Abstract
This special issue of Theology has a very welcome focus upon theological concepts of disease. It consists of five striking articles specially commissioned for a symposium and now edited and introduced by Therese Feiler and Joshua Hordern of Oxford University. In addition, there is a mature overview of ‘The Possibility of a Christian Politics’ from the veteran sociologist and theologian David Martin. Sadly, his American counterpart Peter Berger died last June aged 88. Together they showed in the 1960s, long ahead of most of their colleagues, that it really is possible and fruitful to combine sociological and theological insights.
Sociological and theological analyses of the Church of England now abound. In the March issue of Theology last year Clive Field wrote an impressive corrective to Andrew Brown and Linda Woodhead’s That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People (Bloomsbury, 2016). In the following issue my editorial noted (and dissented somewhat from) the sociologist Steve Bruce’s staunch defence of Bryan Wilson’s seminal 1966 study of the Church of England as set on a path of secularization in Religion in Secular Society: Fifty Years On (Oxford University Press, 2016). And my editorial in the following issue commended Jessica Martin (daughter of David) and Sarah Coakley’s collection, with its parish-based analysis, For God’s Sake: Re-imagining Priesthood and Prayer in a Changing Church (Canterbury Press, 2017). Now yet another sociologically informed analysis of the Church of England has caught my eye:
Peter Herriot, Warfare and Waves: Calvinists and Charismatics in the Church of England (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2017); 208 pp.: 9780718894863, £20.00 (pbk)
The title and subtitle suggest a tension that runs throughout this book. The subtitle suggests that this is a relatively dispassionate social scientific analysis, whereas the title conveys that it is actually a piece of polemic (along the lines of Brown and Woodhead’s book). This may well be a tension in the Methodist psychologist Peter Herriot’s own life. His academic career was in organizational studies, but in retirement he has been more focused upon religious fundamentalism. He admits that he does not have training in either the sociology of religion or theology. This does show up at times, for example when on the second page he claims, without any qualification, that the monarch ‘appoints all of the bishops, and the government appoints the vicars of almost 700 parishes’. His style can also be quite anecdotal in places and heavily reliant upon online sources. Yet, once these features are ignored, his experience in organizational studies does offer some interesting insights into two much-publicized movements within the Church of England today – namely, what he terms the Calvinists and the Charismatics.
Movements such as Reform and Anglican Mainstream (and GAFCON internationally) are the Calvinists in this analysis. Herriot offers a detailed analysis of their formation, leaders, organization and main congregations. He finds them to be well organized, well financed and media savvy. He gives sharp profiles of their most influential leaders and frequently quotes some of their claims, especially about not having women and gays in church leadership, suggesting why many members of the public now see them (and, unfortunately, the Church of England at large) as ‘homophobic, misogynist, patriarchal, and judgemental’ (p. 93). He concludes that ‘the Calvinist culture is conflictual, doctrinaire, and conformist’ (p. 100). Because Reform and Anglican Mainstream (appropriating for itself the term ‘mainstream’) offer the media a sharply polarized position at odds with society at large, they both, so he argues, receive much more attention than their national membership merits.
He seems more impressed with Charismatics, whom he regards as less prone to media-attention-seeking yet just as well organized as Reform and Anglican Mainstream. Yet he judges that the focus of some Charismatics upon miraculous healings puts them at considerable odds with modern medicine. He also notices that Calvinists, and to a less extent Charismatics, are internally divided about the role of women within church leadership (notoriously Wycliffe Hall in Oxford was deeply traumatized by this division a decade ago), creationism and (he might have added) marriage after divorce. As Lambeth ’98 discovered, only opposition to gays could unite biblical literalists.
Overall Peter Herriot concludes that: I have construed the Calvinists as located within Britain’s religious and imperial past, and the Charismatics as reflecting the values of the 1960s counter-culture and free-market consumerism. Any policy recommendations for the C of E based on the relative success of these two movements, or derived from the current debate on its future, are therefore likely to be based on a local, and therefore incomplete analysis. (p. 177)