Confusion and Coercion in Church Property Litigation
Brian Schmalzbach, 96 Va. L. Rev. 443 (2010)
If, after a relatively calm decade in the 1990s, the Protestant Episcopal Church thought its role on the church property front of the American Kulturkampf was over, it was in for a rude awakening. The 2003 ordination of Gene Robinson, an openly homosexual bishop, ignited a firestorm of dissent and ultimately provoked dozens of Episcopal parishes and even whole dioceses to leave one of the oldest Protestant denominations in America. The conflict reached a head in 2006, when eleven Virginia parishes withdrew from the Episcopal Church and affiliated with the Convocation of Anglicans in North America. The massive, multi-million dollar litigation over property worth tens of millions of dollars that followed concerned one simple question: Is the local parish or the supercongregational denomination entitled to retain control of church property? Answering this question has implicated a host of exceedingly complex constitutional problems.
