The Anglican Anxiety and the Struggle for Modernity
1920, Lambeth after the Great War
After the First World War the Anglican Communion faced a paradox of influence and power. The old Catholic and Orthodox powers of imperial Austria and Russia were broken and in ruins. While much attention has been paid to Catholic social teaching, the reality is that in the early 20th century, the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches were politically at their weakest and most marginalized since the Renaissance. In 1920, the pope had not ruled in Rome for half a century. The Greeks were struggling in their war to liberate Constantinople and would eventually fail to defeat Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who would then establish the Republic of Turkey. Aggressively secular and anti-clerical regimes ruled in France, Russia, Portugal, and Austria. Spain was a wreck and the Papacy maintained icy relations with the Kingdom of Italy that had robbed them of the Eternal City. And in defeated Germany, the Protestant authorities were lost, rudderless without their old attachment to the Protestant princes dethroned in the 1918 Revolution.
But in 1917 George V saved the British Monarchy; he would not suffer the fate of cousins in Europe. The Church of England remained the established church, and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America though outnumbered by Methodists, was the unofficial church of the American establishment with prestige stretching back General George Washington and many of the Founding generation. This arguably made the Anglican Communion, as the church of the British Empire and the American WASP elite, politically the most important Christian confession of the interwar period. Yet their societies faced growing pressures and antagonisms over race, empire, gender, capitalism and disenchantment with traditional sources of legitimacy.
The Anglicans met in the 1920 Lambeth Conference held in London and presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury Randall Thomas Davidson. Davidson was by nature a moderate reformer, collegial and ecumenical and reigning for 25 years, he was the serving Primate of All England since the Reformation. He entered the Church of England as a young man, after being raised a Presbyterian in Scotland, and rose quickly when he came under the wing of Archbishop Archibald Tait, serving as his resident chaplain at Lambeth. There he learned the inner workings of the hierarchy, and by marrying Tait’s daughter Edith Murdoch Tait, he became intimately connected with England’s elite. He moved into the royal court as Dean of Windsor, where he became one of Queen Victoria’s most trusted advisers, remaining a confidant and religious counselor to the Queen’s conscience, and attending her at her death. Her confidence eased his promotion first to the bishopric of Rochester and then to the more prominent see of Winchester, putting him in charge of key dioceses at the heart of English public life. In 1903, he succeeded Frederick Temple as Archbishop of Canterbury becoming a familiar and weighty presence in the House of Lords, speaking regularly on moral and national questions and helping to align the bench of bishops with major constitutional changes. He was also a conciliator, healing rifts between the traditionalist Anglicans and the Anglo-Catholics, bringing the Anglo-Catholics back into obedience with the Church and also emphasizing the need for the Church to follow its own rules. He and many of the other bishops were caught off guard by the war and its consequences. A good man, he understood they faced challenges.
Many young people, disillusioned by their experiences in the First World War and the additional death toll of the Spanish Flu pandemic, rebelled against pre-war conventions and attitudes. They turned against the old rules of respectability, especially around dress, language, and sex. Many thought that since the older generation led the West into the war “Why should their sense of propriety rule?” Young upper and middle-class women reveled in provocative transgression. Defying convention was cool. The “new woman” of the era, the flapper, cut her hair short, wore loose knee-length dresses, smoked and drank in public, and spoke more openly about her desire. Sleeping around became the new conformity in some circles. The war and its immediate aftermath broke the old Western social order. It is not uncommon for scholars to treat the 1920s as the true start of the sexual revolution.
The traditional elites, especially in Britain were not immune to the anxiety. Many great elite families lost sons in the war, the Liberal Party would soon be replaced by the Labour Party as one of the two major parties, alongside the Conservatives. Again the monarchy was saved by the wise decision of the king to modernize by appealing to middle class nationalism, changing the royal dynasty from the very German sounding House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor.
The First World War’s carnage, Leninism, youth disillusionment, eugenics, and Social Darwinism, — latter two gaining ground among the intellectual elite in the Empire and the USA — challenged the classical Christian worldview. The Anglican bishops understood they were facing a time when the foundations of Western civilization were shaking and the exuberance about the end of the Great War masked real anxiety. Meeting at Lambeth Palace from July 5 to August 7, 1920 the bishops attempted to speak authoritatively the to the social, political and economic crises of a world still dominated by politically and militarily by the British Empire and awed by the industrial and economic might of the USA and Wall Street.
The bishops sought to baptize the League of Nations as antidote to future war and a path toward reconciliation with Germany. In Resolutions 1–6, the bishops essentially claimed that world peace required the recognition of Christ’s sovereignty and the application of Christian principles of brotherhood and justice. They called for the early admission of Germany to the League. The bishops also condemned injustices against indigenous peoples, including abuses in land tenure, forced labour, and the liquor and opium trades, and they urged active relief for populations suffering from war and famine in Europe and Asia.
