"There was a time when I claimed for myself the title 'evangelical.' To me it meant one who lived on the Protestant and low church side of our Communion. It did not mean ill-informed, prejudiced, close-minded, and doctrinaire in a fundamentalist direction. After Lambeth I no longer wished to be identified with that word. The evangelicals I have met in public debate are frequently dishonest, manipulative, and unworried by any commitment to truth, fairness, or justice. If that is the evangelical future of Christianity they talk about so gleefully, then I want no part of it.
"I saw the death of the church visibly at the Lambeth Conference. The evangelical fundamentalist takeover of the church internationally was apparent. It is not, I am confident, that this right-wing form of Christianity is growing, as they claimed, so much as it is that thinking people in the mainline modern churches are departing, leaving these distorted evangelicals as the sole remaining voices of Christ in the public arena. I have labored through all of my career to give a credible voice to a Christianity that was in dialogue with the real world. At Lambeth that possibility seemed to be a losing cause. If the Anglican Communion can turn this far to the right, then it joins a strident fundamentalist Protestantism, an antiquated Roman Catholicism, and an irrelevant Orthodox tradition as the major expressions of Christianity at the dawn of the twenty-first century. There is no leaven in that ecclesiastical lump and no candle left to shine in that ecclesiastical darkness. I see no hope for a Christian future in any of them. There is very little in any of these conservative traditions with which I could identify. If the church was not dying, objectivity then I needed to face the fact that it was surely dying for me."