What’s So Good About Being Anglican? (Part 3)

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Anglican, Anne Hathaway, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, Bede, Beowulf, bourgeois, canon, Canterbury, Canterbury Tales, Catholic, Charles Dickens, Charles Taylor, Charlotte Brontë, Chaucer, church-state relations, debt atonement, democracy, English major, English mystics, establishment, George Eliot, Great Books, Jane Austen, Jürgen Habermas, John Henry Newman, Justin Welby, Karl Barth, literary criticism, Literature, Michael Ramsey, Middlemarch, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Oxford Movement, Paul VI, Pope Francis, Prospero, public sphere, Rowan Williams, Shakespeare, social science, Stanley Hauerwas, state, Tempest, Thomas Becket, William Cavanaugh

If you haven’t read part 1 yet, or the ‘Is Anglicanism strategic’ post, go catch up there first.

I am now deeply satisfied. After reading part 2, Churl is now wanting me to perform some sort of ‘theological magic’ to enact a ‘Houdini-like escape,’ as ‘digging one’s grave very deep makes rising from it that much more spectacular.’ Moreover, after the previous Wong Fu diversion, he is now commending my Anglican theological acumen:

“It’s kind of complicated. Let’s talk about something else for a while and maybe it will go away.” I gotta say, Chinglican certainly knows how to do Anglican theology – and I mean that of course in the most loving and Christian way possible.

He knows, after all, that I really can’t live up to the order of the Resurrection; after all, that declared a wandering rabbi the Son of God, produced what Karl Barth called a ‘krisis’ of the powers that styled themselves as godlike, and started a church whose complex history we have been exploring. Moreover, the question of whether Anglicanism can rise from the dead? is likely territory where even angels fear to tread. While the Lord Jesus promises us that we will do greater works than those he did (cf. John 16:12), I unfortunately do not wish to presume that I can give life to whomever I wish (cf. John 5:21).

So I won’t try.

My question is more modest: why do I stay Anglican? Picking up on Churl’s question about ‘theological magic,’ today’s answer comes to us first by way of Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest.

Because The Tempest was the obsession of my Catholic creative writing mentor in high school and the first thing I ever read in university, I’ve come up with a reading of The Tempest that will make all the people who think that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic very happy (apparently, this hangs on a reading of Hamlet, but that’s another post).

Here’s my read: Prospero is a Protestant Anglican. Of course, it might be tempting to read Prospero as a Catholic: he has control of the winds and the waves, the spirits on the island, the book of magic that perhaps the pope has.

But this reading doesn’t quite work if, at least as I was taught, The Tempest is at heart Shakespeare’s ultimate parable about modern science and political sovereignty, making apparent what has long lain hidden in his theatrical oeuvre. For cryin’ out loud, the guy’s on an island, controlling the spirits (like Ariel), kicking the monsters around (like Caliban; yes, I read Prospero as a racist colonizer and Caliban as a post-colonial cry for liberation; that’s another post too), and micromanaging his daughter (Miranda) worse than any stereotypical tiger parent (sorry, had to throw that in there; I am a Chinglican, after all). Prospero is no church controlling the world; he is the state subjectifying his citizens, including their spirituality.

Here’s the comedic twist, though. Spoiler alert: at the end of the play, Prince Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda, and the brothers who usurped Prospero’s throne back in Milan are reconciled with him. Once this happens, Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his book of magic. He’s done with the magical subjectification of everything on the island under his sovereignty. He lets go of the establishment he invented. He is ready for reconciliation.

I’m sure that Shakespeare never intended The Tempest to be taken as a parable for Anglicanism. But it certainly can be received that way. After all, on a cursory reading of the play, one might think that Shakespeare is pro-Prospero: Prospero’s brothers stole his throne, Miranda is over-protected and rebels with Ferdinand, Ariel complains too much, and Caliban is a deformed asshole (can I say that on A Christian Thing?). But that Shakespeare makes Prospero give up the new establishment at the end of the play signals that he might be critical of Prospero, that is, critical of establishmentarian politics, as he is in many of his plays.

Shakespeare is thus providing a re-reading of Anglicanism. A non-establishmentarian reading.

Which brings me to the central proposition of this post: blessed are the English majors, for theirs is the Anglican portion of the kingdom of heaven.

I say this completely without guile, because I was never an English major. I am in fact a social scientist. (I need to put that in bold in case anyone wants to challenge my reading of English literature: yes, I am ignorant, untrained, uncouth, and make pronouncements on things beyond my discipline. Deal with it.)

But I wanted to be an English major in high school, so much so that while my Catholic high school required us to take at least one English course per semester, my junior and senior years were filled with at least two per term, partly because I liked literature so much and partly because I didn’t want to do home economics (imagine my regret when they cooked rotisserie chicken, though).  That all changed when I got to university. I’m frequently told that I took the smarter, more lucrative way out of things: rejecting my recruitment into an English honours program because the history honours program had no exams and lectures, I did my undergraduate degree in history, after which I defected in graduate school to the social sciences. We’ll talk more about the social sciences in part 5 (so stay tuned!), but while I suppose the stuff that i do in the social sciences is more ‘relevant,’ ‘scientific,’ and ‘secular’ (though the social sciences are also chafing under budget cuts), English majors and graduate students seem to have it the worst these days. They’re often told that they were fools to choose literature as a major or graduate specialization because of the putative death of the humanities in the academy. Become an English major, and throw away your entire career. After all, look at Anne Hathaway’s character in the often-panned Valentine’s Day (though my wife and I love this chick flick, partly because we quite uncritically love all chick flicks, and are proud of this ethic). Spoiler alert: we discover that Anne Hathaway’s character moonlights on the side as a phone sex escort because, as she explains, ‘how else is a poetry major going to pay back all her college loans?’ As the English graduate students on this Thing have also described it, the job market in literature is one that doesn’t value what they do, leading Lelbc43 to describe it even as a ‘theodicy.’ If English majors are indeed in such a state of poverty, it would be ‘very meet, right, and our bounden duty always and everywhere’ to acknowledge that they are poor not only in spirit, but in material means, and that their mourning will be comforted and that because of their meekness, they will inherit the earth, including the academy.

