The Church of England will split. I think it's inevitable now. This matters politically.
With its eighty million members across the world, the Anglican Communion has always been a significant instrument of British soft power. The urge to evangelize and educate was a key driver of the nineteenth century Empire, and the Anglican churches the Empire left behind still long looked to Canterbury for their inspiration and guidance. If, as neocons and imperialists believe, the spreading of one's values abroad is a key duty and goal of a wealthy, strong nation, then the Anglican Communion must have its place in foreign policy.
In addition, of course, the Anglican Church is the state church. Anglican bishops sit in the House of Lords. Each new monarch is anointed and crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and appointed Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Anglican morality is at the heart of most of the traditional English constitution, and represents a norm to which matters revert after a while, even if they are occasionally driven away from that norm by the politics of the day. The debate about what role the church ought to have in our national life is one for another time. That it does have a key role in our national life can hardly be disputed.
(What follows explains how the Anglican Church will split. There is then an Appendix in which I will explain why it will split, that can be skipped by the reader interested mainly in the high-level political significance.)
For both of the reasons above, it seemed to me that British political debate about the appointment of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury was negligent and self-indulgent. It was not just a small matter of interest only to a few churchmen. It was a vital matter of state. For our current Archbishop has been required - as was easily foreseen and widely predicted at the time - to either prevent the collapse of the Anglican Communion and the splitting of the Church of England in England, or at least to oversee an orderly schism. This is a matter of at least the first importance in foreign policy terms, even if one sets aside (as I do not) the impact on British internal political life.
What I believe will happen next is that the Church of England will split. The most likely form this split will take is for of the order of two thirds of the Bible-believing parts of the church, including both "evangelicals" and "Anglo-catholics" (terms I shall explain and nuance in the appendix below), to exit the Church of England and instead come under the auspices of another Anglican Church - such as the Church of Nigeria or the Church of the Province of Rwanda (both parts of the Anglican Communion). The model for this form of schism is already well-established in the US, through the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA), a branch falling jointly under the Church of the Province of Rwanda and the Church of the Province of South East Asia. AMiA is an Anglican Church, operating in the US, that considers the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (the UK branch of the Anglican Communion - ECUSA) apostate. Since AMiA therefore believes that Anglicans in the US lacked a church, it offers an alternative.
In a similar way, I believe that there will be an "Anglican Mission to Britain" (let's call this the "AMB"). The key difference, I expect, will be that the AMB will not regard the Church of England as apostate. Instead, the AMB and the Church of England will be sister churches, and may well cooperate in many matters.
The only "if" left relates to whether, as alluded above, it will be those of us that are theologically conservative that will have to join the sister church and leave our current buildings and privileges as part of the State Church, or whether, instead, it is the liberals that will have to leave. Even if the conservatives leave, it is not obvious that it will be sustainable for the liberals to be the Church of England. For example, if and when the AMB forms, an interesting question will be which church the Queen will want to belong to. I think that it is clear that her theological sympathies will lie heavily with the AMB. If the conservatives were to leave to form an AMB and the Queen were to adopt the AMB as her church (which I don't think should be 100% ruled out - she is known to have strong theological convictions and it is very likely that her personal decision would be politically decisive), then it is all-but certain that, in fact, the AMB would be known as the Church of England and the Anglican church of the liberal rump would be called something else.
The other complexity is what other part of the Anglican Communion we would want to fall under. It is not obvious that Nigeria or Rwanda is quite right for us. Within a very few years the Sydney Diocese, the most powerful conservative part of the Anglican Church of Australia, is likely to dominate Australian Anglicanism sufficiently to impose its model. At that point, the natural thing would be for the AMB to fall under the Australian Anglican Church. My current guess is that this is eventually how things will proceed.
This will clearly mean a great change in the relative power of British English values versus Australian English values. Over time, it would probably mean a rise in the influence of Australia in the world, for many in Africa would look to Australia for their spiritual guidance. This could have been avoided, I believe, by the choice of an Archbishop more prepared to condemn the Episcopal Church of the United States as the apostate church that it is. But that would have taken a different Prime Minister from Tony Blair.
Appendix: Why Anglicanism will Split
To understand how we come to where we are, certain pieces of context are vital. We really need to go back to 1992, and the debate in England about the ordination of women priests. At this time, there were a number of important groups in the Church of England that had emerged from debates from the 1960s through to the 1980s. First, let us identify the "Anglo-Catholics". This group of high-churchmen tended to like robes and ceremony, to be keen on the Eucharist, to be conservative in morality, and though they took their Bibles seriously, to see the traditions of the Church, including the Roman Catholic church, as key authorities to take seriously.
