“The Republican party at prayer” is the way Americans used to snicker at the Episcopal Church, the snobby, worldly US branch of the Anglican communion. Recently, though, the church has taken on a new identity in the eyes of the world: as the gay-rights movement at prayer. Church leaders met in Columbus, Ohio, last week to vote on dozens of pressing internal matters. They elected the church’s first-ever female presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, to lead it for the next nine years. But all of that won public notice only in relation to the leaders’ deliberations over gay ordinations, gay bishops and gay marriages.

Such questions disturb all churches nowadays but gay issues are a particularly big problem for Episcopalianism. One reason is that the church is dying. Through decades in which Americans have moved to more conservative denominations, Episcopalians swam with the social tide and against the religious one, trying to anticipate rather than adapt to new movements that speak in the name of liberation. This won the church political kudos – particularly during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa – but it never drew spiritually hungry people into the pews. With just over 2m worshippers, the Episcopal Church is smaller than in generations. Its influence comes from the inertia of the era when it was the church of the few, the rich and the well-born.