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Jeremy Morris (ed.),
The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume IV. Global Western Anglicanism, c 1910-present
Oxford: OUP, 2017

My review of this recent volume appeared a few weeks back in Reading Religion, the review journal of the American Academy of Religion. It began: What, precisely, is Anglicanism, that a history of it may be written? The several contributors to the recent Oxford Handbook of Anglican Studies (reviewed here) returned again and again to the means by which Anglican identity might be defined. For the writing of history, are there certain markers of Anglican thought and practice that might form the unit of analysis (“Anglicanism” as a system of ideas rather than an institution)? Is the history of Anglicanism in fact the history of the relationships between the autonomous and (largely) national provinces of which the Anglican Communion is composed, and the global institutions in which those relationships are partially embodied? Or, is the history of Anglicanism actually a set of parallel histories of individual churches in their local, national, and regional contexts? For the most part, the volume under review takes the last of these three approaches, while paying careful attention to the interactions between individual churches and larger trends in political and cultural history to which they all were required to respond.

The review then expounds the general argument of the volume, and then notes that it is focussed on Anglicans in the West: Great Britain and Ireland, North America, and Australasia, but:

There were of course other Anglicans than those of the West; readers will need to await a treatment of African and Asian Anglicanism in volume 5 of this series, due to appear in print in early 2018. The division between the two volumes is defensible — indeed, it is perhaps the best division that can be made if one must be made — but there are several occasions here where the dictates of the theme require the authors to trespass outside the scope of the volume. This is no great difficulty, but the volume is also let down in places in the execution of particular chapters. Many are fine examples of their type, in particular those by Avis, Grimley, Moyse, Snape, and Stockwell. Others are chaotically organized, with, in one case, a verbatim repeat of three sentences on consecutive pages. [One other chapter in particular is] poorly done, lacking analytical precision and awareness of context, and based on an inadequate range of sources. The geographical survey of North America is too concentrated on the US and on the period since 1970; that for Australasia loses all sense of thematic coherence in a chronological procession of events. More generally, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada feature less than does the US, which in turn is less prominent than Britain. English material also predominates over Scottish, Welsh, and Irish. This is understandable given the relative weights of the published literature on each country, but as one reads there is often a subtle slippage where an English example is made to do duty as a representative of the whole.

Overall, however, I thought that the volume as a whole is:

a valuable first synthetic account of Anglicanism in the West in a crucial period. Although surely priced beyond the means of most private readers, no serious library for history or theology will want to be without it. A question remains over the longevity which the book may expect, given the implicit intent of monumental series such as this that they may stand for a generation or more. Readers who take the volume as a whole may be struck, as this reviewer was, by the cumulative weight given to the issues that have so troubled Anglicans in the last two decades, human sexuality and the ordination of women. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this focus is most pronounced in some of the chapters written by those who are both historians and clergy. We will need to leave it to the reader of 2037 to determine whether these were really the most significant issues in world Anglicanism in the twentieth century when viewed from a greater distance.


 




God and War. The Church of England and armed conflict in the twentieth century
Ed. Stephen G. Parker and Tom Lawson
Farnham, Ashgate, 2012, ISBN:9780754666929

I recently reviewed this timely and important collection, for the Journal of Beliefs and Values, which I thought ‘required reading for students of British Christianity’. The review should appear at some point in 2014, just in time for the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. It begins: ‘As public perceptions of the First World War have petrified around images of futile slaughter in the mud as the clergy led the cheering, so an image has been reinforced of the Church of England as merely an arm of government public relations; part of the Establishment deployed to defend the indefensible. Yet this theme is dissonant with trendy vicars marching against the war in Vietnam or to ban the Bomb, and Robert Runcie’s conspicuous failure to celebrate victory in the Falklands with sufficient enthusiasm to please Prime Minister Thatcher. And so there is a job of historical work to do, to understand the relationship between the established church in England, successive governments and the armed conflicts into which the British have been drawn.

‘The idea of an established church, or of a national church, held always within it a tension between aspects of the role. It was a bolster of morale, and part of a united public face against an external enemy, but also a critic of armed interventions that were harder to justify, and referee of the debate that decided which wars were just and which were not. And the balance of these forces within the church also shifted over time, as the centre of ideological gravity within the church shifted leftwards, particularly after 1945.

The collection goes a long way towards a fresh consideration of the issues, and neatly illustrates the tensions between these two aspects of the Church’s role.

‘For Dianne Kirby, the predominant note in the relationship of the church and the government during the Cold War is one of subservience. Governments expected practical co-operation in the positioning and re-positioning of the UK in relation to powers of east and west, and by and large that co-operation was forthcoming, even if it came with misgivings. In contrast, in perhaps the outstanding contribution, Matthew Grimley adroitly delineates the significance of Anglican opposition to nuclear weapons, bringing out the constant negotiation within the Church of England between its established and prophetic selves.