Next, let us take the "traditional evangelicals". These drew on an old low church Anglican tradition wherein the Bible was taken as highly authoritative (more definitively so, relative to the Anglo-Catholics) and forms of worship that arose from tradition, rather than Biblical teaching (including much that the Anglo-Catholics held dear) were regarded with deep mistrust. The key piece of doctrine was belief in the "substitutionary atonement" of Christ - i.e. that Christ died in our place to save us from our sins. Traditional evangelicalism was also "anti-charismatic" - that is to say, it did not accept the Pentecostal view that there were still today miraculous "gifts of the Spirit", such as faith-driven healings or speaking in other-worldly languages or prophesying the future, available to all Christians.
In contrast, at the end of the 1980s, the real rising power was the "charismatic evangelicals". This group took a similar view to the traditional evangelicals concerning the authority of the Bible and substitutionary atonement. However, they did believe in the miraculous powers of the Holy Spirit today and tended to be more open to working with Anglo-Catholics and liberals (the distinction between "open evangelicals" and "charismatic evangelicals" became very blurred). Their services, unlike what were typically still the traditional choir-and-organ services of the Anglo-Catholics (often including "bells and smells"), and the spartan simplicity of traditional evangelicals - in contrast to these, charismatic evangelical services included up-beat drumming and guitars, intense doctrinal and emotion-expressing lyrics, strong sermons with extensive life-application (often drawing on the tradition of the Billy Graham missions and of Pentecostal services), unashamed drawing on environmentalist themes from Genesis as well as sexual discipline themes from Matthew, all knit around the strong liturgical and episcopal framework provided by Anglicanism. It seemed to be the magic formula, and many people expected that during the 1990s the charismatic evangelicals would come to dominate the church. (I'll explain why they did not in a moment.)
Lastly, there were two brands of liberalism. We might call them "intellectual liberalism" and "woolly liberalism". Intellectual liberalism included exotic neo-Marxist ideas from liberation theology (a number of which were of considerable interest to the charismatic evangelicals, and have entered into Conservatism through the "social justice" agenda cooperation between Catholic Conservatives - who also had their liberation theologians - and charismatic evangelical Conservatives). It also included academic free-thought (such as Rowan Williams' via negativa idea that all that God really reveals to us is that he is not going to tell us anything - for Williams, the archetype of Christian revelation is the baby Jesus: mute). At the more extreme level it included Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith movement, who are essentially atheists carrying the Anglican badge to achieve social purposes (they wouldn't put it like that - Cupitt would claim that the question "is there a God" is so meaningless that it cannot be asked, let alone answered, and hence that he is not properly either atheist or agnostic; I don't dispute that his position merits an answer, but I'm not going to offer it here - that's another essay - and for our purposes we'll just call him an atheist).
Atheist priests and theologians had less influence in the UK than in the US. There, the most notorious was John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark, New Jersey. To get an idea of just how extreme Spong is, you need to consider his "update" of Martin Luther's 95 theses, of which a few are available here. The first is that "Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead". The second is that it is "nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity". The fifth is that "The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity". Essentially, Spong is not merely not a Christian, and in fact an atheist, but sets himself up as an explicit enemy of Christianity - in something like the mode of Richard Dawkins when he's feeling belligerent. Atheism of the sort actively promoted by American Anglican bishops has always been straightforwardly unacceptable in Britain. That the Anglican Church has tolerated for so long the overt anti-Christian nature of the US branch of Anglicanism, right up to the highest reaches of its authority, is both a mystery and a mistake. I have no political objection to Spong being anti-Christian. But the claim that I am in some kind of common Christian "communion" with him is beyond a joke. That AMiA is correct to regard ECUSA as apostate is so obvious that it is usually clear to non-Christians as well as Christians.
The last group of liberals were the woolly ones, in the tradition of John Hapgood, former Archbishop of York. These perhaps most closely reflected the prevailing caricature of the Anglican priest - uncertain of much, disinclined to criticize personal morality, a bit leftie in their politics, terribly nice chaps who do a lot of good work in the community and are good listeners in their pastoral care.