But poor as English majors are, the English majors will also inherit the Anglican portion of the kingdom of God because the English canon with which they wrestle stands as a crypto-theological critique of the modern Anglican establishment. Which leads to our second beatitude: blessed are those who ponder the English canon while hungering and thirsting for justice, for they will be filled.

St. John’s College. I wanted to go here once upon a time, but nobody would let me. Wah.

Of course, the moment I bring up the word ‘canon,’ I realize that I’m in very hot water. So even though I am a social scientist, let me say that I’m aware that I will be slowly boiled alive. I understand that what purports to be the ‘English canon’ is in fact the invention of American universities’ ‘Great Books’ programs from the University of Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame, and is now enshrined in the core curriculum at St. John’s College. I know full well that the canon has been used to construct a sort of ‘Western civilization’ approach to the world, one that is firmly pro-establishment and works against my post-colonial tendencies. I appreciate immensely the assaults on a fixed canon as a bastion of work written by dead white men (erm, Jane Austen? George Eliot? the Brontë sisters?) that is purportedly anti-feminist, pro-establishment, homophobic, exclusionary of subaltern voices, and discursively propping up an epistemic era in which (as Foucault would say) ‘man’ has become an object of intense scientific scrutiny. And so I fully take the point that in the English-American canon, it would seem that the ‘subaltern’ voices never seem to be heard, and everyone who’s worth reading are dead white men because those are the heroes of the establishment.

But allow me to protest by saying that this is a pro-Prospero reading of the canon. If we are trying to take apart modern Anglicanism from the inside-out, the canon is a remarkable gift. (I know that the One Ring of Power was too, but that’s different.) Because the function of the canon in elite universities has often been used to form a political class with critical civic faculties, you could say that the canon has often been used in the service of the state.

By canon, then, what I mean to refer to is that very loose collection of English-language books, many of which were written by British authors usually from Shakespeare onward to the nineteenth century (with some American inclusions for American state subjectification purposes and pre-modern works, usually of a Greco-Roman imperial nature, just to be well-rounded with the politics of pagan antiquity), that is often taught to us as ‘the classics.’ What I mean to say is this: if I start discussing a book that’s not in your canon, please don’t skewer me. Instead, it just proves my point that this is a ‘very loose collection of English-language books.’

I’d like to co-opt this (very loose) canon for our own purposes. Let’s move the canon back from its service to the state to the service of the church.

And thus, completely ignoring the canon debate because it really is a very state-centric conversation, let’s think about an alternate ecclesial way forward: let’s read the canon as Anglican theology.

In so doing, what we might find is that there is something in the canon that predates the modern Anglican establishment, something perhaps even akin to a Shakespearean critique of Prospero’s magical subjectification strategies. Indeed, let’s co-opt philosopher John Searle’s assertion that the reading of the canon inculcated a ‘critical attitude’ that ‘served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie’ and thus ‘once served an unmasking function.’ For us, the task of canon reading is not to be formed into an American political elite, although I’m sure that we’d all be better off as critics of American imperialism once we’ve read the canon. Instead, if we read English literature as Anglican theology, we might find that what has ended up in the canon is all the stuff with a tense relationship to the state establishment. In other words, the canon may well be the seeds that lead to the dismantling of Anglican church-state entanglement.

Here’s where some critical theory might actually be helpful. As a social scientist, I’ve found the notion of the ‘public sphere’ as a circulation of literary, artistic, and theatrical works particularly helpful. The go-to guy here is critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, who says that around the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there arose (particularly in England) a bourgeois public sphere, which was located between the authoritarian Enlightenment state (it behooves us always to remember that the first iteration of Enlightenment monarchy was the ‘divine sovereign,’ even in the British Isles…or did you forget to read Hobbes?) and the governed masses. The public sphere emerged as a conversation among a liberal, property-owning middle class about how the state represented itself. Starting out by portraying the state’s court, these comedies and dramas in art, theatre, and an increasing amount of literature became texts through which the bourgeois could critique the state. As people like Habermas as well as Michael Warner show, what we now call the ‘canon’ was instrumental in creating this buffer zone between the state and its citizens, between the establishment and the masses. And in time, of course, this public sphere became a vehicle for the state, what we now call modern democracy.

Hauerwas probably just laughed.

While theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and William Cavanaugh have often knocked democratic movements for being overly state-centric and otherwise nihilistic (and indeed, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the church functions as just another democratizing institution in the service of the democratic state), I’d like to join someone like Nicholas Wolterstorff in saying that the language of democracy, human rights, and justice predate modern democracy.  Following that, I’d like to suggest that if the canon can be read as sowing the seeds for the relativization of state authoritarianism, all of this might imply a sort of Anglican impulse that predates the establishment of modern Anglicanism, one that finds itself constantly in tension with the state establishment, one that is ultimately concerned with the human person and his or her mystical communion with the living God as the critique of state subjectification. It’s that impulse that I am arguing is more properly called Anglican Christianity, one that functions constantly as an undercurrent of critique to the modern Anglican establishment that is so embedded with the powers of the state.

And thus, walking onto territory that is definitely more properly Churl’s and Lelbc43’s than mine, I’d like to suggest that what is needed is a reading of the English literature prior to the Anglican establishment that remains in continuity with what comes afterward. In other words, let’s read the canon as Anglican theology. Put another way, let’s read Shakespeare’s critique of Prospero as a continuous thread through the canon. (Just so you know, I’m going to be very selective here. As in, you may come away from this survey very dissatisfied that your favourite author didn’t get covered. I apologize for two reasons. First, I am running out of room. Second, I’m a social scientist and thus incompetent to discuss everybody competently. In fact, if you see any incompetence in what follows, please feel free to laugh.)

