On 'Is the Episcopal Church Anglican'

Thoughts about a recent The Living Church piece

Early on in my ordination process, I was asked by a lay leader in the church about my attraction to the Episcopal Church – a person, I should make clear from the outset, whom I found nothing but kind and helpful throughout my process. When I mentioned my affection for the Anglican liturgical and theological tradition, the person looked at me with bafflement. “But we’re not Anglican,” the person said, “those are more conservative, like over in England. We’re Episcopalians.” I was reminded of this experience earlier this week, when The Living Church published a piece by the Very Rev. Kevin Martin, the former dean of St Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, asking if the Episcopal Church was losing its Anglican identity – a blog post which raised considerable outrage on Episcopal Church social media. Now, questions of Anglican identity are something of a hobbyhorse of mine, and so (with apologies for a somewhat inside baseball post), I wanted to reflect a little on the piece and the responses to it.

First of all, I found myself frustrated by the furious response by some Episcopalians who read this piece as nothing more than pro-ACNA propaganda, for whom even raising the question of whether the Episcopal Church was Anglican was in itself a betrayal of Episcopal Church. As far as I can tell, on this account, Anglicanism is – and can only be – defined as membership in the Anglican Communion, ergo, the Episcopal Church is ipso facto Anglican, whatever its doctrine or discipline or worship may be. Any attempt to proffer another definition of Anglicanism, then, is seen as an attempt to legitimate the Anglican Church of North America.

Doubtless the vociferousness of this reaction was driven in part by memories of the post-2009 moment in which the Episcopal Church’s future in the Anglican Communion did seem precarious, and there truly was a hope among some of the breakaway Episcopalians who formed the Anglican Church of North America that the ACNA would replace the Episcopal Church as the ‘official’ (read: member of the Anglican Communion) Anglican presence in the United States. But emotionally understandable as it may be, as an argument it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. It is by no means self-evident that the only proper definition of ‘Anglicanism’ is a purely formal definition based on institutional membership. In fact, I argue in a journal article that I desperately need to revise and return to an editor (apologies – you know who you are!) that this definition is one that emerges quite late in Anglican history around the turn of the twenty-first century. And indeed, I cannot think of another Christian tradition which is generally defined by institutional membership alone; communion with the Bishop of Rome may be a sine qua non of being a Roman Catholic, but it hardly exhausts the description of what it is to be Roman Catholic. And I have to admit that I find it, well, strange that many of the people who argue against a definitive, prescriptive account of Christian identity so fiercely gatekeep the usage of the term ‘Anglican.’ At any rate, defining Christian groups purely by institutional membership is not typically how scholars of Christian history talk about these matters.

Moreover, I think that the basic thesis of Dean Martin’s piece – that the Anglican doctrinal and liturgical heritage is underappreciated and even explicitly rejected in many parts of the Episcopal Church – is quite incontrovertibly true. At least, this has been my experience and that of many others I know. Apart from the story I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I can think of a number of experiences in the ordination process and seminary and in ordained ministry in which ‘Anglicanism’ was explicitly differentiated from ‘Episcopalianism.’ For example, in seminary I soon discovered that among my fellow seminarians, ‘Anglicanism’ just wasn’t a very important part of how they conceptualized their religious life – certainly not Anglicanism as historically practiced. Indeed, friends would suggest that it was certainly possible to be both ‘Anglican’ (understood as a doctrinal position and way of relating to the Anglican past) and ‘Episcopalian,’ but was in no way necessary to be an ‘Anglican’ to be an ‘Episcopalian.’ It was not clear to many of them that the history of the Church of England, or that of the Episcopal Church before the 1970s, was particularly relevant to their lives as Episcopalians. There was no sense that the doctrinal and liturgical settlements of the Church of England (that is, the Formularies) would impinge on them other than through a few last Cranmerian liturgical holdovers like the Collect for Purity in contemporary-language Anglican liturgy. Now, I’m not meaning to throw them under the bus here. In fact, not only are they faithful Christians and fine priests, but I think they are fundamentally right about the state of our church: to be a priest in the Episcopal Church today does not, in practice, require a deep familiarity with or caring very much about the Anglican past, does not require being Anglican in the thicker sense that Dean Martin (or I) would want to use the term.

