The Power of Positive Thinking?

In the red jacket is Paula White, on whom Donald Trump should insist as the next Supreme Leader of Iran, refusing to accept anything less than unconditional surrender. She would bring refreshing connections to the Unification Church, and through that to the decidedly non-Shia Nation of Islam with which it organises mass events; in turn, the Nation of Islam promotes Dianetics, the foundation of Scientology.

If the White Supreme Leadership lasted only until the next President of the United States required another regime change in Iran, then Dame Sarah Mullally may well retire as Archbishop of Canterbury during the next Parliament, with Nigel Farage possibly in a position to choose her successor. Since Reform UK’s Britain would by then be the principal redoubt of Trumpism, then Farage should nominate White. It is historically anomalous that eight of the nine Archbishops of Canterbury in living memory have been Trinitarians, even if the fifth was an atheist. Her Grace would correct that discrepancy.

As for the prosperity gospel, Trump grew up in the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, who even took Trump’s first wedding there. The Power of Positive Thinking was the old mainline American Protestant tradition reconfigured by the New Thought movement, and prosperity theology is that reconfiguration of Pentecostalism. It was only to be expected that White should head Trump’s White House Faith Office. Now to bring her, first to Tehran, and then to Canterbury. Complete with her third and current husband, Jonathan Cain. Yes, the one out of Journey. Don’t stop believing, hold on to that feeling.

Might Archbishop Paula heal the rift with GAFCON? In part, perhaps. Several of its African provinces do in fact ordain women all the way to the episcopate while maintaining an uncompromisingly conservative stance on homosexuality, yet Anglican clerical opposition to the ordination of women in the British Isles, in North America, in Australia and in New Zealand is very largely homosexual and is by no means uniformly celibate in that. The first category is often influenced by Pentecostalism, while the second most emphatically is not.

For the time being, GAFCON has adopted a sort of presbyterian polity. If that, since ruling elders are no less πρεσβύτεροι than preaching elders are, unlike the lay members of the Global Anglican Council. Next in that line, so to speak, will be the Society of Saint Pius X, rule of which is by a General Chapter in which not only do bishops and simple presbyters have equal status, but it was considered an aberration that the last Superior General was a bishop, rather than being a simple presbyter to whom the Society's bishops would have be subject, as they are again now, with more soon to be added. The fate of the Petite Église and of the беспоповцы awaits. From those latter, at least, have sprung phenomena that have made Paula White look like Saint Paul himself.