Abstract
Rowan Strong (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism. Volume III: Partisan Anglicanism and its global expansion, 1829–c.1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017/2019); xxiv + 490 pp.: 9780199699704, £105 (hbk); 9780198822301, £31.99 (pbk)
It has been a privilege for me, as well as a considerable task, to get to close grips with the five volumes of the truly excellent Oxford History of Anglicanism, having been asked to review all the volumes except, naturally, the one to which I contributed (Volume IV). 1 The present volume, on the global expansion of ‘partisan Anglicanism’, provides a broad, multidisciplinary panorama of Anglican thought and activity from the beginning of the deconstruction of the confessional Anglican state, around 1830, to the eve of the First World War. The unprecedented challenges of that era were met with enormous faith-filled activity, institutional expansion, bracing intellectual exploration – and, through it all, continual bitter infighting. The comprehensive ‘global expansion’ dimension of the book takes in the European continent outside the United Kingdom, the British Empire, Anglicanism beyond the Empire, missionary societies and agencies, North America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, India, China, East Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, and Latin America. So the coverage is encyclopaedic and it is all very well done.
But there is also substantial coverage of the Church of England in this period, with insightful analysis of the hardening party structure of the established Church by acknowledged experts in the field. Rowan Strong (the volume as well as the series editor) and John Wolffe each provide a perceptive overview of British Anglicanism and the fate of the previously confessional state. Robert Andrews’ chapter on the High Church movement (prior to and distinct from Tractarianism) will be an eye-opener to some. Andrew Atherstone describes Anglican Evangelicalism, warts and all, with deft use of original sources. James Pereiro skilfully distinguishes the Oxford Movement, Tractarianism and Anglo-Catholicism. And Mark D. Chapman does fine justice to the Liberal Anglican or Broad Church element, which to some seems endowed with less glamour and drama than Tractarianism and consequently is often downplayed, though not here.
Cultural developments in relation to the Church are also given their due, at least in England, with fascinating chapters on music (Jeremy Dibble) and on art and architecture (Ayla Lepine). The three-way interface between science, the Bible and Anglican churchmen is capably handled by Diarmid A. Finnegan, who debunks the popular perception of a binary battle between science and theology at this time. Clergy and devout laypeople were prominent in the natural sciences, which were not yet fully professionalized. While churchmen of all stripes turned their wrath on Darwin, his theory of evolution was accepted into Anglican Catholic theology with Charles Gore and Lux Mundi in 1889. Susan Mumm’s account of the role, status, suppression and aspirations of Anglican women in this period employs devastating understatement to let the uncomfortable facts speak for themselves. She charts the rise of women’s religious activity and responsibility, through their numerical dominance as churchgoers and through women’s organizations, including religious communities from the 1840s. These organizations and communities asserted their practical independence from the bishops and spearheaded outreach to the urban poor. Jane Garnett brings up the rear with a welcome revisionist account of Anglican economic and social engagement in nineteenth-century England, revealing it as often robust, professional, progressive and methodologically rigorous. Garnett calls for a mutually respectful dialogue between ‘secular’ economic historians and those scholars, like herself, who look for the theological and ethical factors in the thought of the major protagonists. Strong highlights the ‘long-established tradition of moral theological criticism’ within the Established Church (p. 20). The Tractarians, who were politically and socially reactionary, demonized ‘political economy’ because it savoured of belief in progress and social mobility.
Anglican identity
How did the concept of ‘Anglicanism’ evolve during this period? I entitled my review article of the first volume of The Oxford History of Anglicanism (which covered the period from the Reformation to 1662) ‘Not yet “Anglicanism”’, although I acknowledged that the seeds of a later self-consciously ‘Anglican’ theological platform and political ideology were already present in Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. In the second volume of the History, the central focus was the status and role of the Established Church of England and its export to overseas colonies, through the Enlightenment, up to the eve (1829) of constitutional changes at home. During this period the term ‘Anglicanism’ was not in use, although the French equivalent anglicanisme occurs in 1817. However, ‘Anglicanism’ is squarely on the agenda in the present volume, an early use of the term being by J. H. Newman in 1837. The more militant Tractarians used ‘Anglican’ as a term of derision for the existing tradition of High Churchmanship; it was equivalent to ‘High and Dry’.