And let’s start precisely where I should not, that is, by colonizing Churl’s territory and saying that something like Sing Me Hwaethwugu is what I am calling a ‘crypto-Anglican blog.’  Let’s re-read Beowulf and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples. Of course, by including these in the Anglican canon (heh, see what I did there), I’m saying that the ‘Anglican canon’ doesn’t need to start with the old pagan Near Eastern and Greco-Roman imperial ‘classics’ (as most canons go), as if those were really necessary for full catholicity (Augustine basically says that they’re nice to critique in The City of God, that is, except for Plato; Augustine kinda likes Plato). Let’s start instead with the Anglo-Saxons.

Heh. Just something to tick Churl off.

If we read Beowulf and Bede with an Anglican eye, we might find that much of what has been construed as ‘Celtic Christianity’ in our popular Christian parlance is more properly described as ‘early Anglican Christianity.’ After all, this was the point of the Gregorian missions: to evangelize the Angles, a job that St. Augustine of Canterbury discovered was much harder than Gregory imagined because the British isles were the site of all kinds of tribal warfare as well as already-existing monasteries that had to be brought into full catholicity with Rome (hence the need for the Synod of Whitby). This evangelization brings out a central theological point that arguably runs throughout medieval Christendom: the state can really only do so much against the forces of evil. From Ambrose excommunicating Theodosius to Gregory VII excommunicating Henry, the point is that the church always relativizes the powers of the king. Beowulf recognizes this limit. As the hero of the Danish court, Beowulf goes out to fight with Grendel and Grendel’s mother and wins a great victory for the Danes. But he’s outclassed by the dragon, whom he does slay, but he ends up getting killed himself. So too, the whole point of Bede’s book is that the Gregorian missionaries came to the British Isles, and, finding the tribes at war, they relativized the powers of the tribal leaders (sometimes even calling down curses upon them), and as peace came to the Isles, they relativized the independence of the Isles altogether by making the church there conform to an Easter date. In short, the church always says to the state and its proto-state ancestors, Your powers are limited. When they get too big, they cause all sorts of violence. Recognize your relative power. (This point is arguably also in the Arthurian legends, especially when we compare Galahad to Lancelot. But I’m running out of room!)

Forgive me the next anachronistic move (I’m going to combine a few centuries that I know that I shouldn’t; this blog post would never get past a peer review, which is why it’s a blog post!): this is why I think we should read Anselm and Chaucer together. After all, Anselm was an Archbishop of Canterbury in tension with the state: trying to bend William and Henry to submission to the pope (and arguably to Canterbury) even while those two kings were trying to consolidate their state power, Anselm got the the boot twice from England. In turn, Chaucer was writing about Canterbury pilgrims grappling with the murder of another Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, arguably by the state (and by another Henry) because he tried to resist Henry II’s consolidation of state power. After his assassination, Henry went and prayed at his tomb in penance, which is nice because that relativizes the state too.

Here we see that when the church tells the state that its powers are relative, the state sometimes wants to exclude the church, often to its own detriment. Read this way, and Anselm’s ‘debt’ atonement theology makes a lot of sense: after all, as he’s writing Cur Deus Homo in exile (well, he started it at Canterbury, and then got the boot), he’s probably thinking that William and Henry have a lot of debts to pay and a lot of divine wrath to satisfy for their actions. So too, as Chaucer concocts The Canterbury Tales, everyone–especially clergymen and monks out for their own power and pleasure–gets wickedly skewered in bawdy comedy, which suggests that in the tension between the church and the state, the struggle of the powers produces plenty of fodder for hilarity. Indeed, we learn something new from Chaucer: as the church vies for power with the state, as if the church should engage the state on its own terms of power, the church becomes no better than the state and should thus also be subjected to comedic critique. Struggle for power, Chaucer says, and the joke’s on you.

Match point.

It’s that hilariously critical hermeneutic that becomes veiled from Shakespeare onward. By the time that one gets to early modern English literature, especially after the Elizabethan settlement, it becomes easy to read the canon as pro-establishment, trying to subjectify citizens with moral virtues that are conducive to their participation as agents of the state. After all, Henry VIII was somewhat successful: in Henry, you could say, the struggle of church against state in the British Isles culminated with the state eating the church.

Marianne: Is he done yet?
Elinor: No, but my Edward always preaches short sermons.

And so, it’s now really easy to read British literature through a sort of Anglophilic, pro-establishment way. In fact, this is how I grew up. I was told that because I read Dickens, Austen, Trollope, etc. in late elementary, junior high, and high school, that I was a nice conservative child. To some extent, I believed it. I read ‘classical literature’ (Austen and Dickens as classical? Hm.), listened to ‘classical music’ (you mean to tell me that Bach and Elgar were classical?), and watched period movies and ‘classical’ plays (Shakespeare as classical?) because I was that kid. Not just the nerdy Chinese kid (as you may recall, the stereotype usually has more to do with math and science than with English), but the kid with character, the kid with virtue, the kid who was superior to all of his Chinese church and Christian school pleb friends because he was classical.

When I discovered that I was in Selina Kyle Anglicanism, I realized that it was precisely the canon–the same canon that I had read as a sort of pro-establishment conservative child–that in fact undermined the modern Anglican establishment. In other words, while the canon can be used for the purposes of state subjectification through the academy and the church, the works in the canon actually posit a tension between what the establishment is trying to do and what it means to be truly human as a critique of the establishment. (I suppose this is true of the biblical canon as well.)

In other words, read as Anglican theology, the English canon works to dislodge the church from state ideology. I don’t have time to now go back and re-read Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (a non-Anglican who wrote an awful lot about Anglicans), among others, with you. But I trust that with this hermeneutic, you’ll find out why despite the best-laid plans, the Austen characters working through their comedy of manners always wind up with the least-expected guy. You’ll re-think the whole plot of Jane Eyre as a not-so-subtle critique of Anglican colonizing missions and its impulse to subjectification, ironically finding in the ‘establishment’ of Mr. Rochester the seeds of the colonial state’s relativization. You’ll get your aha moment when reading Middlemarch and finding out that Eliot’s critique of the Anglican establishment is in fact a relativization of the powers of the church co-opted by the state for the sake of political gain. And you will laugh incessantly (as I do) every time a beadle shows up in Dickens’s novels.

