Anglicanism and the reproduction of peoplehood

ABSTRACT

This article explores contemporary Church of England disagreements over ecclesial recognition of homosexual relationships in dialogue with postcolonial theology and theory. I argue that implicit in these disagreements are competing accounts of what it is to be an Anglican people. More specifically, I claim that reading these disagreements through a postcolonial lens brings to the surface genealogical ways of thinking about Anglican identity that reproduce a sense of English exceptionalism and primacy within the Anglican Communion, and which, in their exclusivist narration of ‘true’ Anglican identity, create intractable disagreements. I point to a way forward for engagement in Anglican disagreements, in which the messiness of the Church of England’s inheritance is more fully acknowledged and in which ongoing contestation is understood as essential to the future of the church.

KEYWORDS:

• Anglicanism
• postcolonialism
• disagreement
• sexuality
• nationalism
• political theology

I. Introduction

In this article I explore the ways of being a people that are implicit in current Church of England disagreements, particularly those disagreements over the proper response of the church to homosexuality identity and relationships. In this, I am seeking to pay attention to what picture of Anglican identity is being presented by the various parties involved in these disputes – asking, what stories are being told here about what it is to be truly Anglican? Paying attention in this way helps to reveal some of the submerged dimensions of the particular disagreements of the moment; by seeking greater clarity about what each party is aiming for, the Church of England may hopefully better placed to find a way forward through these disagreements. But I think paying attention to the stories of Anglican identity that are being told in these debates is also important at a deeper level, because the accounts offered of what it means to be Anglican shapes the structures and practices through which Anglicanism continues to be reproduced.

In an issue centred on postcolonialism, it is worth briefly specifying that I am using this term primarily in an ethical or normative sense, rather than in a historically descriptive sense. So I am seeking, as R.S. Sugirtharajah describes the aim of postcolonial discourse, to actively interrogate the hegemonic.¹ In particular, I am aiming to interrogate hegemony in Church of England disagreements, out of the conviction that there is no part of Anglicanism – not the structures of the Anglican Communion, nor any of the member churches of the Anglican Communion – that can be seen truthfully without this lens. And if we can only understand the inheritance of Anglicanism through a postcolonial lens, then any way forward must also be postcolonial in approach. This has been the argument of numerous scholars over the past several decades in relation to the project of reconceiving Anglicanism as a whole. But, as far as I know, less attention has been paid within the Church of England to the implications reconceiving Anglicanism in this way might have for this church in particular. This is my focus here.

To this end, I make three main claims. First, that implicit in contemporary Church of England disagreements over the recognition of homosexuality in the church are competing accounts of what is to be an Anglican people – and that there is a fundamental intractability to this disagreement because of the way each party is reading Anglican identity. Second, that reading these disagreements through a postcolonial lens brings to the surface genealogical ways of thinking about Anglican identity that reproduce a sense of English exceptionalism and primacy within the Anglican Communion, and which, in their exclusivist narration of ‘true’ Anglican identity, create intractable disagreements. And third, that any way through these disagreements requires a postcolonial approach to Church of England peoplehood in which the messiness of inheritance is more fully acknowledged, and in which ongoing contestation is essential to the future of the church.

Anglican genealogical constructions

In the disagreement over what recognition might be offered within the Church of England to those in same-sex relationships, the main positions seem, at first glance, to be diametrically opposed.² One the one hand, there are those who believe that faithfulness to Christ and to Christ’s call on the Church means that they must resist the Church of England moving to sanction same sex relationships as a form of relationship that can receive God’s blessing or as able to have the character of marriage. On the other hand, there are those who believe that it is exactly this desire to be faithful that compels them to seek that the church bless these kinds of relationship and extend the category of marriage to include same sex marriage. Yet despite the depth of this disagreement, I am arguing that the way in which both positions are articulated actually depends on a shared logic for reading Anglicanism. It is, I believe, precisely a postcolonial lens that helps us to see this shared logic.³

In making this argument, I am drawing in particular on a recent work by Renie Chow Choy, Ancestral Feeling: Postcolonial Thoughts on Western Christian Heritage.⁴ Choy – a Hong Konger by birth, who spent part of her childhood and adolescence in Canada, and now lives in the UK – compellingly argues that the language of ancestry is ‘the default mode for thinking about the history of Christianity’ and that this default language has had a number of deeply corrosive effects on the practice of Christianity.⁵ Within this overarching ancestral logic, Choy’s work highlights a sense of Church of England Christianity as, first, issuing from a single unbroken line of spiritual ancestry, which, second, has the effect of placing English Anglicanism in a position of central significance for both the past and future of the Christian world as a whole.

We begin then with the argument that Anglicanism has been predominantly imagined in terms of a single and unbroken line of spiritual ancestry. In her discussion of the birth of the Church of England, Choy describes how English Protestantism replaced a genealogy ‘based on the lineage of bishops, kings and saints’, and replaced it with a genealogy of the faithful ‘persecuted elect’. This apocalyptic historiography involved ‘assigning proper ancestors from which English Christianity could claim descent.’⁶ The early English Protestants thus came to see themselves as the faithful, persecuted remnant in amongst the corrupted mass of Catholicism.

