish what they have openly promised to start. The Cardinal Sin The delegitimization of Israel is the world’s cardinal sin because it is a rehearsal for the world’s oldest crime. Iran says the quiet part aloud. Too many in the West — now, God help us, from the pulpit of Canterbury — say it softly. The task before Israel, and before every friend of the Jewish people, is to make certain that neither the loud voice nor the soft one is ever permitted to prevail. David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline (www.virtueonline.org), where some 21,000 stories are archived. A version of this essay first appeared on his Middle East Substack.

Across a dozen dioceses, The Episcopal Church has perfected the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused. A single watchdog is doing the work the shepherds will not COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 4, 2026 The Episcopal Church likes to present itself to the world as the safest room in American Christianity — inclusive, enlightened, trauma-informed, ahead of every curve. For a season the boast had substance. A generation ago, its sexual-misconduct policies were held up as a model other communions were told to imitate. But a church can live a long time on the memory of its own virtue, and this one has. While the Roman Catholic Church was hauled through the courts and the Southern Baptist Convention was forced into a public reckoning with its predators, the Episcopal Church — small, genteel, and largely beneath the notice of the secular press — has quietly perfected a different art: the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused. The pattern runs across a dozen dioceses, and it is always the same. The clergyman survives. The bishop who shielded him retires with his pension intact. And the person who was harmed is handed a “pastoral response,” shown the door, and told that the machinery of the church has, regrettably, done all it can. A labyrinth by design At the center of the failure sits Title IV, the denomination's clergy-disciplinary canon. On paper it is a solemn instrument of accountability. In practice it is a labyrinth — slow, opaque, and, when the accused wears a purple shirt, very nearly inescapable in the complainant's favor. The design flaw is structural and it is not subtle: bishops judge bishops. Complaints against them have historically passed through the Office of Pastoral Development, an arm of the Presiding Bishop's own establishment, before a Disciplinary Board for Bishops composed largely of their peers decides whether any of them will be inconvenienced. Ask a room full of shepherds to indict one of their own and you will get precisely the verdict the Episcopal Church keeps producing. You need not take my word for it. In the autumn of 2023, fifty-five members of the House of Bishops signed a letter conceding what the laity had long suspected — that in case after high-profile case, bishops accused of misconduct had faced “few or no consequences.” It is a rare thing for an institution to confess its own corruption in writing. Rarer still for it to do anything about it. If the second-highest officer cannot get justice Consider the case of Julia Ayala Harris, President of the House of Deputies — the highest lay office in the church. She alleged that in July 2022, on the very day of her election at the 80th General Convention, a retired bishop “physically overpowered” her and made inappropriate remarks as she waited to be presented to the House of Bishops. Two other bishops witnessed enough to file reports; three eyewitnesses figured in the investigation. The accused was later identified as retired Oklahoma Bishop Ed Konieczny, who denied any wrongdoing. And the outcome? As Episcopal News Service and The Living Church both reported, the church attorney referred the matter for a “pastoral response in lieu of disciplinary action” — which is ecclesiastical Latin for dismissal. No finding. No penalty. Ayala Harris called it an obvious abuse of discretion, and asked the question the whole church should have been asking: if the president of the House of Deputies can be treated this way at the very door of the House of Bishops, who in the church is safe? The bishops adopted a statement lamenting the “pain and grief.” Then they moved on. The golden parachute Then there is Prince Singh. In June 2023 his two adult sons and his former wife went public with allegations of years of physical, verbal, and psychological abuse. Singh — then bishop provisional of Eastern and Western Michigan, and before that Bishop of Rochester — was restricted from ministry that September and resigned the following day. He disputed the allegations throughout. Note what followed, because it is the template. There was no trial in any meaningful sense. In December 2024 the new Presiding Bishop, Sean Rowe, announced an “accord” — a negotiated settlement — under which Singh was suspended, but pointedly not deposed. His family, who had begged the church for years to act, were left to plead publicly that Title IV “lends itself to retraumatizing survivors and to protecting offenders.” They are right. And Singh's predecessor in those same Michigan dioceses, Whayne Hougland, had himself been suspended in 2020 for an extramarital affair before being quietly restored. Two bishops, one set of dioceses, the same soft landing. The church calls it reconciliation. The rest of us recognize a golden parachute when we see one. Grooming