As the editor puts it, there emerged a ‘new paradigm of autonomous episcopally based expansion that increasingly distanced itself from the English state connection’ (Strong, p. 3). The Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA (PECUSA) began its autonomous existence after the War of Independence (and the Scottish Episcopal Church had long been autonomous), but elsewhere we are looking at the overseas presence of the Church of England. There was certainly a felt and experienced ‘communion’ between geographically dispersed Anglican communities – the Prayer Book and the monarchy being the twin pillars of unity at this time. As various Anglican Churches in the dominions became self-governing, a formal Communion of Anglican Churches became a possibility, but it could not become a reality until a universal structure came into being with the advent of the Lambeth Conference. The first Lambeth Conference, in 1867, did not envisage a sequel, so that brings us to the second, in 1878. As Strong points out, with the institution of the Lambeth Conference and the promulgation of the (Chicago-)Lambeth Quadrilateral in 1888, ‘Anglican identity, as well as being contested, was also coalescing’ (p. 16). The struggle for Anglican identity, vis-à-vis other cultures and regimes as well as other forms of Christianity, took place on a global stage, and therefore without the support – or the shackles, at that time – of establishment that it had in England and Wales.
Partisanship
The choice of Partisan Anglicanism as the title of this volume is intriguing. The point, presumably, is not that Anglicanism was now more angrily polemical and more bitterly divided than it had been in the late sixteenth century under Queen Elizabeth (though not with the name ‘Anglicanism’), when Richard Hooker feared that the Church that he knew might pass away as in a dream; or as it was in the middle decades of the seventeenth century when the structure of the Church of England was dismantled and both the Archbishop of Canterbury (Laud) and the divinely anointed Supreme Governor (Charles I) were executed. The identity of Anglicanism has always been contested, even unto death. But the point of the title seems to be that domestic antagonisms and divisions were being exported across the Empire and into the mission field. Exported Anglican Christianity was marred and scarred by bitter mutual antagonism between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. Strong identifies ‘an unprecedented divisive partisan culture’ projected on a global scale (p. 2). Evangelical piety, with its trademark emphases of dateable conversion, uncritical Bible reading and moral activism (though without challenging the social order because of the belief in individual self-help) dominated the middle classes in nineteenth-century Britain and gave rise to the Victorian cult of respectability. Moral injunctions about control of the sexual urge and the consumption of strong drink were aimed at the lower classes but were preached and practised by the middle classes.
Strong suggests that Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics had divided the Church of England between them by the end of the nineteenth century. This was not yet the case in the middle of the century (1853), when W. J. Conybeare, the Vicar of Axminster, Devon, made his celebrated analysis of the makeup of Church of England clergy (Wolffe, pp. 26–7); division became more entrenched as the century wore on. However, we should not overlook the legacy of the High Church tradition (the inflammatory Gorham Controversy was initiated by the non-Tractarian High Church Bishop Henry Phillpotts of Exeter in 1847), the impact of the Liberal Anglicans (seminally S. T. Coleridge, Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice), and, later in the century, the inroads made by the new breed of Liberal Catholics (as Charles Gore described himself). Some of the most violent and hysterical public controversies of this era were triggered by ‘liberal’ publications, notably Essays and Reviews (1860), Lux Mundi (1889) and Foundations (1912). Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics did not have all the fun. But it is a gloomy reflection that much of the energy for overseas missions and church extension programmes at home was generated by partisan rivalry.