This account of English Protestants as the ‘True Church’ fostered, Choy argues, a sense of England as an elect and exceptional nation.⁷ Edwin Jones has argued that after the break from Rome and the Henrician reformation, the English increasingly turned inward ‘to an understanding of election that stressed the English nation’s separation and distinction from others’.⁸ This turn to the national is expressed, for example, in figures such as Matthew Parker, John Aylmer, and Hugh Latimer all confidently speaking of God as English.⁹

This sense of exceptionalism further developed with the expansion of the British Empire. Choy highlights what she terms a ‘spatial and temporal universalism’ evident in late nineteenth century missionary thinking, in which the ambition was for ‘England as the origins of the Anglo Saxon race’ to take the gospel to ‘all lands’.¹⁰ In the Church of England, there was a belief that not only was it English Christianity, but more specifically the Christianity of the Church of England that had been providentially chosen by God for this task. We can see this in a 1713 sermon by George Stanhope, Dean of Canterbury:

Our happy island was probably by the preaching of St Paul, but undoubtedly in the time of the Apostles themselves, bless’d with the early knowledge of the Gospel; The first profession of the Truth countenanced and enjoined by Laws and publick Authority; The Birth of the first Christian Emperor; To Us, the shining of this glorious Light, never totally extinguished among us. And, when eclipsed with those Corruptions and Superstitions, which God, in his judgment, permitted to overspread the face of this Western World; We are again among the first, and far the best, Reformed; … But, Are such signal Favours remembered as they ought to be, unless our Gratitude express itself, in as uncommon Measures of Piety, and Charity, and Holy Labour, to plant this excellent religion, where it is not yet … shall not We, who have all the Advantages of truly Primitive Doctrine, lay the Good of Souls, and the Enlargement of the Lord’s Territories to heart?¹¹

I do not have space in this paper to explore at length the wider social, political, and cultural ramifications of theological accounts of English exceptionalism and ethno-nationalism, but it’s worth briefly noting here that this account of the salvific importance of white European Christianity has issued at times in an explicit concern within Anglicanism with biological reproduction. Susannah Cornwall cites how, at the 1908 Lambeth Conference,

[T]he Anglican bishops called on “all Christian people to discountenance the use of all artificial means of restriction as demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare”. At the same Lambeth Conference, the committee charged with considering population restriction noted, worriedly, that ‘in every Western country there has been a decline in the birth-rate; but this decline has been most marked among the English-speaking peoples, once the most fertile of races’. They added, ‘There is the world-danger that the great English-speaking peoples, diminished in number … should commit the crowning infamy of race-suicide, and so fail to fulfil that high destiny to which in the Providence of God they have been manifestly called’.¹²

Due to the extent to which the maintenance of British Christianity in the colonies generally relied on chaplains, societies, and subsidies (with resident territorial bishops not generally installed until the 1840s), what has been called a ‘voluntary principle’ developed in colonial iterations of Protestantism. Whilst a sense of exceptionalism was maintained in England, elsewhere in the empire, preoccupations with the ancient origins of English Christianity and its continuation down the ages were not reproduced in the same way in colonial Protestantism. Instead, genealogical imaginations shifted towards a sense of spiritual brotherhood. Yet ideas of descent were also retained. The image here might be of colonial denominations as streams flowing out of the central river of English Christianity, or of Christian seedlings falling from the English oak.

As Choy puts it, in this reconstruction of Christendom ‘as a spiritual brotherhood derived from common descent’, ‘its diversity and global reach[were] fuelled by the spirit of progress.’¹³ This spirit of progress flowed from a ‘conception of time that relies on tracing descent from origins’.¹⁴ By this account, ‘Protestantism is the principle of movement, of [cumulative] progress in the history of the church.’¹⁵ Central to this way of reading history are what have been termed ‘historicist’ tendencies to seek ‘the general in the particular’, and ‘the idea of development and the assumption that a certain amount of time [necessarily] elapses in the very process of development.’ By this rendition of history, peoples occupy ‘different positions on a universal path of progress’, with colonial subjects the last to be brought into European history and therefore in a perpetual ‘state of deferred arrival’, forever needing to catch up.¹⁶

Both of these conceptions of colonial Protestant Christianity – as a global spiritual brotherhood, and as animated by a spirit of progress – in turn reshaped and came to be incorporated within the Church of England’s self understanding. The Tractarian conception of the church as internally connected branches of a tree fed into ‘Branch Theory’, with its European conception of history as a specific continuum, with Western periodisation, junctures, and so forth.¹⁷ This is in keeping with a contemporary tendency, as noted by Kwok Pui-Lan, for Anglicans, in considering their tradition, to ‘trace it back to the ancient apostolic tradition, mediated through the Church of England, and later brought to different parts of the world.’ This, she argues, is ‘reading history from the metropolitan centre, relegating the histories of other people to the periphery.’¹⁸

Peoplehood in current disagreements

I turn now to trace how these forms of genealogical thinking are at play in contemporary Church of England disagreements. I am attempting to identify here a few different ways that members of the Church of England name themselves as Anglicans in the midst of disagreements over church recognition of homosexual relationships. In mapping these groups and their sense of Anglican identity, I am considering how they account for their stance and actions as flowing out of, and reinforcing, what they believe it is (and should be) to be Anglican. Both of the two broad ways of thinking about what is to be Anglican that I’m setting out here display, I will argue, forms of the genealogical thinking identified by Choy.¹⁹

Those who oppose same sex blessings and/or marriages

Those who oppose the recently approved blessings for couples in same sex relationships²⁰ and the prospect of same sex weddings in the Church of England tend to describe themselves, variously, as: ‘Orthodox Anglicans’, ‘apostolic Anglicans’, ‘faithful Anglicans’, and ‘biblical Anglicans’.