As I read the canon as Anglican theology, then, I have great hope that the oppressive modern establishment that styles itself as the face of Anglican Christianity can be dismantled, and the true Anglicanism that predates modern Anglicanism can once again be known as Anglican Christianity. In fact, I know it must be dismantled because of the conclusions of yet another literary scholar, René Girard.

If we were to read the founding of modern Anglicanism through a Girardian lens, we would find that much of what modern Anglicanism purports to be was founded on a series of original murders, namely the long consolidation of Tudor England as a culmination to the War of the Roses. But what if we take those founding myths and posit them not as foundational, but as merely an episode in the ongoing tension between church and state in English Christianity? What if we take the long view and see that since the Gregorian missions, and arguably before that, the church has always been in tension with the state? What if we see in English Christianity that the church co-opting the state and the state co-opting the church, and both of them being subjected to literary ridicule, is business as usual? What if we say that Henry VIII founded nothing, that Elizabeth I settled nothing, and that Anglican Christianity does not actually hinge on the state’s actions because of the long ecclesial literary tradition that predates it? In other words, what if we stop thinking that the state won its battle against Canterbury in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that we still remain in an ever-unfolding story of Anglican church-state relations?

OK, that was the best tabloid I could find. For the record, Islamophobia sucks. But that’s another post.

This is precisely what’s so fascinating about the very people who should be the face of modern Anglican Protestantism over the last fifty or so years. Since Michael Ramsey, there has been an increasing recognition on the parts of Archbishops of Canterbury, especially Rowan Williams and Justin Welby, that the church should not be tied to the crown, or indeed, to a construction of what British identity (courtesy of the state) should mean. This, I submit to you, was the point of the whole poobah when Rowan Williams came out and said that shari’a law should be recognized in the United Kingdom. Williams was taking apart the whole notion of an established British identity, saying that the United Kingdom needs to understand that the Isles have always been a complex space with many different groups and that it’s pointless to impose one law on all people, especially if there are fellow Muslim citizens. The response to Williams was outrage: how can an Archbishop of Canterbury say such a thing about British identity? Here’s how: by not believing that the founding myths of British sovereignty are true and by disentangling the church from its modern role as the arm of the state, returning it to its original, pre-modern tension with the powers. (Ditto Welby’s comments on the banking system. Ditto the weird game that Welby and the English bishops are playing on the same-sex marriage bill.)

Sorry, Newman, this probably annoys the hell out of you.

I recognize that this argument for a pre-modern/post-modern Anglicanism sounds dangerously close to some of the arguments in the Oxford Movement, and particularly that of John Henry Newman. If there’s something that predates the schism and thus de-legitimizes it, then shouldn’t we all hop over to Rome? Maybe, and so, people like Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins did.

The only thing, though, is that Newman and Hopkins lived during the height of the British Empire. We live in the wake of its collapse, a crisis that affords us Anglicans who do not believe that Henry VIII’s state-eats-church move was legitimate an opportunity to do something unheard of: work for Anglican-Catholic home reunion from the Anglican side of things.

Michael Ramsey and Paul VI. Good times.

Indeed, you could say that the reason there have been so many good and interesting Archbishops of Canterbury since William Temple forward (yeah, actually, Ramsey can’t take all the credit) is that they were all too clear that with the dissolution of the Empire, it made the church’s entanglement with the state look increasingly like nonsense and madness. With the advent of Vatican II, this disentanglement has been coupled with serious dialogue with Rome and the Orthodox Church, particularly in the conversation that Michael Ramsey started with Paul VI that has led to the very interesting work done by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), who have released statements that basically say that despite different theological language being used for the sticky theological issues between the two communions, Anglican theologians basically concur with their Catholic counterparts on the primacy of Rome and the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There is the sticky issue of women’s ordinations and consecrations, as well as the status of LGBTQ+ populations in the communions, but I look forward to what ARCIC will do on this in years to come.

In other words, when I say that I’m staying in the Anglican Communion and when Churl says that he’s leaving for the Roman Catholic Church, we are saying pretty much the same thing. Churl is following Newman: having realized that the entire modern Anglican enterprise is basically a secular one, he is ready to jump ship into a Church where (as Charles Taylor points out) a real, full-bodied sacramental ontology is to be found. This is good and fair. But having read Newman, I’m not convinced that every Anglican who becomes convinced of what Churl has been convinced of must jump ship to Rome. If that were the case, I might ask: then how would the Anglican Communion keep being able to produce figures like Michael Ramsey, Rowan Williams, and Justin Welby?  What we see is that in the English canon, Anglicanism has its own internal resources for undermining its own establishmentarianism. As this becomes undermined, the central question behind the Anglican-Roman Catholic schism will sound increasingly more ridiculous, and that is: can a state’s sovereign exert his rule over the church and her claim to channel one into mystical participation in the life of Christ? Of course not!

Francis: Hey, he’s giving away our secret.
Justin: Don’t worry. The place I’ve reserved for him is secret too.

Then OK, if that’s so, then why continue the schism? Put another way: why can’t the Archbishop of Canterbury finally come home to Gregory? (Let me note that this is precisely what Justin Cantuar said to Pope Francis last week.) And put a final way: Churl and I are doing the same thing: we are working for the undermining of schism in different ways to which the Lord has called us. He will likely be going over to Rome; bless him. I will stay here in the Anglican Church. We both protest the notion that what is known as Anglicanism is founded on schism because, as the literary tradition suggests, this simply is not true. It is a state ideology. It should be disentangled from the work of the Body of Christ.

And thus, as we work for the truth on both sides of the Anglican-Roman Catholic conversation, who knows what will happen? I do not dare to predict the future. But know this: I’m an Anglican because I refuse to believe in schism. And since Anglicanism has its own resources for undermining schism, I’ll side with the long tradition of the Archbishops of Canterbury from Augustine to Justin who undermined the powers of the state (I forgot to say this earlier, but Cranmer also met a pretty ugly end when he finally ended up opposing the state). As a social scientist who loves his literature, I’ll also keep reading the canon that pokes fun at Anglican power wherever it rears its ugly head. I’ll stay right where I am and milk those traditions to the full, all in the hope against hope that one day, Anglicanism will cease to be a schismatic, self-referential modern identity and recognize its unique and vital contributions to the church catholic and the life of the world. Indeed, as I have suggested, this is already happening. It’s incumbent on me to join in.

