Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities 1880-1950

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2006 by Hill, Harvey

Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities 1880-1950. By William H. Katerberg. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. 306 pp. $60.00 (cloth).

The Anglican Communion may well he unraveling. The surface issue is homosexuality, but at stake are larger competing visions of what it means to be Anglican. Now therefore seems an opportune time to consider the question of Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, the title of a recent work by William Katerberg, associate professor of history at Calvin College.

Katerberg argues that modernity is characterized by both centrifugal and centripetal forces. Modern society promotes universal identities and institutional centralization, but modern people experience diversity and fragmentation. As a consequence, people have become "disembedded," meaning they no longer inherit a religious identity, but rather choose one from the variety of options available in the religious marketplace. This disembedding has created a dilemma of modern identity.

Anglicans in North America have experienced this dilemma of identity in distinctive ways. Katerberg notes that the Church of England has historically derived its coherence more from its political status as the established religion than from any clearly articulated theological vision. Both the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States (PECUSA) lost this established status and therefore had to articulate a new Anglican identity in order to he competitive with their rivals in the religious marketplace. Because different parties within the ACC and PECUSA promoted different versions of what it meant to he Anglican, internal dissension made Anglican dilemmas of identity particularly acute.

In five biographical chapters linked together by three chapters of historical narrative, Katerberg surveys different versions of Anglican identity in the United States and Canada from 1880 to 1950. Representing conservative evangelicals are William Henry Griffith Thomas and Dyson Hague. On the other end of the churchmanship spectrum was the aggressively Anglo-Catholic William Manning. Carl Grammer was resolutely liberal, and Henry John Cody was a liberal evangelical. Each of these five, Katerberg shows, combined modern and anti-modern elements in their view of Anglicanism, though in different ways.

The greatest strength of Katerberg's book is his analysis of the partisan appeals to the Anglican tradition made by each of his subjects to justify the different combinations of modern and anti-modern elements in their definitions of Anglicanism. Most interesting, given the current debates in the Anglican Communion, is his discussion of the "myth of comprehension," the idea that Anglicanism can "comprehend" people of widely different theological perspective because it is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but a little of both. A quintessentially modern strategy for containing diversity within a single institution, comprehension has in fact contributed to fragmentation as much as to union. Evangelicals within the ACC and PECUSA have interpreted comprehension so as to promote unity with other Protestant denominations, while Anglo-Catholics like Manning argued that unity with Protestants betrayed the comprehensive character of the church by emphasizing its Protestantism over against its more Catholic character.

Katerberg ends the book with cautions optimism. He insists that Anglicans effectively adapted to changing modern circumstances until the 1960s. Despite institutional decline since then, he continues, signs of vitality remain and, even if the Anglican Church of Canada or the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. were to disappear, Anglican spirituality might endure in different form. The fate of Anglicanism will depend in part, he suggests, on whether Anglicans can agree on what Anglicanism is. And for that decision, he concludes, "Anglicans have a rich heritage on which to draw but also deep contradictions to avoid" (p. 224).

HARVEY HILL

Berry College

Mount Berry, Georgia