Whilst the language of ‘apostolic Anglicans’ has historically tended to be used mainly by Anglo-Catholics in describing their identity, in current debates over sexuality this language has come to be used more widely by those opposing ecclesial approval of same sex relationships whatever their ecclesial flavour. This has tended to be the language used, for example, by the Church of England Evangelical Council in their discussion of options for structures of differentiation (that is, arranging alternative episcopal oversight for those who oppose same sex blessings etc.).²¹ This apostolic language bears the imprint of the ways in which Tractarians read Anglican identity in close proximity to the early church – positioning their form of Anglicanism directly downstream of the origins of the church within the unbroken flow of ‘small c’ catholicism. For this account of Anglican identity, where there is movement (or development, in John Henry Newman’s terms), it is important that this movement is in continuity with what has been handed down through the ages. There is a strong emphasis placed, therefore, on doctrinal formularies and previous Church of England reports, statements, and decisions on matters relating to sexuality. For example, The Alliance (a coalition of leaders of a range of churchmanships opposed to same sex blessings) published an open letter in December in which they describe the framework held in common by their community as follows: ‘As part of one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, we stand on the historic Christian faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and in the historic formularies, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordering of Bishops, Priests and Deacons’.²²

Kwok has remarked upon the tendency of Church of England theologians to look back to the ‘point of origin’ particularly when their identity feels under pressure (for example, in the face of declining congregational numbers and diminishing cultural status), ‘to find the unity and identity of the Anglican church’.²³ This is in keeping with a phenomenon identified by sociologist Daniele Hervieu-Léger, who argues that ‘[e]lective fraternities emerge when the imperative to reestablish identity is particularly pressing.’²⁴ This tendency is particularly helpful to keep in mind when it comes to exploring the originary language of ‘apostolic’ and ‘Reformed’ Anglicans (and is also why I spend longer unearthing the genealogical assumptions of this group, as they are arguably the ones whose Anglican identity feels under most pressure as they attempt to resist changes they find un-Anglican).

This framing of identity in terms of continuity is not only expressed temporally but also geographically, looking to the wider Anglican community as well as ecumenically. By this way of thinking, it is important that the Church of England position on sexuality is in keeping with the majority of the church worldwide. In this vein, members of this camp frequently emphasise the damage that decisions to approve same sex blessings and weddings in Church of England churches could cause (and, indeed, are deemed to have already caused) to relationships with other churches, particularly within the Communion. For instance, The Alliance’s open letter argues that: ‘The proposed Prayers of Love and Faith are a departure from the doctrine to which the Church of England has always held fast. They are opposed by the Anglican Primates of the Global South who represent over 75% of the Anglican Communion … .’.²⁵ This way of construing the Church of England’s relationship with the rest of the Anglican Communion (and particularly with the churches represented in the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON)) chimes with Choy’s account of colonial Christianity in terms of an imagined spiritual brotherhood.²⁶

On the other hand, but running together with the above, the language of ‘Biblical’ and ‘faithful’ Anglicans invokes the Reformed genealogy that looks to select figures and groups in each age who have, in the face of ecclesial corruption and capitulation to the surrounding culture, preserved the faith and passed it down. These elect are the links in the chain of ancestry leading to the current faithful remnant. Contemporary societal attitudes are understood as a dangerous but tempting counter narrative to the gospel, and theological liberalism is seen as the result of spiritual corruption by this temptation.²⁷

We can see, then, that there are several interwoven genealogies of Anglican faith operative in contemporary opposition to same sex blessings and marriages. The language of ‘orthodox’ and ‘apostolic Anglicans’ is used in conjunction with the language of ‘biblical’ and ‘faithful’ Anglicans, in a way that joins these two ways of accounting for Anglican peoplehood. This way of thinking seems at first glance to be primarily backwards looking: looking to the point of origin in the Reformation and to those who have carried that uncorrupted spirit forwards, and looking for catholic continuity down the ages and across the world. However, as we have seen, genealogical understandings of the history of Christianity carry within them implicit hopes and expectations for the future. A recent statement from The Alliance encapsulates this two-way dynamic: ‘We are compelled to resist the current direction of travel of the Church of England. It looks to alter what we stand on. It hinders our vision for the future.’²⁸

Those in favour of same sex blessings and/or marriages

On the other hand you have those who are in favour of blessings and/or marriage for same sex couples in the Church of England. In naming their position in these debates, they tend to self-describe as ‘inclusive’, ‘affirming’, and/or ‘progressive’.²⁹

These self-descriptors are, on the surface, more forward-oriented than the self-descriptors of those who oppose – seeking, in their, terms, further progress and greater inclusion. However, this orientation to ‘progress’ itself rests on a form of historicism, whereby, as we saw from Choy, history is understood in relation to a people that is always in the lead and with whom others are (or should be) trying to catch up. Yet this catching up turns out to be impossible because the ‘advanced’ people is always determining where the ‘backward’ should be in relation to their own moving position. We can also see the shadow side of this way of thinking expressed in shame and anxiety that the church has visibly ‘fallen behind’ society, and needs to ‘catch up’, as well as in arguments that the rest of the Church of England needs to ‘get with the agenda’ (sometimes undergirded by the rationale that the majority in local congregations is in agreement with the progressive position). The decision to allow the ordination, and subsequent consecration, of women is sometimes invoked as evidence that the church is already moving along the path of progress, correcting its previous errors as it goes – and this impels also this next step. This sense of forward movement sometimes runs alongside a sense that that the remaining ‘dinosaurs’ in the Church of England will inevitably eventually die out. In all of this, there is a sense of pre-ordained linear progress, of which this group forms the vanguard in the church.

The self-conception of this party too, then, is operating with ‘temporal and spatial visualizations’ that ‘make England the centre and reference point for the rest of the world’. Where Anglocentrism in the more ’conservative’ camp is expressed in concerns that the Church of England changing its mind on sexuality may lead astray those following the ‘mother church’, here it is evident in the felt imperative to embody the Church of England’s calling as a vehicle of progress and take the same path as the more ‘enlightened’ churches of the Anglican Communion.

