Is it just me, or is there a weird pining for the British Empire in some of the lamentations of angry Anglicans over Gene Robinson’s consecration? Here’s the primate of the Southern Cone of America (an Anglican province with slightly more members than the Diocese of New Hampshire!):
“The United States have declared independence,” said Archbishop Greg Venables, the Anglican leader of South America.
Yes, Archbishop Venables, yes they have. Back in 1776.
Or how about this odd angle in Bishop of Pittsburgh Robert Duncan’s speech at the American Anglican Council pow-wow in Dallas?
“For Rowan Williams, the last British Empire is his to lose.”
The queen, no doubt, appreciates the prayers of Her Majesty’s people in Pittsburgh.
The decline and fall of the Empire is a tried-and-true conservative motif, but it generates some awkward dissonances with the newly-discovered anti-imperialist, identity-politics conservatism — you know, the one in which the West is trying to export its parochial liberalism on the differently-cultured South, where treating homosexuals as animals, for example, is just another “cultural lens” worth celebrating in the right-wing version of post-modern multiculturalism.