Yeah, very very low, laughably low. Newsweek reporters should get out of NYC once in awhile. Or out of Starbucks on Sunday morning. Talk about a parochial viewpoint....
A colleague who is Episcopalian describes the rift thus: "Here we have the faith of the Founding Fathers, the religion that is the purest representation of old-line American power and money, tearing itself apart before our very eyes over … homosexuality. How embarrassing! How publicly humiliating—this for a faith and culture that abhors nothing more than public humiliation."
The Episcopal Church is not the first formerly-Chirstian group to go pagan. Choices must be made every day and some people make the wrong ones. The difference is that the Christians used to be influential enough to maintain some control.
“Only after the Revolution did the states agree to separate their governments from religion—an agreement reflected in Establishment Clause of the Constitution.”
The author is completely wrong about this. The establishment clause did NOT limit the states. It limited Congress.
The establishment clause was inserted to protect states against the feds either mandating or prohibiting an established church in the state. Thus, states who had an official religion got to keep theirs. States who did not were protected against the feds forcing them to have one.
It is only in the topsy turvy world of modern, living, constitutional law that the establishment clause has been interpreted to mean exactly the opposite of what the founders meant.
This is a very badly written article as usual from Newsweek.