Church and state
It is difficult, at a distance of nearly two centuries, to imagine the trauma – the sense of being radically undermined – suffered by the established Church of England when its political and legal monopoly was abruptly removed by a series of mainly Tory pieces of legislation in 1828–29 which gave civil and political rights to Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. Insult was added to injury when the Great Reform Act of 1832 – which the episcopate opposed to a man – enfranchised a sector of the middle class, in which Nonconformity was strong. Progressively, the House of Commons ceased to be, so to speak, the house of laity within the synodical role of Parliament, together with the bishops in the Lords. There followed reforming Whig legislation, designed to drag the sclerotic historical institutions of the kingdom, including dioceses and cathedrals, into the modern world. John Keble, who was normally no fanatic, hysterically denounced the rationalization of the episcopacy of the Church of Ireland. Although it was the state Church, it could command the allegiance of only 10.7 per cent of the population, against 80.9 per cent Roman Catholic affiliation (Wolffe, pp. 32–3). Keble’s Assize Sermon of 1833 was later hailed by Newman as the birthday of the Tractarian campaign. Strong comments: ‘The slow demise of a genuine religious establishment increasingly pushed the Church of England to develop the characteristics of a denomination’ (p. 96). In truth, the denominationization of the national Church had been going on since the failure of the comprehension proposals and the resultant loss of the cream of Dissenting scholars and preachers in 1662. The erosion of the national profile of the still Established Church has been hastened in more recent times not only by changes in the law that it could not prevent, even if it wished to do so, but by attitudes and actions of its own that evinced a denominational mentality. In 1830, the Church of England had virtually no institutional structures apart from the state connection. What Arthur Burns called ‘the diocesan revival’ was one salient way in which the Church of England reinvented itself. Also, led by the Broad Churchmen, in a line from S. T. Coleridge, Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice, it renegotiated its cultural, social and moral national role in the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, the 1851 Census notoriously showed that only 50 per cent of the English population identified with the Church of England. But this figure looks quite healthy compared with Anglican/Episcopal allegiance in Wales and Scotland at the end of our period. In Wales, communicants were 6.5 per cent of the population; in Scotland, 1.5 per cent (Wolffe, p. 36). This level of communicant participation looks uncomfortably similar to that in the Church of England today. There is much relevant food for thought in what this volume brings to light from an earlier period.
Empire and colonialism
One effect of this volume is to question the tired hermeneutic of the ‘Anglo-Saxon captivity’ of Anglicanism. Christians, including Anglicans, were among the most vocal critics of Empire (p. 67) and ‘[m]any of the English leaders of global Anglicanism were at the forefront of independence movements from the Church of England for their Churches’ (p. 3). The Evangelical Henry Venn of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) advocated the three-self theory of missions: self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a freed slave, was consecrated bishop in 1864, setting a precedent, though not a trend. Although there were 12 million emigrants from Britain between 1815 and 1830 – a community that had grown into 200 million a century later – in the century as a whole ‘Anglicanism became an increasingly non-white Church in many regions of the world’, although it remained largely anglophone (p. 11). There was a benevolent aspect to imperialism, signalled above all by the ending of first the slave trade and then of slavery itself in British territories, enforced by Royal Navy patrols. (Bishops and clergy of the American Protestant Episcopal Church in the South were not alone in supporting slavery; some bishops and clergy in the North were also opposed to abolition. American Methodism split over the issue.)
Protestant voluntary mission societies were generally shaped by the great pietistic revivals and consequently manifested a non-ecclesiastical, non-episcopal structure, which also influenced the voluntary ethos of the CMS. The church-based, episcopally supervised Anglican societies the SPCK and SPG were founded in 1698 and 1701 respectively. The concept of the missionary bishop to spearhead the spread of the Church was advocated by High Churchmen such as Henry E. Manning, William Ewart Gladstone, Charles James Blomfield (Bishop of London), Robert Gray (Bishop of Cape Town) and Samuel Wilberforce (later Bishop of Oxford). The consecration of Jackson Kemper as the first missionary bishop of the American Episcopal Church took place in 1835. Anglican missions generally failed indigenous peoples, notably in South and North America and Australia. In India, Anglicanism secured its position through connection with the Raj and its institutions, such as schools and hospitals, but it failed to reach the Dalit and tribal peoples. It was not until the Colonial Clergy Act of 1874 that the English archbishops were permitted by Parliament to consecrate bishops for the Empire without requiring the oath of canonical obedience to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Consequently, as Stewart J. Brown comments, ‘The connections of the colonial Churches to the mother Church of England were henceforth based – not on law – but on sentiment, doctrine, ecclesiology, and loyalty to the empire’ (p. 55). He could have included the Book of Common Prayer in the list, since liturgy is not fully subsumed in ‘doctrine’. But with the subtraction of ‘empire’, these factors still lend some coherence to the Anglican Communion.