gets swept under the rug Then we have the case of The Rev. Jonathan Adams, rector of Trinity Episcopal, in Upperville, Virginia, in the Diocese of Virginia the spiritual home of various billionaires, including the late Paul and Bunny Mellon, the church would seem to be a reliably safe place. Yet after a Fauquier County police report concluded that Adams had groomed a boy, and had informed the Diocese of its conclusions, Bishop E. Mark Stevenson did nothing more than issue a secret directive that basically told Adams to stop. Adams is on sabbatical, and has resigned as rector, effective in October. Meanwhile, he remains a priest in good standing and is still on the Trinity Church payroll — despite prior complaints to the Diocese alleging that Adams was bullying staff, including firing one person who questioned the credibility of Adams’ statements about his prior work experience. The gravest case, and the coldest silence But the case that should shame every bishop in the church is that of the Rev. Richard Losch. In 2023 a grand jury in Grafton County, New Hampshire indicted Losch, an Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Alabama, on a charge of aggravated felonious sexual assault of a boy under the age of thirteen — conduct alleged to date to the mid-1970s, when a boy from Marblehead, Massachusetts says Losch drove him across state lines to a Boy Scout camp and raped him. Losch denies the allegations. At trial in April 2025 the jury deadlocked, and he was not convicted. As a matter of law, he is innocent until a court says otherwise. But the criminal law is not the church's excuse, and here the record is damning. According to Anglican Watch, whose reporting has been indispensable throughout, the victim pleaded for help from Episcopal officials more than a dozen times over several years — and was met, at every level, with indifference. The intake officer did nothing. The Office of Pastoral Development, then under Bishop Todd Ousley — the man responsible for training bishops in their own disciplinary obligations — refused to get involved. Emails to the Presiding Bishop went unanswered. Anglican Watch has since charged that senior figures, including former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and Alabama Bishop Glenda Curry, failed in their duty, alleging that the church ignored mandatory reporting laws in multiple states and, in Glenda Curry's case, engaged in outright coverup. And through all of it — indictment, trial, hung jury — Richard Losch remained an Episcopal priest in good standing, well into his nineties. A church that can suspend a bishop for an affair within months, but cannot bring itself to laicize an indicted alleged child rapist in years, has told you exactly what it values. What the church will actually discipline Which brings us to the bitterest irony of all. Comb the church's own transparency page for a bishop it has actually convicted and removed, and you arrive at William Love of Albany. His offense was not abuse, not assault, not the shielding of a predator. In 2020 a hearing panel found that Bishop Love had violated church law by forbidding his clergy to use the same-sex marriage rite. For declining, on grounds of conscience and Scripture, to bless what the church had newly decided to bless, he was disciplined and driven out. Let that sit. The Episcopal Church's clearest, cleanest exercise of episcopal discipline in recent memory fell not on a man accused of harming the vulnerable, but on an orthodox bishop who would not perform a wedding. The institution defends what it truly worships, and its recent record reveals the object of its devotion. It is not the little ones for whom Christ reserved the millstone. The lone watchdog Almost none of this would be public without Anglican Watch and its editor, Eric Bonetti, a retired attorney who has turned an unofficial watchdog site into the one place the abused of this church can be heard. Its Episcopal Accountability Project invites victims to name their abusers and tell the truth in the open. It has been involved, directly or indirectly, in nearly every national-level bishop's case of the past several years. That the work of holding a wealthy denomination to its own canons should fall to a single dogged blogger is itself an indictment — of a General Convention that studies the problem, a House of Bishops that laments it, and a hierarchy that will do almost anything except surrender its own impunity. Ezekiel knew these men. “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?” The Episcopal Church has bishops in abundance and shepherds almost nowhere. Until it is willing to depose one of its own for the sake of a child rather than a rubric, its policies are parchment and its apologies are noise. The abused are still waiting at the door. The bishops, as ever, have moved on. David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and editor of VirtueOnline. Some 21,000 stories are archived at Virtueonline’s website: www.virtueonline.org His Substack on the Middle East can be found here: davidvirtue2.substack.com

