Peter Jensen is hardly likely to thank the pewsitter for comparing him to Ronald Reagan. But the Archbishop is safely out of the country so let's take the risk.
Maybe it was the actor in him, recognising the scent of pretence, but Reagan realised that the Soviet Union was a tottering edifice like a rickety stage set likely to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. All he had to do was give it a little push. The rest was history.
Jensen has very different politics to Reagan, and he doesn't dye his hair, but somewhat like the president, Jensen has seen that the liberal dominance of the Anglican Communion is a Potemkin village, an elaborate camouflage that only serves to dazzle passing dignitaries.
British journalist Andrew Brown cheekily told a meeting of the Modern Churchpersons Union (the pewsitter has not made up the name) that the "malevolence towards the structures of the Anglican Communion started with the liberals. It started with you guys."
Brown recounts that when Li Tim-Oi, the first woman priest, was ordained in emergency conditions in China during World War Two, respect for the Communion's conventions (because that's all they are) meant that she quietly returned to lay life. But when the Americans ordained women priests thirty years later, things had changed.
"The whole understanding of what constitutes obedience to God had shifted," says Brown. "The old colonial church played by the rules. The new independent one ignored them, pointed out that they didn't exist, they weren't binding and so on and so forth."
The 1978, 1988 and 1998 Lambeth conferences were consumed by futile attempts to stop the Americans doing something they wanted to do. It never worked. It never could.
Put this way, rather than being shocked that many evangelicals boycotted this year's Lambeth, perhaps we should wonder why they were such slow learners. Thirty years to learn that the Anglican Communion has no real structures at all. They can't hold anything up.
This pewsitter is prepared to be surprised " but this year's Lambeth conference is designed carefully not to (as US journos say) "commit news". There will be nothing to report.
Which means the real news is GAFCON, the Global Anglican Futures Conference in Jerusalem, organised with the key assistance of our Archbishop on behalf of a wide range of orthodox Anglicans " much broader than evangelicals alone. GAFCON with women priests, Anglo-Catholics and charismatics, is a heady mix. Too heady for a worried poster to one of our delegate's blogs, asking if some Gafconites were too, um, "catholic', to join with us.
It's best to think of the Anglican Communion as a church building partly in ruins (not as wiped out as poor old St Barnabas', Broadway). GAFCON is an attempt to build a new church structure inside the ruins of the old.
In those areas where the church is in good nick, say Uganda or Nigeria, the building looks the same as when it was first built or even better.
But in the ruined American bits, underneath the exposed arches you can see people scurrying around building afresh. The ruins dwarf the new stuff at present. But groups working at different parts of the ruin are being brought together. The repairs have begun.
