Abstract This article argues that the current Anglican Communion crisis is best understood as constitutional erosion: the weakening of shared norms that historically mediated disagreement through recognizable form, restraint and reception. Doctrinal and moral disputes function as triggers, but the deeper driver is the loss of a common grammar of legitimacy, so that procedurally valid provincial actions can be constitutionally unintelligible to other provinces. The article interprets key African and Global South interventions not primarily as theological or cultural reaction but as contested constitutional reasoning rooted in episcopal guardianship, communion discipline and inherited catholic order. It analyses the Global Anglican Future Conference and Global South instruments as substitute constitutional documents generated by the incapacity of the Instruments of Communion to secure effective restraint and proposes a minimal inter-provincial accord: clarified instrument authority, operationalized reception, limited covenantal discipline and a standing advisory process for communion impairment.
Noel Cox (Mon,) studied this question.