The problems with these accounts of peoplehood

There are problems with both of these visions of peoplehood, because they both rest on a sense of a single line of ancestry of true Anglicanism which, it is hoped, will be reproduced on into the future. To be clear, I am not saying that this is what everyone on each side secretly believes in their heart of hearts (that England is exceptional and should be primary in the Anglican Communion, and that the other side are all traitors to the denomination). Rather, my point is that this is the direction in which these ways of naming identity tend – this is the orientation of the language drawn upon. There are implications of these pictures of Anglicanism for the practice of Anglican peoplehood – including how these visions and practices of peoplehood interact in disagreements, and in so doing, shape the form of those disagreements (and, by extension, shape the Church of England’s rendition of Anglicanism).

Conceiving of Anglican Christianity in terms of spiritual descent (whether that line of descent is understood as flowing from the apostles, or through the faithful persecuted elect, or through a genius for progress) legitimises English nationalism and reinforces English exceptionalism.³⁰ This, as we have seen, makes English Anglicans ‘the centre and reference point’ for the rest of the world (including, most pertinently, for the Anglican Communion), through the use of the language of ancestry to describe the relationship of the colonies to the metropole.³¹

Yet whilst there’s a shared logic to the way Anglicanism is read by the two sides of the disagreement, this does not lead to a consensus. The parties differ in the lineages they trace and in which they situate themselves. They do not come to the same account of what it means to be Anglican.

Now, it is not a problem in itself for there to be widely divergent views of Anglicanism at play in the disagreement. Indeed, I think argument at these kind of levels is part of what should sustain the life of the church. But this does become a problem here because the shared way of reading is animated by a sense that there is such a thing as ‘true Anglicanism’ and that only one’s own party is standing within that lineage. As Mike Higton highlights, this denoting of ‘true Anglicans’ is part of a Church of England habit of relating to our history selectively.³² There is, Higton argues, a tendency to tell stories about Anglicanism that conceal both the brutality and the contingency of the Church of England’s history, ‘stories in which [the settlements we have reached] are the natural unfolding of national character, or the realization of a vision of the Reformers, or the reassertion of the immemorial genius of the English church.’³³ This selection and concealment is done, however, without acknowledgement and with the belief that the story one is telling is the plain truth of Anglicanism.

There is a particular danger that arises where there are apparently shared practices of reasoning that lead people to very different conclusions. Higton writes of the way this plays out in relation to Scripture:

Suppose that you and I are both looking at the same text, and using similar kinds of argument about that text, and yet you are refusing to come to the conclusion that to me seems to be so plainly demanded. I am likely to think that your conclusion is actually being shaped by something else. Unlike me, I will think, you must only be pretending to base your conclusions on the text; you must be twisting the text to some preconceived agenda. Such suspicions of insincerity are a characteristic feature of intractable disagreements.³⁴

I think we can see similar dynamics at play in relation to readings of Anglicanism. Unacknowledged selective story telling in narrating ‘true Anglicanism’ combines with the appearance of shared reasoning to generate an exclusivism whereby alternative accounts of Anglicanism pose an existential threat to the vision each party has of the Church of England. This is, in Higton’s terms, what makes the current disagreement ‘intractable’. As such, it is reasonable to wonder whether this will become one of the unresolved disagreements with which the history of the church is littered – in which negotiations collapse and disputants separate.

We can now see more clearly why this kind of disagreement is a problem within a denomination. Yet it is not just a problem because it raises the possibility of schism, but, more fundamentally, because of the thinking driving this intractable disagreement. More corrosive than the fact of the disagreement is the shared logic of both parties, reproducing a conception and practice of Anglican peoplehood as the perpetuation of a single, unbroken line of spiritual descent, in which England is at the centre of Anglicanism (and at the centre of socio-political relationships more widely).

Reconceiving Anglican peoplehood

What we need, then, is a different way of conceiving of Christian peoplehood in general, and Church of England peoplehood in particular. I offer here a few brief pointers to new directions which we might follow in this search.

Unpicking straight lines, tracing rhizomes, and joining fragments

We have seen that there are patterns of thinking about Christian ancestry that must be unlearnt, ‘components of the language of lineage which we need to discard’.³⁵ Yet the language of lineage cannot, it seems, be jettisoned wholesale. Hervieu-Léger has argued that all religions require collective memory to survive, and so groups and individuals must see themselves as part of a chain of memory – a link in the ‘lineage of belief’.³⁶ However, it is not just the inevitability of genealogical thinking that should keep us tied to conceptions of Anglicanism in terms of ancestry. Rather, there is, I think, something normative to be retained about this language for a conception of ecclesial peoplehood.³⁷

In particular, I think there is a moral significance to paying attention to the way the Church of England has been formed through a messy inheritance. This is why, as Higton argues, we need to resist a temptation to tell selective stories of Anglicanism, for:

Anglicans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are heirs of this whole history [of the denomination]. We are heirs of the seesawing settlements of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; we are heirs of the Restoration’s imposed conformity; we are heirs of the nineteenth century’s industrious, creative and incompatible appropriations of earlier Anglican tradition; we are heirs of a whole series of persistent internal and external exclusions. We can’t simply go back behind the nineteenth century to the supposed purity of any earlier form of Anglicanism: we are heirs of the whole history; we ‘cannot freeze-frame it at any point and say, “This is definitive Anglicanism”’.³⁸

As Rowan Williams has argued, moral discernment requires a commitment to recognising ever more deeply the reality that our moral vision has been shaped by the particular network of relationships in which we are each located. In contrast to what he sees as a post-enlightenment tendency to think of the self as a ‘finished and self-contained reality, with its own fixed needs and dispositions’, Williams argues that we must begin our thinking about moral discernment by attending to ‘the way that the self is already shaped by the relations in which it stands’.³⁹ We are, Williams says, ‘our limits’, not simply in the sense of having a particular location, but in the sense of being material and historical – shaped by all manner of forces in a specific history, in a tangle far too dense for any one of us to tease out our identity with any completeness. We inevitably see only some of the factors that shape our moral vision and make us who we are.