In the women priests debate of 1992, crucially, a large group of the charismatic evangelicals sided with the intellectual and woolly liberals against the Anglo-Catholics, the traditional evangelicals, and some charismatics. This was sufficient to carry the day, and women priests arrived. A number of the larger charismatic evangelical churches were very powerful "vicar factories", sponsoring many people into the priesthood, and had a number of keen women candidates. Large numbers of Anglo-Catholic clergy departed for the Catholic Church. Others formed their own isolated "forward in faith" Church-within-a-Church inside Anglicanism - and here there was profound change, in that many Anglo-Catholic priests that stayed were fairly liberal on many issues other than the role of women in the priesthood. Although in many respects the Anglo-Catholics and charismatic evangelicals had been close allies - particularly relating to forms of worship and a number of social doctrines - the departure of the Anglo-Catholics was not initially feared as disruptive of the charismatics' apparently inexorable rise to power.
But two things happened, that changed matters a great deal. First, though they were very vibrant and influential over many churchgoers even outside their own large congregations, and although they did well at converting many non-Christians and members of other denominations and planted new churches in many places, the number of charismatic evangelical churches was small. Once women priests were permitted, what had been a fall-off in applications to the priesthood - creating a gap for the charismatic vicar factories - that gap was now filled with liberal women priests, typically in the woolly liberal tradition. Liberals, who had always been much stronger amongst the priesthood than the laity, came to overwhelmingly dominate the priesthood.
Second, at around this time, the Anglican charismatic movement became badly damaged through a misguided association with the "Toronto blessing". This movement, involving new forms of charismatic expression such as barking like a dog and giggling uncontrollably, often the rejection of more traditional forms of charismatic expression (such as speaking in tongues - said by some to be part of a "previous washing" of the Spirit, that would impede full receipt of the Toronto blessing), and many new (and sometimes strange) doctrines supposedly revealed in prophetic utterance. Disputes within the charismatic movement about whether to embrace or oppose the Toronto blessing created division, and after a period in which many people new to the charismatic movement first "tried it out" in its Toronto form, there was a significant drifting away of laity from charismatic activity altogether - so that the sense of one-way momentum was lost. The charismatic movement appeared to have peaked.
Whilst the charismatics were distracted by their internal problems, the now-overwhelming power of the liberal priesthood contrasted with still-growing conservatism amongst the laity. The distance in doctine between the priest and his or her congregation became such that the congregation ceased much to respect the theological views of their priests. This lead to people finding their own theologies in their Bible, encouraged by much, often American, Pentecostal and Baptist literature. Special creationism (the "young earth" doctrine according to which the earth was constructed in a six-day period about ten thousand years ago and almost all modern biology is plain wrong) has become a socially acceptable doctrine amongst Anglican laity - when even twenty-five years ago it would have marked you out as rather strange (it is not, for example, a doctrine widely supported amongst Anglicanism's traditional evangelicals - such as John Stott).
This divide led to even greater tensions when, for lack of numerical opposition, the overwhelming liberal priesthood began to press further liberal doctrinal changes. Liberal priests typically offer no disciplined sexual doctrine at all - they do not teach against sex before marriage, they are willing to remarry adulterers, they rarely extol marriage. Sexual topics are not matters about which they have much to say. The iconic form of liberalism relates to practicing homosexuality. But this needs to be seen as a test case, rather than as a great cause. What is opposed by the Anglican laity, by evangelicals, and the much-reduced number of conservative Anglo-Catholics is the whole apparatus of liberalism. Conservative Anglicans want to tell the world that they are sinners and need the redemptive work of Christ, that the Bible reveals God and His purposes to us, that we can know what is right and wrong because God has told us, that God's commands are eternal and not simply a reflection of the norms of our society, that Christianity should challenge the world, not adapt to it, that if we seek to adapt to the world we will have nothing to say to it and it will rightly despise us, and many other such things. The opposition to the acceptance, within the church, of practicising homosexuality is not an isolated thing, as if Anglicans had become obsessed about an irrelevance. It is either the turning point or the end of the line for British Anglicanism. Changing to accept practicing homosexuality is not something we can accomodate whilst still retaining our standard doctrines about the authority of the Bible to guide our lives. There is, of course, a debate to be had about whether we should want the Bible to guide our lives, indeed whether we should be Christians at all. But, Dear Reader, you will appreciate that this is a rather large debate.
The overwhelming liberalism of the Church of England's priesthood, and the consequent emptiness of its message and witness to the world, has long been unacceptable. But its accelerating attempts to impose its empty, pointless dogmas on the most dynamic parts of the church is simply intolerable and will not, I believe, be tolerated more than a very short time longer. It's over. All that remains now is to say good night.
