The King’s Letter

The Anglican world is bigger than the Church of England

Does the King hate his church?

Shock revelation! – albeit by omission. The horrors emerging from Canterbury and the Church of England’s House of Bishops rather dwarfed some “news” from what I can only suppose was a rather drier week for journalism just before. King Charles, back before he was King, in words written 26 years ago in private correspondence, has just been sensationally exposed by the papers as expressing no direct opinion on the Church of England:

“Personally, the older I get, the more I am drawn to the great, timeless traditions of the Orthodox Church. They are the only ones that have not been corrupted by loathsome political correctness.”

The only ones... So yes, His Majesty does indeed exclude the church of which he is now Supreme Governor (not Head, because that is Christ) from the ranks of the uncorrupt, and this is not unworthy of comment. But the Church of England is not the only church to fall under this judgment. If taken at face value, rather than as a generalization, it includes all varieties of Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church, too.

Not that this has stopped online Roman Catholic apologists from saddling up and mounting the gift-horse. Gavin Ashenden, who left the ministry of the Church of England at retirement age to become a lay Catholic and YouTuber, was quick to take aim at the “pantomime and fakery” of the church he used to serve, calling on the King to abdicate (!) and follow what, as far as we can glean from two sentences in a letter from 1998, might be his “heart’s desire.” Never mind that two years later, the then Prince Charles became Patron of the Prayer Book Society, committed to the promotion of the traditional liturgy and theology of the Church of England, and has opted to remain so since his coronation. Never mind that the criticism he levelled, arguably rightly, at the Church of England also encompassed Rome, and surely would encompass it all the more now than in the days of John Paul II, when he wrote the letter. Details, details!

The Tiber is not far enough

Presuppositions can cause one to jump to unwarranted conclusions. Putting those aside, we might see that the King’s letter does not single out any particular church for his opprobrium, but rather the corrupting effect of “loathsome political correctness” which erodes such “great, timeless traditions” as he finds unsullied in the Orthodox Church.

To be honest, I agree with what the King wrote in 1998. The far more shocking revelation that John Smyth QC’s perversions and abuse were not addressed by some of our most senior clerics has not bolstered my trust in the Church of England as an institution. I, too, am drawn to the Orthodox Church for similar reasons as the King. At one point I spent considerable time very seriously exploring the possibility of converting. There is a great beauty to the traditional rites of Rome, too, and an attractive conservative intellectual culture promoted by the likes of Bishop Barron, but the damp flannels of the Vatican’s present incumbent have cooled my “Roman fever.” Were I to jump ship and swim anywhere, I would make the longer journey to the Bosphorus rather than stopping on the other bank of the Tiber. To be sure, Orthodox theology is not monolithic or unchanging, despite what some pundits might have you believe, and there are internal disagreements even to the point of schism. But the overall structure of Orthodox theology, the seriousness with which it treats the Church Fathers, its sacramental worldview and above all, its prayerful orientation towards theosis are matters to which I wholeheartedly assent, along with many other Anglicans past and present. Lancelot Andrewes and E.B. Pusey are among our historic theologians who explicitly sympathize with the Eastern doctrine of theosis, with Rowan Williams and Hugh Wybrew among their modern successors.

Pantomime and fakery

So why remain Anglican? I will not deny that there is a great deal going on in the contemporary Anglican world that puts me off, including the “pantomime and fakery” that Ashenden observes. But that is limited to certain quarters, and quarters which are in rapid decline. It may be that the cathedrals of the Church of England are dominated by those whose liturgical tastes and theological leanings are, to put it slightly more kindly, “performative,” and one need not trawl the Tubes far to find instances of Anglo-Catholic theatricality. This much, granted. But to dismiss Anglicanism tout court for such egregious instances would be as fallacious as to dismiss Rome for its polyester chasubles and U2 masses. Neither accusation is entirely false, but nor is it the entire truth. More serious are Roman objections to the validity of Anglican holy orders, until one realizes that those objections are based on little more than the Pope’s say-so. There have in point of fact been times since the papal bull of 1896 when one Orthodox patriarch or another has, for some time, recognized Anglican orders. The present Pope, for whom my admiration is albeit somewhat qualified, is at least engaging in serious talks with those Anglicans in the US who have kept to ecumenical consensus on criteria for ordination and matters of sexuality. The possibility of recognition of their orders is on the horizon. A dim hope, perhaps, but better than none.