This means that any single person’s – or church’s – identity is always inherently obscured and occluded. For Williams, recognising the reality of this tangled mess should push individuals towards conversation, as we discover more of the tangle of our own identity not alone but by interactions that bring different strands to the surface.⁴⁰ Higton too points to reading this history in conversation with others – ‘with the heirs of those ejected for nonconformity, perhaps, or those whose lands were colonized by the Church-supported empire’ – as a practice that ‘helps reveal just how much those stories disguise.’⁴¹ Such conversations offer a deeper invitation into the particular web of relations in which we are each located. So too do Anglicans need to enter more deeply into the recognition that we will never know exactly what has formed our vision of Anglican identity.

We can fruitfully approach Anglicanism in the manner that Susannah Cornwall has written of families – mindful that, ‘[i]nheritances are valuable: they remind us of our history, and tie us into a story of belonging.’ But, if an inheritance is not to be a millstone around our necks, then we must ‘acknowledge the way in which real families [or, the reality of Anglicanisms] exceed and subvert their culturally idealized forms.’ If we fail to do so, ‘the familial ceases to be dynamic and becomes merely a static repetition of what (never) was.’⁴²

We can say, then, that the Church of England stands not within a single pure line of spiritual ancestry but within an overlapping ecology. In the place of geometric points and lines of transmission, Choy posits that ancestors create ‘timeknots’ that cannot, and should not, be straightened out.⁴³ Or we might draw on the language of rhizomes, as used by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, to evoke the intertwined tangle of roots and the ongoing importance of such ties of belonging.⁴⁴

We need, in fact, to further complexify our understanding of our spiritual inheritance through the work of grafting previously overlooked roots back in.⁴⁵ This is the work of joining and working with fragments that Willie James Jennings sets out as ‘a deeply Christian calling.’⁴⁶ Such joining is not a subsuming of these particular narratives into an unchanged dominant ‘genealogical pedigree’, but rather is intended to ‘destabilize the linear narrative with the complexity of self-experience’.⁴⁷ In the context of the Church of England’s colonial positioning, Stuart Hall’s description of colonisation and its aftermath not as a unidirectional flow of transformation from coloniser to colonised, but as a transnational and transcultural process is significant – whereby the colonised ‘raise issues the coloniser must face’.⁴⁸ This is an ongoing renegotiation between the past and the present, and brings disruption of settled arrangements between the centre and peripheries.

Reconceiving generativity: forming a people through destabilisation and contestation

Rethinking a people’s orientation to its past also has implications for the conception of its future. Cornwall has written of the way in which generativity requires difference; repetition, she argues, ‘is never absolute. It is always tempered by discontinuity. It is necessary and appropriate that this should be so.’⁴⁹ Postcolonial theorists have often pointed to the way mimicry has functioned as a form of indirect rule – or internalised colonialism – in British colonies.⁵⁰ Yet there is also a subversive potential of mimicry – its potential to expose cracks in cultural dominance by being ‘almost, but not quite’. In this way, as Homi Bhabha argues, mimicry ‘reveals that imperial dominance can never be total’.⁵¹

There is, I think, particular potential for Church of England reproduction to be tempered and destabilised through catachresis, as Stephen D. Moore uses the term (informed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak): a process of usurpation ‘by which the colonized strategically appropriate and redeploy specific elements of colonial or imperial culture or ideology.’⁵² As Cornwall articulates it, catachresis takes place ‘when we use an imperfect, inadequate word knowingly but precisely because no better word exists, such that the very act of using it destabilizes both the thing and its others, and thereby itself becomes an act of resistance.’⁵³

We can understand the language of the Anglican via media (and also the language of Christian ancestry and inheritance as a whole) in this vein. Using this language risks obscuring the fact that the Church of England as a whole has never really been ideologically committed to moderation and latitude. But continuing to use this term and ‘usurping’ its meaning can destabilise established understandings of Anglican peoplehood, and make space for new and generative conceptions and enactments of what it is to be an Anglican people.⁵⁴ Kwok points to a way of reimagining the via media as hybridity – a conceptualisation that flows out of the experience of cultural experimentation in the newer churches of the Anglican Communion, and which moves away from the sense of harmonious balance that the mythology of the Anglican middle way tends to evoke. Kwok even names Anglicanism itself in its origins as a cultural hybrid.⁵⁵ Yet despite its hybrid origins, deliberate hybridity did not continue on into Anglican expression in British colonies. Rather, we have seen what John Pobee calls ‘the Anglo-Saxon captivity of Ecclesia Anglicana’.⁵⁶ We might find a way forward, then, in the Church of England through receiving back the concept of the via media from the Anglican Communion, recast as hybridity. This might allow it to see more clearly the hybridity of its own origins – unsettling the story told of reasoned moderation and latitude.

This helps us to see that any iteration of Anglicanism cannot be understood in separation from colonialism and postcolonialism: these are not elements of Anglicanism that are a kind of unfortunate ‘add-on’ to a rational and ideologically pure core. Rather, the DNA of the whole has been reshaped through British colonisation and its aftermath. There is no Anglicanism that has not been understood in opposition to, and/or reshaped through the relationship between metropole and peripheries. This dynamic is also true of what appear as ‘internal’ or ’domestic’ disagreements in the Church of England, and any way forward must through these disagreements must also be postcolonial in approach. It must be attentive to, and led by, those of colonised heritage in both describing and diagnosing what is going in contemporary Church of England disagreements – and in pointing to a normative way forward for becoming an Anglican people.

