It's Tuesday, March 21st, 2023.

I'm Albert Molar, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from

a Christian worldview.

It's really important at times to understand the American religious landscape and the

major changes, even transformations that have taken place in recent decades in that religious

landscape because it has a great deal to do with how we place evangelical Christianity

and our predicament or paradox of living in the modern age within that context.

So let's just go back several decades.

If you go back, say, half a century, the most establishment church of the most Protestant

establishment in the United States was the Episcopal Church.

And the Episcopal Church was at the top of a very rarefied heap, you might say.

Now the Episcopal Church was never that large in terms of numbers, but it was very large

in terms of influence.

If you look at how the elite in society operates, and there always is an elite in every society.

As George Orwell said, the thing about all animals being equal is that some are more equal

than others.

And that was an accurate parable about how elites work.

There's going to be an elite.

You might call the elite the poet bureau, or you might call it, well, the establishment.

And nonetheless, there's an elite somewhere.

And in the United States, in the Anglo-American tradition, in the tradition of English speaking

civilization, well, the Episcopalians were the very top of that pyramid.

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