While I would not presume to answer for the King, whose religious freedom is circumscribed by more important margins than mine, the simple answer to why I have not left Anglicanism behind is because, as long as there remain bastions of what he calls “timeless tradition” devoid of “loathsome political correctness,” I do not need to. You may survey the evidence and come to a different conclusion from mine, but I do not find the arguments against the validity of Anglican orders convincing. The Anglican way preserves the musical, literary and religious culture of my people, it is where I still feel at home. As long as we have faithful and legitimate bishops to turn to and the guarantee of true sacraments, we are in no worse a position than any Roman Catholic, and a better position than many (I honestly take no pleasure whatsoever in saying this, as I want Rome, and the East, to thrive). For some time I was concerned that those bastions were in such decline as to have no future. Short of finding a Western Orthodox church, I thought that I would need to abandon the English religious tradition I love, the religion of my people, and become a nominal Greek, Romanian, Antiochian or Russian in order to remain true to the apostolic faith. I may yet be proven wrong. That may become necessary. However, recent developments have given me cause to think that, despite all appearances to the contrary, now is a good time to remain an Anglican.

Outwith Canterbury, Anglicanism is growing

What British pundits like Ashenden fail to acknowledge is that Anglicanism is no longer defined by what happens in the Church of England. Canterbury is now one minority partner in a dwindling international communion of liberal Protestant churches which are all managing their way into imminent oblivion, within a few decades. They are sincere in their worship and they often do laudable service in support of the poor and disadvantaged, so it would be unfair to call them “fake,” as Ashenden does: they are quite earnestly being what they mean to be, and worshipping what they think God is. Whether God is who they think He is and whether they are what they should be is another question. But one does not need even to address that question to see that as a simple matter of statistics, that kind of religion has no future. In the worst cases, it resembles little more than a left-wing NGO with the barest drapery of religious vesture veiling it. This is lamentably true of parts of much of the leadership of the Church of England, though less so among the parishes. Recent television appearances of bishops who respond to the abuse cover-up by talking about anything but God are one symptom. Worse is when they briefly deride the “problematic theologies” that they suppose to have brought the likes of Smyth into existence, weaponizing the abuse case to take a quick and cheap swipe at theological conservatives. Given that the bishops named and shamed in the Makin Report, Archbishop Welby included, are all on the liberal wing, one might bring up the old adage about glass houses.

The bishops of the Church of England are no longer representative of the majority of the global Anglican communion. Churches representing an estimated 85% of Anglicans worldwide have severed ties with Canterbury. These Anglicans remain the third largest Christian body outside the communions of Rome and Constantinople-Moscow (though in my ignorance I am unclear on the extent to which they are currently in communion), and they are not about to disappear. On the contrary, they are growing, while the soi-disant “mainstream” diminishes.

We who share King Charles’ traditionalist leanings might query just what this Anglican majority is growing into. If the majority were following, say, the Diocese of Sydney into its non-liturgical, anti-clerical, more generic Evangelical religion which sits very lightly indeed to Anglican and wider church tradition, then it might indeed be time for those of us who treasure such things to walk the plank and swim for safer shores. But outside England, that does not seem to be the majority Evangelical trajectory right now. The Anglican realignment in North America, Africa and Asia tends to prize the classical Evangelical priority of Scripture, certainly, and rightly so. But these majority Anglicans also stress the apostolic succession of the episcopate and traditional liturgical form. In the US, Non-Anglican Evangelicals are also increasingly drawn to our historic episcopate and inherited liturgy. At risk of overstatement, the talks between the Anglican Church of North America and Rome do offer at least the glimmer of hope of unity between the world’s largest and third largest Christian communions — which, one might dream, may also draw in part of the second largest, the Orthodox, along with some of the disparate Protestant churches. Were that to happen, Canterbury would have to think very hard indeed about whether its innovations were really worth isolation from what would indisputably be the one, holy Catholic Church of which it claims to be a part. It is less credible to spout the “branch theory” when one is balancing over the fronds with a chainsaw.

The Prayer Book, hope for the Church of England

The story is not necessarily over even for the Church of England. For traditionalists there, unlike in the Episcopal Churches of the USA or Canada, there is legally protected provision for the continuity of the male episcopate, as recognized by the majority of the Church. Alternative Episcopal oversight provides male bishops for those parishes unable in good conscience, on theological grounds, to receive the sacramental ministry of women clergy. Among these bishops, the recently ordained Bishop of Oswestry has reorganized and revivified a tired and demoralized See, which lost its last bishop to Rome, and has become a beacon for traditionalist Anglicans in England and abroad. Oswestry aims for what he calls “total evangelization,” driving hundreds of miles weekly to lead his people and pastors in prayer and catechesis. He brooks no “fakery,” and while he may have the voice and vesture to rival anything on in the West End, he is no pantomime dame.

