Anglicanism Anyone?
By Dwight Longenecker
You would have to be an ignorant boor not to be attracted to Anglicanism. How can an educated person not be drawn to the beauty, and the venerable culture of England’s state religion? A visit to the old country takes one into the great state churches of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s at the heart of London. In the countryside, village churches of mellow stone nestle in picture-book villages. As you travel further you come to majestic cathedrals reigning serenely in medieval market towns, while in Oxford and Cambridge Anglican chapels sit quietly within their colleges—each one a little gem set in the jewel box-like quadrangle.
The culture of Anglicanism is as attractive as its architecture. Anglicans have retained a love for fine music and liturgy. There is little in Christendom that compares to the aesthetic experience of Anglican Evensong sung by a men and boys’ choir in a great cathedral or college chapel like Kings’ in Cambridge or New College, Oxford. The liturgy is fine and dignified. The preaching is urbane, sensitive and inspired. English churches are full of light, music, learning and an exquisitely understated English charm.
There is a gentlemanly quality about the English religion. An air of effortless superiority presides in the cathedral closes, the college quadrangles and the village churches. It is attractive in a self-deprecating way, and its good manners and fine taste beckon in our vulgar and egalitarian age. In a typical Anglican parish you’ll find oodles of genuine charm, a hearty warm welcome and good humour. The typical Anglican priest and parishioner values education and good taste and suspects any kind of enthusiasm and extremism as being poor form. Along with their love of learning comes a real tolerance of different opinions, and a willingness to make room for all who wish to belong.
The Church of England
It was this Church of England that I fell in love with as a young man. After being brought up in a devout Evangelical home in Pennsylvania I attended Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina—a town that claimed proudly to be ‘the buckle on the Bible Belt.’ While there I read C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien and the great English poets. I admired T.S.Eliot, who went to England and never came back. I wondered what religion these great men followed. They clearly didn’t belong to Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church.
I discovered that they had been Anglicans, and then I discovered that there was a little breakaway Episcopal Church in town, and that we were allowed to worship there on Sunday nights. So with some other courageous Baptists I entered the little stone church in the bad part of town that smelt of dusty prayer books, furniture polish and fading incense. I learned how to kneel down to pray, to light candles, read prayers out of a book and connect with the church of C.S.Lewis and T.S.Eliot, John Donne, George Herbert and a host of other literary heroes.
For graduation someone gave me a picture book called, C.S.Lewis: Images of his World. It was full of photographs of Lewis and his chums. It was all roaring fires in Oxford common rooms, jovial laughter in cozy English pubs, and the green and gold of the English countryside mingled with the mist of Ireland and the crumbling, shabby, antiquity of England. I was hooked. When the opportunity came to study theology in Oxford and then be ordained into the Anglican ministry I couldn’t believe my luck.
After three years of study I was ordained priest in the Church of England and served first as a curate in a seaside parish in Sussex before moving to Cambridge to be chaplain at the famous Kings’ College Choir School. I was finally appointed as vicar of two ancient churches on the Isle of Wight. By then my understanding of the Church had become far more Catholic. I began to see the leaks in the Anglican bucket, and after ten years of service my wife and I left the Anglican Church to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church.
Church of Middle England
After becoming a Catholic an English friend heard my story and commented wryly, ‘Poor you. You mistook the Church of England for England.’ What he meant was, that modern England is, unfortunately, not quite the picture book that I had envisioned. The Anglican Church represents an elite stream of English society. Just as the Episcopal Church is the church of the moneyed and educated higher echelons, so the Anglican Church is not really the Church of England, but the Church of Middle England.
In a juicy passage from his autobiography Thomas Merton comments, ‘The Church of England…is a class religion, the cult of a special society and group, not even of a whole nation, but of the ruling minority in a nation. That is the principal basis of its rather strong coherence up to now. There is certainly not much doctrinal unity, much less a mystical bond between people many of whom have ceased to believe in grace or Sacraments. The thing that holds them together is the powerful attraction of their own social tradition and the stubborn tenacity with which they cling to certain social standard and customs, more or less for their own sake. The Church of England depends for its existence almost entirely on the solidarity and conservatism of the English ruling class.”
Merton was writing in the 1940s about his experiences nearly twenty years earlier. His criticism is still accurate today. The main difference is that the beliefs and morals of Middle England are nothing like the conservatism that Merton experienced. In the intervening years the English ruling classes have become hip. Instead of ‘Rule Britannia’ the slogan is ‘Cool Britannia.’ This modern England is pictured by the choice of Prime Minister. In my youth the Prime Minister of England was a tweed-clad, pipe smoking model of an Englishman. He was like Q from the Bond films, reticent, shrewd and slightly eccentric. Now we have a smiling media celebrity with a sincerity that is as fake as his suntan.