Conclusion

We have observed a Church of England tendency, in a moment of disagreement and uncertainty about the future, to look back to a mythologised point of origin and subsequent line of descent. We have seen that these genealogical pictures of Anglicanism generate damage at a number of levels: in terms of English national identity; in relationships within the Anglican Communion; and in the inability of each camp to relate to the other than in intractability. In doing so, the parties to this disagreement offer an exclusivist account of peoplehood, and seek to form themselves (and others) according to this picture.

Seeking a different mode of peoplehood means, therefore, rethinking the Church of England’s relationship to both its past and its future: a) how the faith and peoplehood is passed on and inherited, and who is a legitimate inheritor and who is not – including who gets to name corruptions and reform it, and who does not; and b) our forward orientation – how we think about our understanding of the future to which we are drawn by God, as well as the means by which we are drawn to this future.

In considering these backwards and forwards looking questions in the Church of England context, a less fixed and linear way of construing Anglican identity has come into view. In this light, it is, and moreover should be, something that is out of any Anglican party’s control – something that can only be received from all our spiritual ancestors. This approach to Anglican inheritance also shapes practices in the present: destabilising the centre and rejoining previously excluded fragments such that the form of the whole is reshaped. One of the implications of this is the need to hold all elements and facets of Anglican identity open to ongoing renegotiation. Disagreement has a role to play, therefore, in propelling Anglican peoplehood forward – and, as such, should be essential to our hopes for the Church of England. Anglicanism comes into view here as not as the unfolding of a prefigured blueprint, but rather as something that is never fully realised and that involves ongoing frustration and reshaping of any party’s specific hopes for it.⁵⁷ This leaves us with what we might call a ‘bottom-up’ mode of Anglican peoplehood, that emerges through working with contingent fragments and is constituted through ongoing contestation.

This leaves us with some questions about what all of this might yield for the Church of England in the midst of this particular disagreement. Disagreement can, we have seen, be a place where stories of genealogical pedigree and identity are reinforced. But can it also be a place where our desires and hopes are unsettled and transformed? What might it look like for competing visions of Anglican peoplehood to disrupt and reshape one another – and so for the Church of England’s postures and practices to be unsettled and opened out to the ever surprising wisdom of God?

Websites

Anglican Ink: https://anglican.ink

Global Anglican Futures Conference: https://www.gafcon.org

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Notes on contributors

Jenny Leith

Jenny Leith is Lecturer in Christian Ethics at Westcott House, Cambridge. She is the author of Political Formation: Being formed by the Spirit in church and world (SCM Press, 2023).

Notes

¹ R.S. Sugirtharajah, ‘From Orientalism to Postcolonialism’, in Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), 17.

² There are other positions than these two camps, of course – including opposition to change on procedural grounds. Nonetheless, these are the primarily positions in the disagreement.

³ In making this claim, I am not saying that this is the only animus in these disagreements, and that I am unmasking what is really going underneath it all. Rather, led by a foundational insight of postcolonial theorists that we cannot think of the discourse of the ‘metropole’ or imperial ‘centre’ without also thinking about the interplay with the colonial ‘peripheries’, I am offering this as one lens on contemporary Church of England discourse. This is not, therefore, an exclusive account of the logic of these disagreements, but is nonetheless an indispensable lens for understanding what is going wrong and what should be done differently.

⁴ Renie Chow Choy, Ancestral Feeling: Postcolonial Thoughts on Western Christian Heritage (London: SCM Press, 2021).

⁵ Choy, Ancestral Feeling, 34.

⁶ Ibid., 38–39.

⁷ Ibid., 39.

⁸ Edwin Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998).

⁹ Choy, 39. However, it is worth noting that this understanding did not consistently translate into of colonies as territories given to this exceptional people by God. Rather, an argument was made from ‘vacancy’ – as articulated, from example, by Thomas Paine in his account of God’s provision of a vacant America as a sanctuary for the persecuted.

¹⁰ Choy, 43. She names the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and Baptist Missionary Society as examples of this way of thinking. As Arif Dirlik puts it, ‘[t]he distinguishing feature of Eurocentrism is not its exclusiveness but rather the reverse: its inclusiveness’. Arif Dirlik, ‘History Without a Center? Reflections on Eurocentrism’, in Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (eds), Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in a Global Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 247–84 (252). Cited in Choy, 55.

¹¹ George Stanhope, Dean of Canterbury, The Early Conversion of Islanders, a Wise Expedient for Propagating Christianity: A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1713), 20–2. Cited in Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 62. Strong notes of the emperor cited: ‘The reference here is to the legendary first Christian king of Britain, Lucius, who was believed to have made Christianity the official religion of his realm in the second century. The legend stems from a reference in the papal biographies written in the Liber Pontificalis from the sixth century onwards that a British king had petitioned Pope Eleutherius (175–89) for Christian clergy to be sent to Britain.’

¹² Susannah Cornwall, Un-familiar Theology: Reconceiving sex, reproduction, and generativity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 127. Cornwall continues: ‘At the 1920 Conference, the bishops reiterated, ‘We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception … and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race.’ See also similar language used in Pan-Anglican Congress directly preceding the Lambeth Conference.

¹³ Choy, 41–42.

¹⁴ Ibid., 48. This historiography, Choy contends, is more foundational than the kind of postcolonial paradigms offered by theology. Philip Schaff’s application of Hegelian Geist to church history is identified as a key step in this direction (and away from the Protestant ‘persecuted elect’ genealogical thinking). Schaff’s claim that Protestantism must not be grounded in a rejection of Catholicism is a particularly significant point of departure here, and a move towards a new kind of universalism. See Philip Schaff, What is Church History: A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott and Co, 1846). Reprinted in Charles Yrigoyen Jr and George M. Bricker (eds), Reformed and Catholic: Selected Historical and Theological Writings of Philip Schaff (Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick Press, 1979), 17–143.

