The Anglican Covenant has drawn fire from an Anglican anarchist contingent which is reluctant to be tied down by such trivia as dogma and creeds. Their website is populated with endorsements from the usual suspects, including a double-barrelled Canadian pomposity consisting of the Revs. Malcolm French and Alan Perry.

The Rev Gregory Cameron, who was on the committee that drew up the covenant, has their number, though, and has characterised them as “latter-day little Englanders”. Very perceptive.

From here:

[C]ritics of the plan, which is known as the Anglican Covenant, claim it would cede control over the affairs of the Church of England to a foreign authority for the first time since Henry VIII.

The covenant was deemed necessary after international criticism from conservative Anglicans followed the ordination of the Rt Rev Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, as Bishop of New Hampshire in 2004.

Two liberal groups, Inclusive Church and Modern Church, have launched a campaign against the covenant plan, which they say is overwhelmingly backed by traditionalists.

The critics ran an advertisement in the Church Times claiming that the plan represented a move to install an “authoritarian leadership” and “the biggest change to the Church since the Reformation”.

However, the Bishop of St Asaph, the Rt Rev Gregory Cameron, who was on the committee that drew up the covenant, described the opponents as “latter-day little Englanders”.

The Anglican Covenant has raised the ire of liberals because, they say, it will forbid “new developments” create an un-Anglican dogma, be too centralised and – this is my favourite – hinder “mission”.

Some of the whining is emanating from the Modern Church and some from the Inclusive Church and there is a full page advertisement denouncing it.

Without a change of heart within Western Anglicanism, the Covenant itself is not going to solve anything. For example, the Anglican Church of Canada has promised to study it for the next six years – if it is still around in six years; but no-one seriously believes that this is anything other than a tactic to delay its inevitable rejection in the hope that,by then,  most of the conservative opposition will have left for greener pastures.

The liberal fuss about the Covenant reminds me of the Bloomsbury Group who, for all their lofty ideals of re-inventing literature, politics, gender and aesthetics, simply wanted to subvert contemporary mores so that they could be free to copulate with anything that moved. And so it goes with the priestly protestations against the Covenant: it is really all about sex. Dogma should be subservient to sodomy – it’s as simple as that.