Merton’s observation has always been true. The Church of England is the church of the ruling class in England. Therefore, in order to understand the Church of England one must begin with an examination of Middle England itself. What does Middle England look like today?
Cool Britannia
On the one hand, the English ruling classes look as conservative as they have always been. The gents travelling up to the city on commuter trains may not wear bowler hats and carry rolled umbrellas, but they still like the English countryside, the London Times, the Christmas pantomime, the Oxford and Cambridge boat race and cricket on the village green. They still love grand country houses, mellow English pubs with dark beer and huge fireplaces. Increasingly, however, this England is no more real than the picture book whose spell I fell under. Amongst twenty first century Britons there is a nostalgia for ‘ye olde Englande’. But their nostalgia is for something unreal—much like the nostalgia for the small town America that one gleans from films like It’s a Wonderful Life.
The reality is very different. England is now a multi-cultural society. Immigration from Eastern Europe is causing a significant population shift which adds to the already large number of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, the West Indies and former British colonies in Africa. When this is combined with the falling birth rate amongst English people, the demographers reveal a startling change within what it means to be British. If present trends continue, by 2050 white people of British descent will be in the minority in England.
The population of Britain is therefore not ‘British’ in the sense that we would normally consider. Instead, twenty-first century Britain is a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. The transformation itself, is not necessarily a good or a bad thing. History shows that, for all sorts of reasons, populations change. Nations do not stay the same. There is a constant flux flow of peoples, ideas and power. While the new multi-ethnic Britain may nurture Muslim extremists, it also nurtures a new entrepreneurial spirit, high family values and decent morality.
The ruling classes in Britain are still white, Anglo Saxon males, but they accept the new Britain and promote it actively. The image of ‘Cool Britannia’ is young, upbeat, positive about its multi-ethnic make up, and looking forward to the future. It is also determinedly secular, materialistic and relativistic. Every ruling class must have a dominant idea, and the dominant idea of the ruling class in Britain is that there must be no dominant idea. In other words, relativism rules the day. If multi-cultural Britain is to succeed there must be tolerance for all by all. This essentially secular philosophy suits ‘Cool Britannia’ well, for it seems ideal and necessary if a multi-cultural society is to flourish.
Anything Goes
Most modern Britons are therefore extremely wary, and increasingly antagonistic, towards any religion that makes exclusive claims. If tolerance is the national creed, then any creed that smells of intolerance must be eliminated. As a result there are practically no agreed dogmatic beliefs shared within the British population. Survey after survey shows that the British believe in God and are interested in spirituality, but they don’t hold to specific Christian dogmas and don’t go to church. Indeed they consider such things not only irrelevant, but pernicious.
If there is no shared religious belief neither is there a shared sense of morality. There is a vague attraction towards goodness and self sacrifice. There is a generous spirit when faced with catastrophes and natural disasters. There is a shared sentimentality about children, family, animals and all things cuddly, but there is no hard edged moral system to which modern Britons can subscribe. In the moral sphere anything goes. As a result, immorality is rampant. The divorce rate in Britain continues to be amongst the highest in Europe. There are more teenaged unwed mothers in Britain than anywhere else in the world. Britons commit 600 abortions every day with only 300 babies being put up for adoption each year. At the same time sexually transmitted diseases are at epidemic proportions amongst teenagers, while suicide is now the highest killer of young men under twenty five.
At the same time as the government is trying to remove all laws restricting the public consumption, they are battling an epidemic of binge drinking amongst young people. Every weekend British towns are full of young people blind drunk, urinating and vomiting in doorways and indulging in ‘dogging’—a new trend in which total strangers copulate in parking lots with multiple partners. During Christmas season last year the National Health Service set up military style field hospitals in the major towns in Britain to deal with the high number of drink-fuelled injuries, and this summer the situation got so bad the government set up contingency plans to put troops in the streets to control the drunken brawls that happen every weekend. This is the real picture under the image of ‘Cool Britannia’. Beneath all the glitz and glamour there is an epidemic of despair and emptiness.
C of E – Church of Everybody
English men like to joke that when they went into the army and the sergeant asked their religion they would have three choices: Jew, Catholic or C of E. If they protested that they were a Baptist or Methodist or Plymouth Brethren they would be told. ‘No. You’re C of E’—Church of Everybody.’
Sadly, in the ‘anything goes’ world of modern Britain this is truer than ever. In the midst of spiritual and moral meltdown, there is little real leadership from the Anglican Church. In doctrinal, spiritual or moral matters, for the Anglican Church, anything goes. Where does the Anglican Church stand in doctrinal matters?