So shouldn’t you go up for ordained Anglican ministry, then? Absolutely not. I’ll explain in Part 4. I might do some magic there too.

What’s So Good About Being Anglican? (Part 2)

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I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted. Over the night after I posted my first post, Churl read it. The suspense is now killing him, and he is now describing my talents as made for television miniseries, such as ‘The Real Anglicans of Canterbury, Jordan Shore, The Amazing (G)race, and Survivor: The Evangelical Church, to be followed by Survivor: the Neo-Reformed Church (in which we don’t bother to vote anyone off the island because the matter is predestined anyway).’  For my part, I’m still thinking of something that includes Gordon Ramsay or Guy Fieri. Regardless, though, my wife has been calling me a ‘naughty Chinglican,’ so to say the least, I am quite satisfied. (Ew, Mark Driscoll, get your head out of the gutter.)

Anne Boleyn? Or Irene Adler? And if the latter, then whither Moriarty?

This second post will not satisfy any of Churl’s frustration. It is in fact intentionally designed to make it worse. By returning to the question, if Anglicanism is as bad as I described it in my previous post, then how did people like me enter it in the first place?, it’s like I’m rubbing it in. How on earth did we get in? Why the hell did we do it? What in God’s name were we thinking?

Since all theology is done through analogy anyway, let me begin my case by analogy. In fact, I’m going to try to make my analogies as shallow as possible in order to maximize Churl’s frustration. I recognize that the answer to this question will be very complicated. That’s why the post is so long.

It seems to me that most evangelicals who wind up Anglican (like myself; unless you were raised Jewish, in which case your name is Lauren Winner) found the Anglican Church in some kind of whirlwind romance. As the stories often go, Anglicanism is like that person to whom said evangelical was very physically attracted (oh, oh, see what I did? I made that gender-neutral!). As a result, said evangelical’s evangelical friends who have read I Kissed Dating Goodbye cautioned him (or her; I like evangelical feminists) against basing his or her relationship on sheer physical attraction. Indeed, they often ask, Doesn’t Anglicanism have a lot of baggage?

But we are in love, or as Stanley Hauerwas would put it, in lust. For every insecure Mark Driscoll masculinity quote about priests who ‘wear a dress’ (one wonders who is more insecure about their masculinity: the dress-wearing priest or Mark Driscoll?), we reply that the attraction is too powerful, too magnetic, to resist. Oh, that was so spiritual, we evangelical liturgical hipsters say about the liturgy. I’ve never had something that structured before, except when I planned out that perfect worship set three weeks ago that I executed with ‘rehearsed spontaneity.’ Through the liturgy, I really feel closer to God than I’ve ever been. It was so poetic. (I read somewhere, by the way, that this is actually how Rowan Williams became an Anglican.)

Yeah, I know, shocking that that’s how Rowan Williams became Anglican…

In some ways, this is my story, except mine is more along the lines of the Princess Diaries. There, Anne Hathaway begins the movie as a rock-climbing geek with glasses and very frizzy and oily hair (hey, sounds about how I look!), and not only does she not return her crush’s affections, but the crush of her life does not return her affections. After discovering from Julie Andrews that she is in fact princess of Genovia, she gets an ultimate makeover, and by the end of the movie (spoiler alert!), she is kissing the guy who had a crush on her (as opposed to the guy on whom she had a crush) and lifts her leg as she squeals.

Of course, I am certainly nowhere nearly as attractive as the guy on whom Anne Hathaway had a crush or the guy who had a crush on Anne Hathaway, but I think it’s quite apropos to say that Anne Hathaway is my Anglicanism. In fact, the real Anne Hathaway (I’m still talking about Hollywood, not Shakespeare) did once upon a time consider becoming a nun (Dolores Hart, round 2?), but when she found out that her brother was gay, her whole family became Episcopalian. While she now considers herself ‘spiritual but not religious’ (paging Lillian Daniel!), I consider her as the Beatrice figure in my story of the Anglican Church, which is (admittedly) my own idiosyncratic version of the Communion. (Let me note here, however, that everyone’s version of the Anglican Communion is personal and idiosyncratic. That’s probably why there is a crisis.)

You see, when I first entered the Anglican Church, I hated it for the same reasons the teens with whom I worked hated it. The liturgy was stale, the traditions were geeky in a very uncool way, the vestments were reviling, and the songs they sang sounded like three variations of ‘All Creatures of Our Bugs and Pigs.’ The kids hated it, I hated it; we just couldn’t see any beauty in it.

In fact, the funny story of how I became an Anglican begins with my defection from non-denominational circles to the realm of a man I like to call the ‘topless bishop.’ He wasn’t a bishop at the time, but he wanted me to work for his parish. For my part, I was looking for an escape out of the evangelical churches of which I was a part, mostly for political reasons: I was a very outspoken child in a conservative Chinese evangelical congregation with a congregational polity, so while the church’s congregational polity meant that I could hypothetically say whatever I wanted, that I had spoken too many times and with too little tact at several annual general meetings meant that it was time for me to go.

The ‘topless bishop’ saved my life. He called me while I was at work at a summer job doing industry manual labour, and he said over the phone, ‘Meet me for breakfast at a restaurant called Topless.’

Thinking that the machines around were making his words unclear, I yelled, ‘Where?’

‘Topless.’

‘How do you spell that?’

‘T-O-P-L-E-S-S.’

That was my introduction into the Anglican Communion and its sexuality struggles. (The restaurant was called ‘Tops,’ by the way, which only makes one wonder about what the origins of the bishop’s derivative were.)