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | August 3, 2026 If you want to know what schism actually costs — not in theory, not in press releases, but in souls — don't read a canon or a court ruling. Look at the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin. San Joaquin was the first full diocese to walk out of the Episcopal Church, and it did so in two deliberate steps. In December 2006, its convention voted to strike from the diocesan constitution the language by which it acceded to the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church. The decisive blow came a year later. On December 8, 2007, the Fresno-based diocese, under Bishop John-David Schofield, voted overwhelmingly to sever ties with TEC and align with the Argentina-based Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. Now look at what remains Today the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin counts 18 churches and 1,958 members, under Bishop David Rice. The rival Anglican diocese, under Anglo-Catholic Bishop Eric Menees, counts 30 churches and 2,392 members. On the day the diocese divided, it had 8,500 members. Add the two survivors together and you reach roughly 4,350. The Anglicans — the ones who kept the faith — finished with a mere 434 more members than the church they left behind. Do the arithmetic. Between them, the two bodies have lost more than half of what was once a single diocese. More than 4,000 people — better than four in ten — simply walked away and never came back. This is the legacy of Gene Robinson. This is what his 2003 consecration purchased in one Central Valley diocese. Ask it honestly: how has any of this served Christ's Church or advanced His kingdom? It has not. And the man who presided over the wreckage on the Episcopal side — the man who made certain the departing were stripped, sued, and driven out — died this week. His name was Jerry Lamb. He was 85. He died on July 25. Pardon me if I do not pretend to mourn. The Enforcer Let us be precise, because precision is the sharper weapon. Lamb did not start the fire at San Joaquin; Gene Robinson and the General Convention did that. But when the Presiding Bishop needed a man to punish those who left, Lamb answered the call — and he did the work with relish. A former Roman Catholic priest who had served as a college chaplain and camp director, Lamb was ordained an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Oregon in 1977. He rose through the Diocese of Northern California — rector, diocesan staff, and in 1991 coadjutor to Bishop John L. Thompson — before succeeding Thompson as the diocese's sixth bishop the following year. He led Northern California for fourteen years. His churchmanship, it must be said, was as thin as his institutional ambition was not. Communion for the Unbaptized Consider the doctrine for which Lamb is best remembered. He was among the Episcopal Church's first public champions of communion without baptism — offering the Body and Blood of Christ to men and women who had never been baptized into His death. By his own telling, he crossed that line at a funeral in the 1990s. According to a 2022 account first published in Deputy News, Lamb resolved to invite the unbaptized to the altar while burying the husband of his secretary — a sheriff's deputy killed in the line of duty. With law officers filling the pews, Lamb reportedly said he could not stand there and tell them only the baptized might come forward: “I just can't do that.” Sentiment, however, is not sacramental theology. What Lamb could not bring himself to do was hold a line the Church has held since the apostles. Years later, when his own former diocese moved to repeal the canon requiring baptism before communion, 22 prominent Episcopal theologians rose to condemn it, and General Convention — to its limited credit — took no action. That is the ground Lamb spent a career softening. San Joaquin Then came his true assignment. After Lamb retired from Northern California in late 2006, and after San Joaquin voted to leave, the ultra-liberal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori nominated him bishop provisional — charged, she said, with serving the clergy and congregations who wished to remain Episcopalian. Delegates from just 19 of the diocese's original 47 congregations elected him. He declared his intentions at once. On taking office, Lamb licensed three women priests into what had been one of only three domestic Episcopal dioceses that declined to ordain women — a calculated affront to the Anglo-Catholic conscience of the place. He spoke, naturally, of reconciliation. The word was hollow. His lawyers were already drafting the suits to seize the property of the congregations that had withdrawn. In the fall of 2008 he deposed 36 priests and 16 deacons of the Anglican diocese, charging them with abandoning the communion of the Episcopal Church — their offense being that they declined to beg release from vows they fully intended to keep. He stepped down in 2011, his work finished. The courts completed it. In July 2009, California's Superior Court ruled that Lamb's body was the true Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin and the rightful owner of the assets the departing parishes held. Rulings in 2013 and 2014 forced the return of more than 30 properties; the Anglican appeals were exhausted by 2016. The buildings were recovered. The people were not. The Final Accounting Give the man his due: he was efficient. He did precisely what he was sent to do, and he did it thoroughly. But look at what the efficiency bought. He won the buildings and lost the diocese. He got the deeds and left the pews empty. He enforced the canons and emptied the churches. Half a diocese is gone, and no lawsuit will ever bring it back. That is what schism really looks like. ENS contributed to this report.