¹⁵ Choy, 52.

¹⁶ Ibid., 55.

¹⁷ Ibid., 53.

¹⁸ Kwok Pui-Lan, ‘The Legacy of Cultural Hegemony in the Anglican Church’, in Beyond Colonial Anglicanism: The Anglican Communion in the Twenty-First Century, Ian Douglas and Kwok Pui-Lan, eds, (New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 2001), 47–71(57).

¹⁹ I am primarily drawing these categories, and the categories that follow, from synod papers, speeches and campaigning activity, and attendant social media activity – but there is nonetheless an identifiable family resemblance with academic discussions of the same themes.

²⁰ The Prayers of Love and Faith, including prayers of blessing for those in a same sex relationship – initially approved at General Synod in February 2023 and then again in November 2023.

²¹ The Church of England Evangelical Council’s website: https://ceec.info/alternative-spiritual-oversight/ (accessed February 10, 2024).

²² See Francis Martin, ‘Prayers of Love and Faith commended, despite final HTB plea’, Church Times, December 14, 2023. The open letter can be read here: https://anglican.ink/2023/12/14/letter-to-house-of-bishops-from-the-anglican-alliance-about-prayers-of-love-and-faith/. Accessed 10.02.2024. Members of The Alliance include leaders of the Church of England Evangelical Council, the Catholic Group on General Synod, Forward in Faith, the Society, the HTB Network, New Wine, the Evangelical Group on General Synod, ReNew, Church Society, Living Out and Myriad. GAFCON’s website also articulates an understanding of Anglicanism as dating back to AD 597; discusses Anglicanism in relation to the apostolic succession; and contrasts faithful Anglicans with those who have been conformed to the pattern of the world: https://www.gafcon.org/about/orthodox-anglican (accessed February 10, 2024).

²³ Kwok, ‘The Legacy of Cultural hegemony in the Anglican Church’, 58.

²⁴ As summarised by Choy, 66, citing Danièle Hervieu-Léger, La religion pour mémoire (Paris: Cerf, 1993) trans Simon Lee, Religion as a Chain of Memory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). This is, she claims, what gives rise to ‘ethno-religious’ identity, which is ‘the chain on memory reinvented, founded on choice and dependent on the strength of emotional ties.’ Hervieu-Léger further argues that there it is possible to make connections between the ethnic and the religious because they share the same genealogical outlook. She identifies in the ethnic a ‘naturalized genealogy’, related to blood and soil, and in the religious a ‘symbolized genealogy’, constituted through belief in and with reference to a myth and source. Ibid., 125, 127, 130, 157.

²⁵ https://anglican.ink/2023/12/14/letter-to-house-of-bishops-from-the-anglican-alliance-about-prayers-of-love-and-faith/ (accessed April. 10, 2024).

²⁶ It is worth asking, however, how deep this commitment to moving in concert with rest of the Communion runs. As Mike Higton questions, quoting Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, ‘“the Church of England on the whole goes its way without paying much attention to the opinions and reactions of the rest of the Anglican Communion” – except, perhaps, when it suits one side or another in some domestic dispute to do so?’. Mike Higton, The Life of Christian Doctrine (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 33. Citing Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, Beyond Anglicanism (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965). That the importance of continuity across the Anglican Communion is primarily invoked by Church of England Anglicans when convenient for internal disputes is also born out by the origins of GAFCON. In this, then, there is also a continuing Anglocentrism, whereby the spiritual brotherhood of the Anglican Communion is determined in relation to English disagreements. This is in continuity with the dynamics that gave rise to the first Lambeth conference.

²⁷ See, for example, the language used in ‘The Beautiful Story’ film from the CEEC: https://ceec.info/resources/the-beautiful-story/ (accessed February 10, 2024).

²⁸ https://anglican.ink/2023/12/14/letter-to-house-of-bishops-from-the-anglican-alliance-about-prayers-of-love-and-faith/ (accessed April 10, 2024). Part of what is happening here is a uniting of ways of thinking about Christian and Anglican identity, that, whilst both following a logic of lineage, had previously been separate from one another (and have even been understood to be in opposition to one another). Yet through disagreements over sexuality, understandings of Anglican identity have been slowly reshaped, with the traditional delineation of the ‘parties’ of the church – evangelical, liberal, anglo-catholic (to use a contested typology) – meeting the conservative/progressive poles on questions of sexuality.

²⁹ As reflected in the names of groups such as Inclusive Church, Inclusive Evangelicals, Accepting Evangelicals, Diverse Church, Affirming Catholicism. Similar language is used by Changing Attitude England, Equal, OneBodyOneFaith, and MOSAIC.

³⁰ Choy notes that state formation requires notions of continuity and tradition, and further notes the way this plays out in ecclesiastical heritage sites, in which it is sometimes openly acknowledged that the nation’s heritage depended on the ownership of this particular estate. Choy, 93, 96.

³¹ See Choy, 130. See also Kwok’s argument that this imperial imaginary continues to shape Anglican polity, ‘The Legacy of Cultural Hegemony in the Anglican Church’, 62: ‘The structure of the Communion is [still] modelled after that of the British Commonwealth, with bishops functioning almost as governors or heads of states.’ One of the effects of this ‘hierarchical structure and its symbolic representation’ is to ‘diminish the participation of the laity’, both locally and at the level of international Anglican Communion structures. The vision of peoplehood expressed and formed through this is one in which laity are the subjects of the governing clergy.