Also of great interest were Philip Coupland’s important relocation of the Christendom group in the ‘conventional left-right mapping of British politics.’ Stephen G. Parker argues that the ‘Church’s promotion of compulsory religious education, as embodied in the Education Act of 1944, contained within it the seeds of a later dilution of Anglican distinctiveness in schools.’

Some of the other essays are less successful, being ‘muddily written, poorly structured and based on a thin layer of source material, and would have benefited from a firmer editorial hand.’ In some cases, I had the sense that some contributors had ‘only a limited acquaintance with the Church of England itself. The view is often that from outside, which leads to an over-reliance on voices in the press.’ Lawson and Parker as editors were also badly let down by their copy-editors, with typographical and factual errors in several places. I have remarked on this apparent slipping in copy-editing standards in reviews here and here, and it seems to be becoming a trend.

Despite these gripes, as a whole the volume is essential reading; and I’ve already had cause to cite several essays while revising my text on Michael Ramsey.




I recently reviewed Robert Beaken’s study of Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury, published by I.B. Tauris in 2012. The full review in Reviews in History shows that I think it an ‘important reassessment’ which ‘goes a long way towards superseding [the work of J.G.] Lockhart and presenting Lang afresh’. Robert very effectively rescues Lang from his reputation as ‘a figure caught in the headlights, reactive rather than in the lead, a puritan and a snob.’

The book has three primary concerns: with Lang’s relationship with the monarchy; with the disputed process of liturgical reform within the Church of England; and with the Second World War. Chapter 7 deals with the war; Chapter 6 with the stalemate in relation to liturgical revision that Lang inherited after the Prayer Book Crisis of 1927-8. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Lang’s relationship with the monarchy in general, and the abdication crisis in particular, and are very clearly the centrepiece of the book.

The review did make some substantive criticisms, which I reproduce at length here. The first is of one of interpretation:

Beaken rightly emphasises that in the period between the wars the office of archbishop still mattered in English public life. The opinion of Canterbury was sought and listened to on matters of moment; and the archbishop’s correspondence clearly shows that many of the general public expected something of ‘their archbishop’, even if those expectations were inchoately expressed and neither compatible nor realistic. All this is right, and worth emphasising; but it is difficult to recognise the ‘simple narrative of secularisation’ against which Beaken sets himself as one now held by very many historians. The work variously of Callum Brown, Grace Davie, Hugh McLeod and many others have all deepened and complicated our understandings of what secularisation is and how it occurs; and so Beaken is pushing at, if not an open door, one which has been unlocked and left ajar.

Also on matters of interpretation:

For Beaken, Lang’s radio broadcast of December 1936 […] was ‘an unusually unwise and unreflective action’, in that Lang allowed himself to reflect unfavourably on the mores of the social circle around the former king. However, the receipt of many letters and a ‘torrent of abuse’ in the popular press does not necessarily prove that an archbishop is not doing his job, but only that he has expressed an unpopular but arguably necessary view. Despite Lang’s evident enjoyment of the quiet entwining of archbishop and establishment, he was able to see where lines should be drawn.

The other criticisms were about the shape of the book, and its style:

At the broadest scale, the book is strangely shaped, such that it appears not as a rounded study of an archbishop at a time of crisis, but as three substantial studies of particular issues, hedged around with some rather desultory supporting materials. The three themes of the royal connection, the war and the Prayer Book crisis between them occupy two-thirds of the book, with the royal material alone forming nearly a third. This leads Beaken to neglect other issues that merited greater treatment. Lang’s path from bishop of Stepney (1901) to his arrival at Canterbury in 1928 are dealt with in five breathless pages; a time that included the controversy over Lang’s public comments on the First World War, which cried out for a fuller treatment. Similarly, Beaken’s account of a pivotal time in ecumenical relations at home and abroad is perfunctory. Lang’s time in office saw acute economic hardship and the Jarrow March, as well as the rise of home-grown Fascism and pitched violence on the streets to counter it. None of these receive the slightest treatment, in a study entitled ‘Archbishop in War and Crisis.’ […]

By contrast, significant space is instead given over to a discussion of Lang’s sexuality. Beaken is largely successful in showing that Lang was probably not a repressed homosexual, but a lonely figure who found it difficult to form close personal relationships of any kind. To this reviewer, however, it is not clear that those making the case for Lang’s homosexuality ever established why the matter should be all that important, and neither is Beaken convincing as to why it is important that Lang was not.

Robert’s response is at the foot of the review.




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