And it’s worth adding that an interest in Anglican history is not always treated as simply an odd but harmless pastime. I have not infrequently encountered disdain for Rite I in the Episcopal Church or the Book of Common Prayer 1962 in the Anglican Church of Canada, including at the episcopal level. It has been suggested to me that it is time for the Episcopal Church to ditch Rite I or the Canadian church to ditch the prayer book, that these were left as a sop to benighted traditionalists but now can safely be castigated to the dustbin of history. The thought that the Articles of Religion might have anything to do with contemporary Anglicanism is at times scoffed at, including in the Anglican Church of Canada where it remains a de jure doctrinal standard. I know of someone who innocently asked about the current status of the Articles in Canada and was met with a mocking rejoinder from a highly placed person in the national church, who asked dismissively if they intended to bring back the reading of the Homilies. There are signs of hope; I think of the work of the Prayer Book Societies in the US and Canada, or the efforts of Seminary Street Press to republish long out-of-print Anglican classics – and I in my writing here hope to contribute however possible to a ressourcement of classical Anglican thought and practice. But I think that it is straightforwardly true that many in our church, including many of our leaders, are uninterested in or even antagonistic towards the Anglican past, at least as norming our present in any way.

So far, Dean Martin and I agree.

But for all that he gets right, I still found myself dissatisfied with parts of the argument. Martin’s own definition of Anglican identity is worth talking about. He foregrounds the 1662 prayerbook along with a historic connection to Canterbury. The Articles are largely marginalized, placed alongside a supposedly characteristic Anglican emphasis on incarnation and a ‘big-tent’ approach to Christianity as secondary identity markers. This is an older and thicker account of Anglican identity than mere institutional belonging, but it is perhaps worth saying that, as a statement of global Anglican identity, it dates largely from the 1920s. It certainly does not fit pre-Oxford Movement Anglicanism terribly well. Of course, given the author’s self-admitted Prayer Book Catholicism, this stance isn’t a surprise, and I think it is a defensible account of Anglican identity, even if it is not my own. But where I think he runs into trouble is on the question of how to measure whether or not contemporary Anglican churches (like the Episcopal Church) measure up.

Here, he relies on a criterion he calls “recognizability”: for a body to be Anglican today, it has to be recognizably in line with the Anglican tradition, defined by the historic connection to Canterbury and the 1662 prayer book. I think that this language of “recognizability” might perhaps be helpful. But its vagueness means it runs the risk of falling prey to arbitrary individual judgement, rather like the (in)famous Supreme Court standard of ‘I know it when I see it’ for obscenity. And in fact, I think that is exactly what happens here. For the author, the fundamental break in Anglican identity for the Episcopal Church doesn’t happen in, say, the widespread rejection of the Articles of Religion as a theological standard in the mid-nineteenth century, a change that was seen in its day as dramatic enough that it produced the first major Episcopal Church schism (the Reformed Episcopal Church). But his definition of Anglican identity isn’t concerned much with the Articles, so small surprise there. Fair enough. But what about the development of the 1979 prayer book? Here, we have a dramatic, unprecedented change to Anglican liturgy, a fundamental reconceptualization of what makes Anglican worship Anglican, led by people who publicly described their project as one of moving beyond or rejecting Cranmer! And indeed, here we have another moment of schism in American Anglicanism, with the departure of the various Continuing Anglican groups over concerns about the new prayer book and, often, women’s ordination. Yet, in contrast to recent liturgical developments which he describes as “avant-garde,” the author says that he “can attest to the ‘recognizability’ of the 1979 prayer book.” The break is, he asserts, not here.

He cites in particular the marriage service and the ordinal as signs of the prayer book’s stability. Let’s dig into these choices a bit. To highlight the supposed stability of the ordination services is quite odd. The 1979 prayer book ordinal in fact marked a dramatic departure from earlier Anglican tradition (and many contemporary Anglican liturgies around the world) by incorporating themes from the so-called ‘Apostolic Tradition.’ These have resulted in a much higher view of ordination, even suggesting a quasi-Roman Catholic view of ontological change (I’ve written about the strangeness of the Episcopal Church ordinal here)!  The marriage service, to be fair, did indeed remain much more stable. But here I think the choice to highlight that service, rather than other also fairly stable services like the daily office, makes something important clear. As I read this text, the fundamental moment of rupture that threatens the Episcopal Church’s Anglican identity came in the 2000s, with the dispute over whether or not people of the same gender could be married in the Episcopal Church. To put it in terms of liturgy (which, as we’ve seen, is central to the piece’s definition of Anglican identity), it seems to be this liturgical change of authorizing alternative marriage rites, rather than the (to my mind anyway) much more dramatic and fundamental changes that led to the 1979 prayer book, that threatens to make our liturgical practice no longer recognizably Anglican.