³² Higton, The Life of Christian Doctrine, 26.

³³ Ibid., 36.

³⁴ Ibid., 182: ‘Such suspicions, however, often rest on a mistake. The apparent commonality in our forms of argument disguises much deeper differences in our apprehensions of scripture‘. Higton continues: “People in both parties may listen to their opponents” arguments carefully, and be willing to have their minds changed if only those arguments will anchor themselves to the plain features of the text. They will think it clear, however, that their opponents are only sustaining their position by refusing to read with open-minded diligence. There is no real shared argument here. In the midst of this kind of intractable disagreement, appeal to scripture is likely only to reinforce, not to resolve division.’

³⁵ Choy, 130.

³⁶ Hervieu-Léger, trans. Lee, Religion as a Chain of Memory, 125. Cited in Choy, 65. Yet attempts, such as that of Guillermo Rene Cavieses Araya, to find another footing for the Anglican Communion other than as held together primarily by ‘common historical ancestry’ (and instead, for example, as an ‘embodiment of the vision and comprehensiveness of the Church […] which the apostles and earliest fathers of the Church envisioned) end up failing. These attempts all, in the end, have to refer church history in terms of ancestry to explain to what the “Anglican” bit of the “Anglican Church of X” refers.’ Choy, 53–54.

³⁷ This impulse leads Choy to ask: ‘Is there a way to retain genealogical consciousness, the language of inheritance and ancestral feeling, while discarding the assumptions of linear descent, originary movement, historical development and essential unity […]?’. Choy, 57.

³⁸ The Life of Christian Doctrine, 36. Higton continues: ‘The 1662 settlement was the product of a messy history. It was a matter of happenstance and the ugly tactics of power, as well as of habits of prayer and patterns of theological imagination. Something similar is true of the settlement that had emerged by the start of the twentieth century, with its braiding of catholic, evangelical and liberal strands. It was the product of contention between parties, and the exhaustion of legal and parliamentary attempts to resolve that contention, more than any positive vision of pluralism.’

³⁹ Rowan Williams, ‘Making Moral Decisions’’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics, Robin Gill, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–15, 5–6. Williams expands: ‘Long before we can have any intelligent account of our “selfhood” in absolutely distinct terms, we already have identities we did not choose; others have entered into what we are – parents and neighbours, the inheritance of class and nation or tribe, all those around us who are speaking the language we are going to learn. […] We discover who we are, in significant part, by meditating on the relations in which we already stand. We occupy a unique place in the whole network of human and other relations that makes up the world of language and culture; but that is not at all the same as saying that we possess an identity that is fundamentally quite unlike that of others and uninvolved in the life of others – with its own given agenda. Thus […] self discovery […] in the process of making certain kinds of decision is also a discovery of the world that shapes us.’

⁴⁰ Williams, ‘Making Moral Decisions’.

⁴¹ Higton, The Life of Christian Doctrine, 36.

⁴² Cornwall, Un/familiar Theology, 174.

⁴³ Choy, 85.

⁴⁴ Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2000).

⁴⁵ Choy’s response takes the form of an attempt to make ‘the Eurocentric ‘timeline’ of events in church history join up with the events of [her] life.’ This means retaining an understanding of faith as a family inheritance through writing her own story into the received grand narrative, and so reintegrating fragmented pieces. Such work requires viewing genealogy not as a linear continuum (that is, resisting historicising tendencies to ‘master’ the subject of the past) but as an overlapping and intergenerational story, a site of personal encounter. Choy writes of ‘bringing the fragments of [her] family history to the behemoth that is ‘the history of Western Christendom’ – to declare … . that this is the inheritance left to me by my ancestors too.’ Choy, 63, 70–71, 132.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 132.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 71.

⁴⁸ Kwok, ‘Cultural hegemony’, 52.

⁴⁹ Cornwall, Un/familiar Theology, 143.

⁵⁰ See discussions of Choy, 110, and Kwok, ‘The Legacy of Cultural Hegemony’, 57. Choy argues that preserving the distinctions of class and race in colonial contexts involves the elevation of certain cultural forms as being part of ‘Christian heritage’. Kwok also notes that ‘[i]n many cases, such mimicry of the “mother church” serves not as a mockery of colonial authority, but as a sign of privilege by association’. She sees this kind of mimicry informing the actions of some majority world bishops within the Anglican Communion: ‘While their cultures are generally more inclusive of diverse sexual practices, they have learned from the colonial masters and missionaries a much narrower understanding of sexual propriety.’ Kwok, ‘The Legacy of Cultural Hegemony’, 64.

⁵¹ Cited in Choy, 114. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in Ashcroft et al. eds, The Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 121–31(124 – 5). Bhabha concludes that that mimicry can be used to mock colonisers, serving as double vision, ‘which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.’ As also referenced in Kwok, ‘The Legacy of Cultural Hegemony’, 53.

⁵² Stephen D. Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006), 37. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Identity and Alterity: An Interview’, Arena 97 (1991): 65–76(70).

⁵³ Cornwall, Un/familiar Theology, 166, citing J. Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o.

⁵⁴ Molly Farneth’s account of performances of the ordination of women in The Episcopal Church (US) can perhaps also be read in this light. See Molly Farneth, The Politics of Ritual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

⁵⁵ Kwok, ‘The Legacy of Cultural Hegemony’, 56–57. Newer churches of the Anglican Communion must, therefore, reconnect with and take seriously their hybrid identities – and the (instruments of the) Anglican Communion ‘should encourage the experimentation of new cultural forms among member churches.”

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ For more on the relationship between hope and its frustration in a democratic context, see Vincent Lloyd, ‘Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell’, Compact Magazine, 10 February 2023.