From there, I was coaxed into the Anglican Church with a combination of the encouragement of Anglican clergy who wanted new blood in the system and the overwhelming promise of my own ego. This, by the way, is why I first hated Anglicanism. If I were to be the saviour of the church, I needed to save these kids from boredom, to catch them before they all secularized and went the way of the ‘silent exodus’ (Asian American evangelical terminology…I’ll explain separately!). The liturgy, the organ music, the status jockeying, the unpoetic Cantonese elements: these were all unhelpful. The kids would tell me that they were bored; I used to pass notes to some of them in service, asking if the ones who bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and nodded through the sermon whether they were ‘praying hard or hardly praying.’ The kids needed excitement, a burst of their religious affections (remember, I was a Piper fan), a kindling of the Holy Spirit, and a new hip (or as one of my colleagues put it, ‘high octane’) presentation of the Gospel.

As I looked harder, though, I saw with the rest of the liturgical hipster defectors to the Anglican Church that I could give Anglicanism an ultimate makeover. Because the rubrics in the Book of Common Prayer really aren’t that strict, for example, we could have our worship team insert Hillsong, Vineyard, Passion, and Soul Survivor music between the readings. The sermons didn’t have to be drawn from the lectionary, because the lectionary was just a suggestion; we could make up our own sermon series and attempt to exposit whole books of the Bible the proper (neo-Reformed) way. The Eucharist could be very intimate, especially if you strummed an acoustic guitar while everyone was communicating. After all, with the rest of the evangelical liturgical hipsters, I saw that the Book of Common Prayer articulated Reformed theology in brilliantly poetic terms. Confirming this understanding were evangelical and Reformed books by Robert Webber, Marva Dawn, and Jamie Smith that argued that liturgy is the way that we’re formed, that we are made for poetry (we are, after all, God’s poema), and that because Anglicanism has such a rich tradition, liturgy, history, and spirituality, this is the perfect place to become formed into the image of Christ. This Reformed thing was admittedly dampened a bit by the Alternative Service versions where you don’t get to talk about ‘oblation, satisfaction, and propitiation once offered,’ but it was like the Eucharist could replace the altar call, which for us evangelicals was a big deal. In short, Anglicanism could save evangelicalism.

And that’s where I discovered Anglicanism’s baggage.

The baggage that I discovered in Anglicanism’s family wasn’t that she was the princess of Genovia with Julie Andrews as the queen mother. It was that Anglicanism was Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises.

There was quite a bit of baggage that I had ignored as an evangelical liturgical hipster and that I simply didn’t know about when I didn’t like Anglicanism and didn’t care to learn more. While I knew, for example, was that Anglicanism was founded by Henry VIII when he wanted a divorce from a political marriage (only to manage to get through five more women over the course of his life), I didn’t know about the political crisis in Tudor England and the consolidation of the state that those actions caused, as well as the political upheaval leading up to and past the reign of Elizabeth I. As a result, I also did not know to read Anglicanism as pretty much the state religion of the United Kingdom that was probably more interested in advancing the interests of nation and empire than I’d like to admit. This means that while I thought that someone like Bishop J.C. Ryle and his very Calvinist leanings were signs of ‘good Anglicanism,’ I thought I could ignore the crazy Anglo-Catholic and broad church cousins.

Actually being Anglican–and at one point, being on ordination track–meant that my pretty Anglicanism was devastatingly challenged.

As I worked in those Chinese Anglican parishes, I slowly started to notice that not all was as it seemed. There was definitely some wishy-washiness that went on, which, when challenged, would receive very wishy-washy theological justification. On top of that, I was privy to a few strange backroom political deals, some of which happened in the past and people told me a variety of versions about them, some of which happened behind my back to marginalize me in ministry, and some to which I was privy to marginalize others in ministry. (Come on, I can’t tell you more than that. They were backroom deals, for cryin’ out loud. I can only tell you that some were surprisingly ethical, with the only thing ethically questionable about them being that they were backroom deals.)  After the backroom deals, of course, we’d all pretend that whatever church split was on our hands wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Generally, we did not use the corny evangelical line about ‘God calling people to different seasons in their ministry’ to explain away people leaving. But we did come up with a variety of stories and explanations for people that were often so unconvincing that people would start to imagine their own versions of stories, which, layered over time, made the truth that we knew to have actually happened in the backroom to sound increasingly implausible. Add to that the involvement of a few out-of-town bishops whose actions must remain completely off the record, and you’ve got a story juicier than anything Susan Howatch could concoct for her Church of England series. (More on Howatch in Part 3.)

And so, at the parish level, I was ushered into the world of Anglican politics, the world in which Anne Hathaway is not princess of Genovia, but Catwoman trying to eke her way through Gotham.

And thus, to magnify Churl’s utter frustration and consternation about just how ugly the state of Anglicanism is, let me dish out some of the general dirt, that is, bits of intentionally vague data that I’ve collected over my time working in Anglican parishes and interacting with bishops and senior clerics (some of whom were very senior, let me assure you), and then using all of those experiences as a hermeneutic while reading Anglican theology.

The first thing I discovered was that racism is pretty much built into the lifeblood of modern Anglicanism. With no Virgin of Guadalupe appearing to refocus our attention, the racism that Anglicans have imbibed since the dawn of modernity seems to focus around reinforcing the sovereign power of the British crown at the expense of colonized, coloured populations worldwide. If indeed John Bossy is right about the ‘migrations of the holy’ from the church to the state in modern times, Anglicanism is a model for how a church got completely subsumed under the state, which proceeded to attempt to subjectify all of its citizens/parishioners into theological uniformity during things like the Elizabethan Settlement.

This subjectification under the crown became a sort of interesting colonial model. Since I’m a Chinglican, let me take Hong Kong as my guiding example (you can fill in all the blanks with Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, the African colonies, the Middle Eastern colonies, and the American colonies). As the British won the Opium War in 1841, there was a sense in which Hong Kong became the British crown’s chance to experiment with the creation of an Anglo-Chinese site (see Christopher Munn’s fascinating book, Anglo-China, for all the lurid and scandalous details). Within this colonial subjectification framework, Anglicanism played a very interesting role. As Anthony King shows in his work on colonial urban development, the idea of a ‘colonial third culture’ emerged precisely out of the segregation of the British colonizers from the colonized natives. That is to say, in the colonies, there were separate sections of colonial cities for the British colonizers–often working-class and lower-middle-class people from Britain looking for class advancement so that when they got to places like Hong Kong, they were the elites–and the colonized populations that they were attempting to subjectify (in Hong Kong, convert to ‘Anglo-Chinese’ citizens). In Hong Kong, St. John’s Cathedral functioned as the church in the colonizer territories. While the Cathedral currently (and commendably) serves as a hub for social justice especially for foreign domestic workers, it was the site of a lot of class conflict in the nineteenth century. In fact, if you read the early records, there was a big fight over who sat in which pews and whether you could put pews between existing pews (thus screwing with the class-stratified order of the space) in the 1850s, leading to a massive split in the church and the reconstruction of the pews.

