Newsweek: Episcopalians are Assimilating?

Thanks to this article in Newsweek, "Family Feud: Who cares about the arcane battles of Episcopal Church?" we will be walking around all day now scratching our head, trying to reorient totally our thinking about the Jews and Gentiles in America.

See, we were taught that the epitome of assimilation for a Jewish immigrant or his descendant was to attain membership in the Episcopalian Church - the essence of goyishness, if you pardon my Yiddish.

Of course, the story went, this was a bad thing to do if you were a Jew because it meant that part of our tribe was now gone and assimilated into the protoplasm of American Christianity.

Whoa. Lisa Miller informs us today that indeed it is the Episcopalians who are in danger of assimilating into the larger cauldron of the American soup and themselves dwindling due to, what other term could we use, due to assimilation.

This does not compute.

Jews can assimilate by becoming Episcopalians.

Episcopalians cannot assimilate and disappear.

This does not compute.

Here is how Miller brilliantly puts it, knowing full well the irony of the facts:

...After years of dominance, Episcopalians have become a minority religion in America. There are just 2.4 million Episcopalians in the United States, down from 3.5 million in 2001—a 31 percent falloff. (The Episcopal Church is the American branch of the Anglican Communion, a worldwide church that has 80 million members.) By comparison, there are 8 million nondenominational Christians (a low estimate), up from 2.5 million—an explosion of 220 percent over the same period. Thanks to the Great Awakenings and the waves of immigration over the past hundred years there are exponentially more Roman Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists in America than Episcopalians. There are also—surprisingly—more Mormons, more Pentecostals, and slightly more Jews. (This last is especially interesting because at the height of 20th-century anti-Semitism, American Jews who wanted access to the highest levels of status and power would sometimes become Episcopalian. One wonders whether they would have done so had they known that they were switching from one shrinking minority religion to another.) According to the latest data from the American Religious Identification Survey, more people belong to cults and emerging religions than to the Episcopal Church...more...