Just when I think I might start to like George Will a little, he tells the world on ABC’s Sunday Morning that Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama will have “some impact” because “this country is so eager, a) to feel good about itself by doing this [electing an African American president?], but more than that to put paid to the whole Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson game of political rhetoric.” Partial translation: Powell has endorsed Obama (and Obama supporters are happy about the endorsement) because Obama is black.

Elsewhere, Will has claimed that Obama will get three votes because he’s black for every vote he’ll lose. So, of course, Powell (also being black and not being a true conservative) has gone with the herd who are supporting Obama as an afirmative action candidate.

Writing on the same subject, Robert Novak seems by his title theme, “Powell’s Predictable Endorsement,” to drift into the same territory of circumstantial ad hominem that has claimed Will. But Novak’s point turns out to be that Powell has always been a liberal. I thought Powell’s endorsement prettty much summed up the campaign as I see it it right now; and that being the case, I’m hard put to disagree with Novak.

Then there’s Will’s most recent Washington Post column characterizing deposed Episcopal Bishop Robert Duncan as a hero of the faith, a regular Martin Luther, if you will.

The Rev. Robert Duncan, 60, is not a Lutheran, but he is a Luther, of sorts. The former Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh has, in effect, said the words with which Martin Luther shattered Christendom and asserted the primacy of individual judgment and conscience that defines the modern temperament: ” Ich kann nicht anders” — I cannot do otherwise.

As every Episcopalian knows, Robert Duncan could have done otherwise. He has pursued a course towards establishing a separatist Anglican province in the United States (with himself as principal) for many years now. He has collected a relatively small group of followers who are dissatisfied with the 1979 Prayerbook, the feminization of the church (so called — read ordination of women to the priesthood), and most recently by pressures within the church for full inclusion of gays, lesbians, and transgendered persons, symbolized for many by the consecration of the church’s first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. But, as Will protests (too much, I think), echoing a theme Duncan has sounded again and again:

It is not the secessionists such as Duncan who are, as critics charge, obsessed with homosexuality. The Episcopal Church’s leadership is latitudinarian — tolerant to the point of incoherence, Duncan and kindred spirits think — about clergy who deviate from traditional church teachings concerning such core doctrines as the divinity of Christ, the authority of Scripture and the path to salvation. But the national church insists on the ordination of openly gay clergy and on blessing same-sex unions.

It is for this reason, the putative apostasy of church leadership, that the Episcopal Church has declined in membership and influence, as Will sees it:

The Episcopal Church once was America’s upper crust at prayer. Today it is “progressive” politics cloaked — very thinly — in piety. Episcopalians’ discontents tell a cautionary tale for political as well as religious associations. As the church’s doctrines have become more elastic, the church has contracted. It celebrates an “inclusiveness” that includes fewer and fewer members.

Will’s views echo those of schismatics but do not reflect the political reality. Duncan’s splinter group has affiliated with Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, but the schismatic Dioceses of San Joachin and (soon to be) Fort Worth have affiliated with Bishop Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone, since their primary complaint is women’s ordination. Schism does not breed unity, but breeds more schism.

Meanwhile the Episcopal Church continues. It is true that the church lost members between 1965 and 2002, but the reasons for that loss are complex and by no means as Duncan and his followers maintain. Those who think the Episcopal Church is incoherent, as Duncan alleges, might wish to read a bit at the site of The Episcopal Majority, now closed because its work is done, or spend some time with Fr. Mark Harris.

All churches are political. That the Episcopal Church’s politics have moved somewhat left of center is no different a case than those of the United Methodist Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, which have moved right of center (the Baptists further than the Methodists), no different indeed from the case of Mr. Will’s church, which in this essay I will not call Catholic but Roman, and which has been wrenched sharply to the political right by its current Pope, a move that is causing a good deal of discomfort to liberal Catholics.

The goal of schism in the Anglican Communion is not merely to destabilize communion, but to destroy it and replace it with something else. The Communion has, as Fr. Harris points out, never been a church. It is rather a “fellowship of churches.” What Duncan wants is to create an Anglican Church, broad enough perhaps to include the various schismatics with their differences, but not broad enough to include the Episcopal Church.

And in spite of a recent press conference in which he protests some remaining loyalty to Canterbury, I don’t think Duncan cares much whether the empty chair in his imagined cathedral is reserved for the ABC. As matters stand now it will be reserved for the Archbishop of Nigeria, who dreams of rule in the United States on the order of that which Muslim fundamentalists have enforced in parts of the Islamic world.

I wish the church had some law-enforcement agency we could encourage to arrest the arrestable, to jail the jailable, to banish the banishable; but it doesn’t. . . . [T]hings are going haywire….Don’t just let – ‘freedom, freedom, freedom!’ Your child begins to grow up and do all sorts of things, you cannot even cane him, you cannot even reprimand him, you cannot do anything, they say it’s illegal, because all sorts of laws have removed parents’ control over their children. All this must change.

Far from being a Lutheran hero and asserting “the primacy of individual judgment and conscience,” Robert Duncan has sworn fealty to a would-be tyrant. I can’t believe Mr. Will would support such a thing if he thought about it; though the Will/Duncan Luther is a false Luther, as just a casual perusal of Christian Liberty will show, but’s that’s a subject for another day.