Global South Anglicans cut their ties to Canterbury? Maybe that's a news story worth ink

One of the most depressing things about being a reporter these days is trying to accept the fact that we live in a split, divided, warped news marketplace in which stories that, in the past, would have been Big News for everyone are now “niche” news items that half of our journalism culture feels totally comfortable ignoring.

This happens on the journalist “right” as well as the journalism “left,” or whatever word people are using instead of “left” these days.

This just in: One of the world’s great Christian traditions — the global Anglican Communion — ran into a wall late last week. The big idea: Anglican leaders from nations that represent about 80% of all Anglicans regularly IN PEWS — as opposed to being names on membership lists that may or may not be relevant — voted to cut the ties between Canterbury and the most of the Anglican Communion.

I’ve been watching for elite media coverage all weekend. Here is a Google News file with logical search terms. Please click that search, which was made Sunday night. What do you see? Obviously, at that moment, this was a “conservative” and/or “religious” media story.

You see, the Anglicans in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) represent the growing (in some cases booming) churches of Africa, Asia and the Third World. They do not, however, represent the zip codes in which the major newsrooms of the Western world are located. They also do not represent the world’s richest Anglicans. Thus, to be blunt, what these “lesser” Anglicans say is NEWS is not news until the New York Times says that it’s news. Right?

With that in mind read the top of this report — long, but essential — from the venerable Anglican publication called The Living Church: “GAFCON Rejects Archbishop Justin Welby’s Leadership.”

On April 21, primates representing a large majority of the Anglican Communion formally repudiated the historic leadership of the See of Canterbury.

Yo, journalists: It's time for a big update (or two) on the old, old Anglican wars timeline

Scribes who have been covering the Anglican Communion wars since, oh, the late 1970s or so (there are a few of us Jurassic journalists left) know that this has been a long, complicated road.

In most recent elite-press coverage, this timeline has been radically truncated, turning battles over a wide range of doctrines and church-history issues into a simple good vs. evil clash over LGBTQ rights. In this version of history, this global doctrinal war began in 2003 with the consecration of a non-celibate gay bishop in the tiny, shrinking Diocese of New Hampshire here in America.

Here at GetReligion, I have long referred to this fallacy as “Anglican timeline disease.” Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

The key, right now, is that journalists need to radically update this timeline, in the wake of some major global developments that are receiving little elite coverage. Here is the dramatic double-decker headline for the major report in The Wall Street Journal:

Conservative Anglican Leaders Call for Break With Church of England Over Same-Sex Blessings
Archbishops from Africa and elsewhere repudiate the Archbishop of Canterbury’s historic role as spiritual leader of Anglicans worldwide

The overture for this solid story included several bites of information that are worth noting:

Conservative Anglican archbishops on Monday said the Church of England had forfeited its traditional leadership role in the worldwide Anglican Communion by approving the blessing of same-sex relationships earlier this month, opening a historic rift in one of the world’s biggest Christian denominations.