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Communion no more: as Anglicanism's transcontinental unraveling continues.

Article Excerpt
WITH a half millennium behind it, the Anglican Communion has had a good run. Its unique blend of Catholic and Protestant theology and ecclesiology, first outlined in Queen Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity of 1559, has weathered turbulences as diverse as Cromwell's Puritans and Stuart Catholics.

Over the centuries, it flourished. As English culture spread beyond its island home, Anglicanism outgrew its stature as a national church and became a religion of empire--first in North America and later in the African colonies. The faith grew dramatically in the last hundred years, and Anglicanism became a truly global church. Today, it is the third-largest Christian denomination, behind Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

The wide geographic and cultural reach of the church, however, has lately seemed likely to be its undoing. While Anglicanism can count 77 million people as believers and prides itself on being a worldwide, unified "communion" with, the term implies, a single ethics, this is not the reality on the ground. In England itself, Anglicanism is a civil religion, the state church: Even today, the British government has a hand in appointing the church's bishops. This has led to a latitudinarian (some would say flaky) character that prefers the soup neither too hot nor too cold.

In the former colonies, meanwhile, the churches have been unbound. Anglicans are one among many sects in North America, though the very definition of the blue-blood "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant"--WASP--is an Anglican, or "Episcopalian," as they began...