I think positing the fundamental break in ‘Anglicanness’ in the late 2000s and early 2010s runs into issues on two fronts. First of all, it is possible to be supportive of the changes to our church’s teaching and practice on marriage – indeed, possible to be LGBTQ! – and be committed to the prayer book and the Anglican theological tradition. While I share the author’s worries about future liturgical revision and will certainly admit that people like me are not driving the liturgical or theological agenda in the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Church of Canada, I emphatically do not think that commitment to the Anglican theological heritage maps neatly onto opposition to LGBTQ ordination or same-gender marriage. But even if you’re more inclined to side with Dean Martin than with me on the question of LGBTQ inclusion, there’s still another problem with locating the rupture in the gay marriage debates. Namely, the author seems to me to overestimate the stability and, well, ‘Anglican-ness’ of the 1980s/1990s status quo ante. The big-tent Anglican comprehensiveness of the period which the author celebrates seems to me to be, instead, incoherence. Ironically, given that Bishop Spong was in the episcopate at that point, I think our current college of bishops is more publicly orthodox on core Christological and Trinitarian doctrines than it was in these supposed glory days! And on my reading of Anglican liturgical history, the development of the 1979 prayer book (and, within the 1979 prayer book, the marginalization of Rite I) meant that a fundamental break with the Anglican liturgical tradition had already happened. (N.B.: the point is not that the 1979 prayer book is bad, or to deny the many resonances from the classical prayer book tradition that remain in its text. But if you are defining Anglicanism in relation to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, I do think that the Liturgical Movement-era reforms mark a rupture, a conscious rejection or at least relativization of the Cranmerian heritage, and I confess that I wish that the revisions of the 70s and 80s had been very different.) I don’t think that it’s possible to turn back the clock to the 1990s as though it were a stable, consistent moment in the history of American Anglicanism. Indeed, while I am very much an outside observer, I think that some of the strife within the ACNA today (over women’s ordination, say) reflects the impossibility of so doing. Late 20^th century Anglicanism minus incipient advocacy for LGBTQ people just isn’t a particularly coherent or, dare I say, particularly Anglican thing – hardly something worth holding up as the moment before which the church lost its way or to which which the church should return.

I, like Dean Martin, want an Episcopal Church that is unembarrassedly and unequivocally Anglican. I think that he is right to diagnose that the Episcopal Church (and, for that matter, the Anglican Church of Canada) often seems to want little to do with the Anglican liturgical and theological tradition, and that he is right to see this as a problem. I think that those who think that to raise the question of the Episcopal Church’s ‘Anglicanness’ is automatically suspect, who wish to reduce the meaning of Anglicanism to mere institutional affiliation, are incorrect to do so. Yet I think that the author is wrong to see the problem as wrapped up in the marriage canon. He is wrong to do so because an affirming position on questions like ordination or marriage for LGBTQ people does not necessarily entail a rejection of the Anglican theological heritage. And he is wrong to do so because the Episcopal Church of the 80s/90s, rather than a stable and committedly-Anglican church, was already deeply incoherent and had already rejected much of its Anglican heritage. I don’t mean to suggest that this is the author’s intention, but I worry that this move has the effect of blaming LGBTQ people in the church for our lukewarmness, our incoherence, our lack of interest in a thick Anglican identity. And sure, some LGBTQ Episcopalians have theology I find uncompelling or troubling – but some are among the strongest defenders of a thick, unapologetic Anglican identity in our church today, and what’s more, fundamental rejections of much of our Anglican heritage happened before LGBTQ inclusion was a serious question in the Episcopal Church.

This is why my hope for the future of Anglicanism in North America is not in turning back the clock just a bit to the late twentieth century but embracing a yet older Anglican tradition. For me, as I have written, the most compelling way to construe the core of Anglicanism is around the Articles and the Prayer Book (and the Ordinal). These Formularies nourished Anglicanism for centuries as an irenic Protestant tradition committed to reverent worship that points people to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of the free gift of grace through Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. I know some of you have different accounts of what makes Anglicanism Anglican, and I think that navigating between these different accounts, exploring lines of convergence as well as deep disagreement, is something worth doing. And I hope that Dean Martin’s piece, even if flawed, does succeed in pointing us to the question of how to articulate Anglican identity today, a question which is at the heart of what I’m trying to do with Draw Near With Faith.