It was in June 2022 that my wife and I started looking for a home in Washington, D.C. Among our desires was a safe neighborhood in which to raise a child, near good grocery stores and restaurants and close enough to my new job that I could walk to work. Also among our priorities was a good church.
I had been baptized in the Episcopal Church only one year earlier, whereas my wife is a cradle Episcopalian. (Literally: At the age of two months, she played baby Jesus in the Epiphany pageant at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.) And so our goal was to find a suitable Episcopal or, perhaps, Anglican church. Since the Episcopal Diocese of Washington comprises ninety-eight congregations—including the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, better known as the National Cathedral—the innocent observer will be excused for thinking that it must be easy to find a suitable place to worship. But the jaded observer of religion in America today will see the problem.
The problem was made painfully manifest by the month in question. We walked around D.C. that June with an eye on the flags the churches were flying (Rainbow, Progress Pride) and the signs they were displaying (Black Lives Matter, “In This House We Believe”). Spotting a cross other than the plus sign at the end of LGBTQIA+ could be a challenge.
My wife and I are, broadly speaking, theologically conservative, but our main concern was not that the flags and signs were promoting progressive values. Rather, in our opinion, religious institutions should not be making sociopolitical statements of any kind. We do not wish to attend a church that is festooned with banners promoting causes or candidates we approve of, either.
The standard line about Episcopalianism—I quote from an article in the New York Times about Sean W. Rowe, the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of America—is that it is “one of the historic mainline Protestant denominations, which tend to be progressive in their theology and traditional in worship style.” For what it’s worth, my wife and I are suspicious of such mismatches, including the reverse. The combination of conservative belief with progressive style that characterizes most megachurches likewise holds no appeal.
The reader will reasonably ask why I became an Episcopalian when I don’t like progressive theology. One reason is, of course, family. Another is my longstanding love of Anglican choral music and of the cadences in the Book of Common Prayer (even in most post-1662 versions), neither of which can, in my view, be matched by any other Christian tradition in English.
Moreover, when I first started attending church regularly in 2018, I was so very naive that I did not understand what “progressive Christianity” meant. It did not occur to me—and my Sundays at the glorious Temple Church in London did not suggest to me—that priests would allow theology and politics to bleed into each other in surroundings where robed choristers sang Parry as light streamed through stained glass and parishioners in dark wooden pews belted out “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven.”
I am no longer quite so naive. My understanding of both religion itself and the contested place of religion in American life is, I believe, far greater than it was only a few years back. And yet I must also say this, even though many will ridicule me for willfully ignoring the facts on the ground: I do not understand why anyone would regularly attend religious services who was not in some sense theologically traditional or conservative.
Belonging to a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque is not the same as joining a secular civic group, whether local or national. True, they have plenty in common. Tocqueville with good reason wrote admiringly about the “commercial and industrial associations in which all [Americans] take part” but “also . . . a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small,” mentioning such institutions as fêtes, inns, churches, and schools. And true, too, there is much to be said for the idea, associated with Durkheim, that religious practice is fundamentally social: “Communion” and “community” are nearly the same word. (This is one reason why “Zoom church,” as in the Covid years, is dreadful.)
And yet, to quote my colleague Yuval Levin, “our religious institutions are most important not for reasons of civic utility, such as running soup kitchens or cleaning up after natural disasters. No, their highest function is offering us access to the fullest truth about our world.” (Levin, who is Jewish, understands that different people discern different religious truths, but “for its believers, . . . each faith serves the highest purpose.”) What this means in practice is that we should recoil when “we find institutions intended to change hearts and save souls used instead as stages for political theater.”
Yes, I know that Anglicanism broke from Roman Catholicism for theatrically political reasons—as, more mildly, did the Episcopal Church from the Church of England 255 years later. It is undeniable that schisms generally come about when divine doctrine and worldly considerations collide. I merely wish—and I concede that this is a flabby remark—to minimize these collisions.
So what happened in Washington two and a half years ago? My wife and I spotted all of two Episcopal parishes that flew no flags and displayed no signs other than the banner and seal of the Episcopal Church itself. A few weeks later, we fell hard for a house that happened to be just a few blocks from one of them. On the day before we made an offer on what is now our home, we entered that church for the first time.
It was a Sunday afternoon in August. We had attended church that morning in the town where we then lived—a church that, to our sadness, did use signs (and often sermons, too) to advertise its progressivism—and had taken the train down to Washington. Walking around what would become our new neighborhood, we decided to enter this new church to see what it looked like inside. We were fortunate to be greeted warmly by a member of the flower guild, to whom we explained that we were Episcopalians who were likely to move to the area. Almost her first words to us were, “We believe here in leaving our politics at the door.”
Hallelujah! We could have kissed her. And what she told us has held true. There are no flags or signs. The excellent sermons are firmly grounded in the text and have never veered into partisan politics. (Very occasionally there is a phrase that might—but also might not—be interpreted as a political jab. My wife and I then spend days arguing about whether it was or wasn’t.) We all pass the Peace without giving any thought to how our fellow parishioners might have voted or which senators the people kneeling beside us work for. The church’s mission statement formalizes this ethos: “For more than 200 years we have sought to be a sanctuary from an often-chaotic and divided world.”
At a gathering over coffee in the rectory on the Sunday morning when my wife, one-year-old daughter, and I were to be formally introduced to the congregation, the rector asked all the new members to say why they had chosen to join this particular church. The most common answer was ours: relief at the absence of politics in the sanctuary.
Almost fifty new members were inducted that day. This suggests that one way to stanch the hemorrhaging of Episcopalians in most parishes—Benjamin Crosby, an Episcopal priest, noted recently that “demographers predict that our numbers will hit zero around 2040”—is to start being theologically serious again.
The coming months and years in Washington will be politically interesting. But on Sunday mornings, my family doesn’t want to be interested in politics. Neither, it seems, do the hundreds of other individuals and families with whom we join in fellowship, many of them young and not born into the Georgetown set. Presiding Bishop Rowe and the longtime bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, may wish to take notice.
