S.M. Hutchens on Calvin Robinson and the 2024 Mere Anglicanism Conference

"Mere Anglicanism, according to the group’s website, is 'an organization of Anglican Christians seeking to engage the culture with the Gospel of Jesus Christ by discipling, training, and educating lay and clergy leaders for the renewal of biblical and orthodox Anglicanism.' Thus, this group would be supposed to stand against progressivist corruptions of present-day Anglicanism, including those involving the sexual confusions in which it is entangled. At the group’s recent gathering in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the invited speakers was Fr. Calvin Robinson, who, after giving his paper, was barred from further participation in the conference. He writes:

On Friday 19th January [2024] I gave a talk at the Mere Anglicanism conference in Charleston, South Carolina. I was given the brief of, “Critical Theories are Antithetical to the Gospel.” I wanted to address the root of the problem rather than the symptoms, which we spend too much time focusing on. It was my point that the reason Gender Theory, Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory are so prevalent in the Church today is because we have conceded too much ground to Feminism.

Fr. Robinson asserted that women priests were a direct product of feminist influence and concluded that:

Feminism—an arm of liberalism—is the gate by which all the other woke ideas gain ground. They are all part of the same ideology, but Feminism is the brute force which breaks down the wall for all the others. . . . What combines queer theory, gender theory, [and] critical race theory? Their attempt to destroy the patriarchy and smash heteronormativity. [This is] the language of Marxism. These are not the arguments of theology, but of philosophy. They are weapons of the enemy, as instituted by the philosopher Karl Marx.

Some members of the audience were offended by Fr. Robinson’s direct association of women’s ordination and feminism with Critical Theory and Marxism. As a result of the offense, he was called before a bishop, who strongly reprimanded him, and barred from further participation in conference activities by its organizers. There were, it appears, certain conclusions he was not permitted to draw about the roots of Critical Theory, his assigned topic, and the conference did not wish to hear about a certain application of its energies in particular.

It is a continuing source of wonderment to this writer that so many organizations claiming to admire C. S. Lewis hold events celebrating his life and writing and trade upon his thinking (by, for example, giving themselves names like 'Mere Anglicanism') while ignoring his well-known opinion, echoed by Fr. Robinson, that women’s ordination, while bearing its own form of secular rationality, isn’t Christian at all. Rather, by setting at naught the symbolic weight of maleness in Christian presbyters, it results in something 'not near so much like a Church' (as Lewis takes it from Jane Austen’s Bingley). For agreement with this opinion, Fr. Robinson, who dared to identify some of the deformations encouraged by this un-Christian neoplasm, has been banished by people who put themselves forward as 'biblical and orthodox Anglicans' in the style of C. S. Lewis.

If Lewis was right, it calls into question the 'sustainability'—not of some form of feminized religion—but of Christianity itself in sects that profess to be orthodox but persist in ordaining women."

(S.M. Hutchens is Senior Editor of Touchstone Magazine.  Subscribe to here if you're not already a subscriber.  This is a magazine that every tradtional Christian needs to be reading.)