What I’m trying to say is that in many places in the British colonies, Anglicanism was the religion of the colonizing elites within the segregated part of the colonial cities reserved for the colonizing Europeans. In turn, it generally wasn’t the Anglicans who first ran the schools and did missions among the colonized populations: those were Baptists, Union Church, Lutherans, and Methodists. The Anglican entry among the colonized populations came quite late in the game, which meant that the colonized populations (say, the Chinese) who became Anglicans also became attached to a symbol of colonizing power, i.e. if you were an Anglican, you were more European than the other Protestant plebs. Of course, throughout the early twentieth century, this dynamic sort of changed in parts of, say, East Africa where there was a revival. But argue this point as you might, the recent transition of the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA) from the Province of Rwanda has a telling story. The new Primate of Rwanda, Onesiphore Rwaje, had an exchange of letters (read them here yourself) with the province’s dean, Bishop Bilindabagabo Alexis, about the financial accountability of the AMiA and whether money that was promised to flow in from the Americas had actually arrived. As if the financial scandal that caused ‘the transition’ weren’t bad enough, Alexis point-blank takes notice in a letter dated 9 June 2011 when Rwaje fails to acknowledge his title, and thus his status: ‘Also, in your reply to my letter, you failed to recognize me as the Dean of the Province. Was this intentional or simply an oversight?’ Facepalm. Revivals replaced status? Hm.

This, by the way, is why I find the central geographical claim of the current Anglican realignment–that the Global South Anglicans whom we in the West evangelized during the missionary movements of the nineteenth century are now returning to evangelize us–completely ludicrous. Again, this is like Hong Kong. By all accounts, the early British attempts to colonize Hong Kong turned out to be a complete failure, and it was not until the development of a Chinese merchant elite that the semblance of order took shape in the 1870s. But by the time the British left in the 1990s (and with some colonial political maneuvering since the 1970s), the narrative that was left over was that the British had done a wonderful job with Hong Kong as a ‘borrowed place on borrowed time.’ The idea that we in the West evangelized the Global South is already a problematic notion because one wonders how effective the missions that came alongside the crown actually were, especially if these were Anglican missions catering to European elites. Instead, as was often the case, there was a breakout of charismatic revival among the Anglican parishes quite late in the game, which made for quite a bit of indigenous revival, to be sure. And yet, these revival movements often didn’t often lead to the development of a new indigenous theology (Archbishop Paul Kwong in Hong Kong pretty much admits this in his fascinating book, Identity in Communion), but a recycling of the old colonial theologies in charismatic garb, partly because the church still needed to function under the auspices of first the colonial empire, and then the developing post-colonial nation-state. That these supposedly ‘post-colonial’ Anglicans whose identities are still heavily tied to their nation-state’s political regimes are now returning to evangelize us is a bit of a ridiculous claim in terms of Christian orthodoxy, then. It’s more like they’re rebuking ‘the West’ for shedding the old colonial theological frameworks that used to underpin their imperial regimes, for (to put it crudely) failing to be the good, strong white people that we used to be. There should be no celebration that race has been overcome in this new Anglican re-alignment; it should rather be the lament that race has been refashioned with post-colonial clothes.

What I’m saying here is that in the Anglican Communion, everything within its polity that has been touched by the British crown is subsumed under the rubric of class, including race. Anglican racism is about class hierarchy in a political regime. It’s about British colonizers being superior and segregated from the natives. It’s about the native converts being superior to the plebs. It’s about climbing the ladder of race for class advancement. It’s about class advancement for increasing political influence toward the established national regime. Class, and thus, race, are in many ways built into the fabric of the modern Anglican Communion. Modern Anglicanism, in short, is little more than a political theology for the colonizing state.

The second thing I learned was that most every other English-origin denomination is a church split from Anglicanism, which means that Anglicanism can be taken validly as a proxy for all that’s wrong with Anglophone Protestantism writ large. Think about it. Presbyterianism: split off from Anglicanism to form presbyteries with Calvinist theologies. Methodists: split off from Anglicanism based on missionary methodologies. Baptists: split off from Anglicanism over the credo-baptism thing. Even the separatist Puritans (sorry, J.I. Packer): split off from Anglicanism for a more pure form of religious practice.

This has two implications. First, if Anglicanism was the religion of the state, these church splits were no mere private backroom poobahs; they were political splits that challenged the authority of the crown. What we have in the various Protestant denominations is not simply the debate over fine points of theology; it’s also a debate over what it means to be English, what it means to be under the British sovereign, what it means to be part of a British colony, what it means to do theology for the state. If indeed Anglicanism is a political theology, then splitting from Anglicanism implicates all the other English-speaking denominations also as alternate political theologies to Anglicanism at the core.

Second, then, this means that Anglicanism has a very special and schismatic relationship to the other Protestant denominations. You can see this in the current Anglican crisis. Since the late 1990s and the early 2000s, it was like all the other denominations were waiting with bated breath over what would happen regarding LGBTQ+ clergy, LGBTQ+ bishops, and the recognition of gender-neutral unions and marriage within Anglicanism. Now if all the other denominations were really independent of Anglicanism, then you wouldn’t think they’d feel the need to do this. But they did. If I might steal from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s title as ‘first among equals’ among the primates, I’d speculate that this suggests that Anglicanism is first among equals in terms of the Protestant denominations, partly because all of them take their Protestant cues from the Anglican Communion. In fact, I know the English denominations do this. Go find a Presbyterian book of worship, a United Methodist hymnbook, or a Baptist manual of service, and tell me what you see. I see the wholesale importation of prayers, baptism services, wedding services, funeral services, Good Friday services, Easter services, Christmas services, and even some Eucharistic prayers straight from the Book of Common Prayer.