What is more, unusually among Anglo-Catholic bishops in England, Oswestry is an ardent supporter of the quintessentially Anglican liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. North American readers may be surprised to discover that most traditional Anglo-Catholics in England use Roman Catholic liturgy rather than the historic rite of their own church. This is almost unthinkable in Anglican churches outside England, all the more, since it is precisely the Book of Common Prayer, or some variant of it, which is driving the growth of more conservative Anglican churches around the world. It is often an interest in the Prayer Book that brings Evangelicals into the Anglican fold. But experience in North America suggests that the Prayer Book can also unite Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. This is so to some extent in the Church of England, where the Prayer Book Society, under His Majesty’s patronage, is enjoying a consistently larger and younger membership every year. It encompasses conservative Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, as well as some “Broad Church” latitudinarians and liberals from both ends of the churchmanship spectrum.

What draws people to the Prayer Book is what drew King Charles to the Orthodox Church: great, timeless tradition, uncorrupted by the vagaries of political correctness. It offers stability, a basically unchanging repository of Scripture and Apostolic tradition. Applied as it is written, even the English book of 1662 offers a Kalendar of feasts and fasts, a daily pattern of offices in the finest English verse and prose, thrice weekly Litany after Mattins, provision for Holy Communion every Sunday and saint’s day, and the possibility of private penance. These are not arbitrarily invented, but inherited and translated from ancient sources. The rubrics leave it open to a range of musical settings including ancient chant, and it can legitimately be enriched with traditional use of vestments and incense, without being limited to the late-nineteenth century conventions stipulated in Rome (the unified system of “traditional” liturgical colours are in fact something of an innovation), and without jettisoning the ancient lectionary of the Western Church (freely usable in the Church of England through the BCP, but only under sufferance of the local bishop through the Tridentine rite in Rome). Those of a more Catholic mind might complain, legitimately, that the 1662 Prayer Book lacks invocation of the Saints and prayer for the dead, but many churches of the Anglican communion have reintroduced these in the last century or so as permissible supplements to the liturgy. The Prayer Book tradition broadly construed, rather than the “Prayer Book fundamentalism” of sticking rigidly to every letter of 1662, offers the possibility of celebrating the holy mysteries in concord with the tradition the King so rightly admires.

For those of us born in the Church of England or who, like me, have come to Anglicanism in later years, this is reassuring. With the Bible and Prayer Book in hand, we can maintain our patrimony and rich liturgical heritage without absorption into Rome and submission to the whims of future pontiffs. We can offer with confidence worship in the great and timeless tradition of the Apostles, as it has been received in English-language cultural form over the past 1400 years. We can do so with the support of a faithful and God-loving King, and with a large and growing number of sympathetic Christians throughout the world. And happily, given the quality of some of current bishops, we enjoy greater freedom to ignore them than our Roman brethren do at present.

Sitting ducks

There are many reasons to distressed by the recent leadership and direction of the Church of England. Even before the revelations of the hierarchy’s failure to address Smyth’s abuse, Welby’s tenure brought increasing managerialism and centralization, the creation of highly-paid jobs focusing on fashionable but debatable political issues while parish clergy look after multiple churches for minimal stipends, the forced closure of churches during the Covid pandemic, and the promise of vast centrally-funded “reparations” for historic benefits from the slave trade while parishes struggle to keep the rooves of their churches intact. Anglican tradition was sacrificed to the interests of a well-heeled Evangelical elite whose expensive projects promised great evangelistic yields that they failed to deliver. Leaders of their clique were feted as celebrities by bishops only to fall very short of the Church’s teaching in their personal lives. Some of this was the product of their public (i.e. elite private) school culture, and the perpetuation of the sort of bullying and sadism that used to pass as “muscular Christianity” (q.v. Roald Dahl’s Boy) in mid- to late-twentieth century boys’ boarding schools. Smyth’s case was one of the establishment closing ranks.

If the Church of England looks like it is falling apart, that is likely because it is. Congregations are small and old. Confirmations have plummeted. Nobody outside the church seems very interested. We have bored the nation into apostasy. But this presents an opportunity. For those who despise what the church has become, this is the chance to change it. The parishes are sitting ducks. Many churches are so nearly dormant that it would take only a handful of like-minded and determined people to join, take over as Church Wardens and members of the Parochial Church Council, and remake it as they wished. They could become corporate members of the Prayer Book Society immediately. Should they be so inclined, they could vote to align themselves to a traditionalist bishop and so guarantee that their next priest is one who upholds the apostolic faith as universally and historically understood without question or qualification. If they find a vacant church (not difficult at the moment), they could directly influence what sort of priest they get. And while remaining part of the Church of England administratively, with the financial benefits of a centralised administration to fund their clergy, they would be free to look to the growing worldwide Anglican majority for spiritual resources and support. The Church of England is ripe for a takeover.

Death has to precede resurrection. Now is the moment for the people of England to rise up, take back their church, and make it what the King would like it to be.