Anglican theologians have always been good at saying one thing and meaning another, but this tendency towards fuzziness has now drifted into totally open-ended relativism. In a 2002 survey by the Christian Research organisation, Anglican clergy were asked what they believe. Only 82% could claim a confident belief in God the Father. The belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as saviour could elicit just 51%. Belief in the Virgin Birth just 56%, and belief in the bodily resurrection could only muster support of 66%.
The support for traditional Christian morality amongst Anglican clergy is just as weak. In the same survey 75% of the clergy said they were in favour of accepting divorced people for ordination. 52% didn’t mind if their bishop was a divorcee. Even amongst the more conservative groups about half were not bothered about divorce amongst the clergy. Only 68% of the Anglican clergy said they were against euthanasia, only 66% were against abortion, and over 30% didn’t mind the ordination of practising homosexuals.
The statistics support the suspicion that doctrine and morals within the Anglican Church basically mirror that of the society in which it finds itself. It is easy to blame Anglicans for compromise and giving in to the pressure of the secular world, but the relativistic mindset is actually part of Anglicanism’s very nature.
Elizabethan Settlement – The Sequel
When I was an Anglican priest agonizing over the decision to leave everything and become a Catholic I thought long and hard about the Anglican Church’s inability to stand up for historic Christian faith and morals. I felt that she had been taken captive by the spirit of the age.
Then I looked again at the Elizabethan Settlement. When Queen Elizabeth I took over from her half sister Mary Tudor in 1558 she brought in two acts: the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity. Put simply, these acts asserted that Elizabeth was the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and that all her subjects would conform to the new religion. However, in a sop to the Catholics, she asked that the wording of the communion service would be deliberately vague, and she allowed for Catholic ornamentals and ritual to be observed. This caused widespread confusion, but it also established the essential mindset of Anglicanism. That fuzziness is to be the foundation of all things. In other words, religious relativism was born under the name of tolerance.
This philosophical foundation became the foundation for all subsequent Anglican attitudes and behaviour. In every age the important word in the title ‘Church of England’ was ‘England.’ So down the ages, the spirit of the age was the spirit of the Church of England. In the eighteenth century when Freemasonry and Deism were the fashionable creeds you will discover that most Anglican bishops and clergy were freemasons and deists. In the nineteenth century when Victorian values and the British Empire were at their zenith the Church of England became the religious expression of that age. A visit to Westminster Abbey today will reveal a church crowded with triumphant statues and memorials, not to the great Christian saints, but to the great statesmen and heroes of the British Empire.
It became clear to me that the Church of England had ever adapted to the spirit of the age. In the first Elizabethan age the Church of England adopted anti-Catholicism, Protestantism and the nation state. In our own Elizabethan age when feminism, relativism, utilitarianism, sentimentalism and homosexualism are the prevailing fashions, why should we be surprised to find that they are also the prevailing ideologies within the Church of England? This is, after all, not only what the Church of England does. It is what the Church of England is.
Quo Vadis C 0f E?
Unfortunately the present trends in the Church of England have not helped boost its failing numbers. Apart from the hot spot of the Evangelical churches, the Church of England continues her rapid decline. More than half of the church’s 16,000 parishes have fewer than fifty people in the pews, and those few are elderly and on fixed incomes. The Church now has only 9,400 paid clergy, but even those are too expensive. The Times in London reported that a cash crisis in the church means bishops are considering church closures and cutting a third of the clergy.
The problems are complex and the solutions being offered are manifold, but all agree that the problem is not just financial. Anglican bishops, facing schism over women bishops and the homosexuality issue, realise that the church needs more than a five year plan. They need to examine the basic questions of the gospel.
At its heart an increasing number of Anglicans are asking themselves where true authority in the church lies. Where do they go for the answers? Is it really true that there is no objective theology? Are the Bible and human reason the only tools available in the quest for answers? Must the church in every age adapt to every age? Can theologians continue to they re interpret the very basics of the faith even in an atheistic and secular age?
As the Anglican Church faces the increasing challenges of global Christianity, can she continue to avoid the only universal authority system in the Church? In his encyclical Ut Unum Sint Pope John Paul II called for all Christians to re-examine with him the role and ministry of Peter in the Church. If they are to avoid total melt down the Anglican Church may wish to re-consider the ministry of authority in the Catholic Church, and ask again how they may build on a rock rather than the shifting sands of contemporary trends.
Dwight Longenecker is the editor of The Path to Rome a collection of British conversion stories. Contact him at www.dwightlongenecker.com
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