In short, I hate to be disappointing to the evangelical liturgical hipsters, but if you were looking to escape Protestantism by becoming Anglican, you have simply jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Modern Anglicanism is all about Protestant identity. All the Protestant identities. Too many of them.

Which brings me to my third point…

The third thing I realized was that this whole crisis about sexuality is not really about the authority of Scripture or the divinity of Christ, but about the conflicts among the various theological factions of Anglicanism finally coming to a head after the last five hundred years or so. What I mean to say is that the factions in Anglicanism are not simply theological disagreements about this or that articulation of God; they are deep fissures over what theology is, period.

Allow me to illustrate. A very senior Anglican cleric with whom I spoke (I should not reveal what his position was) told me that when he had worked in the Global South, he was in fact good friends with Rowan Williams when he was Bishop of Wales and had enjoyed a thriving Global North-Global South partnership with him during those years. However, as both of them were promoted into even more senior positions, they discovered that their different actions in the Anglican Communion caused their personal friendship to drift apart. My senior Anglican friend had supported a Global South excommunication of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, which had in turn led to the consecration of alternate bishops with alternate provincial jurisdictions. These were actions that neither George Carey nor Rowan Williams (both Archbishops of Canterbury) could support, for they felt that these cross-episcopal consecrations fractured the Communion.

I then asked my friend what he thought of Rowan Williams. He said this: ‘Rowan and I both have a line. I draw the line here; he draws the line there, and so if Rowan doesn’t like me anymore, I suppose it’s because we draw the line in different places. But I know Rowan has a line. When Jack Spong said that he denied the resurrection, Rowan went ping! like that to Jack Spong.’

What my senior Anglican friend was telling me was more profound than I realized then, for in that moment, all bets were off. My friend was within the evangelical stream, Rowan Williams in an Anglo-Catholic stream, and Jack Spong in a very extreme latitudinarian stream. That my friend emphasized ‘drawing lines’ demonstrated what he as an evangelical Anglican thought orthodox Christian theology was: it was about keeping within boundary lines that fenced in what the truth of God was. This was, after all, the logic of the Anglican Communion crisis: several bishops had crossed theological lines that should not be crossed, and thus, their provinces should be excommunicated and those who are faithful to historic Anglican orthodoxy, i.e. those who stayed within the fence, should find alternate orthodox episcopal jurisdiction.

Imagine my utter surprise and consternation when I actually went to read Rowan Williams’s book on Arius. As an Anglo-Catholic, Williams had come to a radically different understanding of orthodoxy. He argued that it was Arius who was drawing the lines for God while Alexander and Athanasius had to use their creativity in relation to the tradition to articulate orthodox formulations of God, articulations that eventually became known as the Triune Personhood of God. For Williams, orthodox theology had nothing to do with drawing lines; that was Arius, for crying out loud. Orthodox theologians had to use their creativity to find truly catholic solutions to sticky doctrinal problems. Orthodoxy wasn’t about drawing lines; it was about tapping into what Williams has long called ‘the mind of the Communion.’

I imagine that theology is even different still for Jack Spong. My evangelical friend told me that Williams had a line that Spong crossed. But in Williams’s actual open letter to Spong, Williams (as an Anglo-Catholic) asks, given Spong’s desire to change everything in orthodox Christian belief: why does Jack Spong even bother to stay? Williams wasn’t appealing to Spong’s boundaries; he was appealing to his sense of catholicity. This in turn probably puzzled Spong, whose latitudinarian tendencies had led him to conceptualize God as a progressive revelation that could be experienced through modernity. As a result, this liberal theology might cause him to see my friend’s boundary-drawing and Williams’s catholicity as too conservative and not open to the progressive revelation of God. As Spong might say, both put too much emphasis on tradition and the institution and in turn might be seen by him as heretical because they denied God’s ongoing work and revelation in the present.

You see what just happened there? My friend, Williams, and Spong don’t simply disagree about theological positions; they are deeply divided over what theology actually is. Get ‘sexuality’ as a catalyzer, and bam! you have an Anglican crisis with no one who actually even agrees on what theology is. Is it boundary-drawing? Is it creative catholicity? Is it progressive revelation through modernity? Who knows?

What we do know is this, of course: of these three theologies, only one of them is really accepted in the Catholic church, as the evangelical one sounds a bit Jansenist and the latitudinarian one was the subject of Pius IX’s fulminations in the Syllabus of Errors. And thus, back to the Protestant point: yes, Anglicanism is Protestant. It’s so Protestant that it has two streams of Protestant theologies called anathema by Rome and one stream for catholic theologies, none of which currently get along because none of them agrees on what theology actually is.

Now take all this insight from the level of global communion, and plug it back into parish life. That was my brief Anglican apprenticeship experience. Those backroom deals and private conversations that I was talking about was all about this stuff: class advancement and maintenance, racial hierarchies, Protestant identity, relations with other evangelicals (some of whom began working in the church and decided to introduce elements of congregational democracy, which caused a bit of a rebellion against the rector that was kinda fun while it lasted), potshots thrown at liberals without any knowledge of what liberal theology actually was (take that, Jack Spong, although we have no idea how you do theology!), reading other people’s theologies through your own theology, having parish members go to evangelical/charismatic/liberal/catholic events and coming back wanting to change the church into their image, etc. Of course, I’m sure you can say this about non-Anglican churches (I grew up free church most of my life; I definitely know that you can say this in non-Anglican settings), but within Anglicanism, you could read all of the political problems happening at the parish scale within ever larger diocesan, synod, provincial, and communion-wide scales.

The honeymoon was over, the beauty dissipated, the communion turned into infighting. Selina Kyle Anglicanism. Got baggage?

Stay tuned now for Part 3, on why I’m not about to call quits on Anglicanism, or, for that matter, Anne Hathaway.

Sure, life killed the dream I dreamed too.