Just as they appealed for peace between the nations, they also issued an “Appeal to All Christian People,” to acknowledged all baptized Christians as members of Christ’s universal Church and called for visible unity. The bishops confessed Anglican complicity in Christian division and proposed a reunited catholic Church based on Scripture, the Nicene Creed, the sacraments of Baptism and Communion, and a ministry with apostolic authority, specifically the historic office of bishop. The subsequent resolutions authorized individual Anglican provinces to pursue ecumenism locally.
Resolution 1
We rejoice that in these times of peril God is giving to his Church a fresh vision of his purpose to establish a Kingdom in which all the nations of the earth shall be united as one family in righteousness and peace. We hold that this can only come through the acceptance of the sovereignty of our Lord Jesus Christ and of his teaching, and through the application of the principles of brotherhood, justice, and unselfishness, to individuals and nations alike.
The issue of race was particularly sticky. The Empire was run on the principle of white rule, and the USA was a segregated society with its more extreme Jim Crow version ruling the Southern states. Nevertheless, bishops decided that the witness of the Communion required clarity.
Resolution 7
The Conference records its protest against the colour prejudice among the different races of the world, which not only hinders intercourse, but gravely imperils the peace of the future.
This was linked to mission through Resolutions 32–42; 7, 35, 41, 78. the Conference bishops affirmed the goal of building “self-governing, self-supporting, and self-extending Churches” and urged that “outside control” be withdrawn “at the earliest moment.” Yet these reforming aspirations collided with imperial reality: the resolutions maintained that missionary dioceses must remain under provincial oversight until “largely self-supporting,” and bishops retained authority over liturgical adaptation. The contradiction deepened in the resolutions addressing race directly. Resolution 7 condemned “colour prejudice among the different races” as hindering intercourse and imperiling future peace. Yet, Resolution 35 —in the category of “missional problems” — acknowledged the practical difficulty of racial integration due to local conditions:
Resolution 35
The territorial episcopate has been the normal development in the Catholic Church, but we recognise that difference of race and language sometimes requires that provision should be made in a province for freedom of development of races side by side; the solution in each case must be left with the province, but we are clear that that ideal of the one Church should never be obscured.
Money was and remains an issue with the expenses of the Communion often being covered by the wealthier European dominated provinces who have been tempted to use their position to influence and sometimes bully the member churches in the post-colonial world. Like the liberal democracies they struggle to make deeds match words, but the bishops were clearer that the failure was hypocrisy and therefore sinful because it was contrary to the idea of one Church united under Christ. And how could mission prosper long term on the principle that one group of sinners was born superior and closer to God than another group of sinners?
Women and Modernity Resolutions 46-54
The question of women’s roles exposed deep divisions within Anglican leadership about how far modernization should proceed. The Conference declared women should be admitted to church councils “on equal terms” with laymen, with implementation timing left to local synods. It called for formal restoration of the women’s diaconate throughout the Anglican Communion as “the one and only order of the ministry which has the stamp of apostolic approval” for women. The diaconate was defined as:
Resolution 49
The office of deaconess is primarily a ministry of succour, bodily and spiritual, especially to women, and should follow the lines of the primitive rather than of the modern diaconate of men. It should be understood that the deaconess dedicates herself to a life-long service, but that no vow or implied promise of celibacy should be required as necessary for admission to the order. Nevertheless, deaconesses who desire to do so may legitimately pledge themselves either as members of a community, or as individuals, to a celibate life.
Critically, they debated the nature of the deaconess, with a vote of For 117 and Against 81 on the idea that a deaconess could assist with baptism. Again this clearly heralded the tensions and debates that remain over the role of women as potential members of the clergy and whether or not traditional sex and gender roles are part of God’s order or merely a human social conditions that can be reformed or removed.
When it came to Resolutions 66-72 focused on “Marriage and Sexual Morality” modern readers may be shocked that the concerns of 1920 sound like they could have been written in 2020, which again to my point, modern political narratives often present the past as a kind of conservative ideal that does not match the document reality of the early 20th century. The Conference proclaimed lifelong chastity before and after marriage as “the unchangeable Christian standard” and affirmed marriage as “a life-long and indissoluble union...of one man with one woman.” However, it permitted national/regional churches to recognize the Gospel of Matthew’s exception of adultery as allowing the wronged spouse to seek divorce.
However, while they acknowledged that secular governments may not always adhere to the Christian standard in law for marriage and divorce, the Church was called to bear witness to its own principles and that chastity applied to men equally as it did to women. Resolution 68 reads like a Roman Catholic ruling as it issued “an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception” and condemned teaching that encouraged “sexual union as an end in itself,” upholding procreation and “deliberate and thoughtful self-control” as governing principles. They argued that such innovations were threats to the “race” which reemphasized the Anglican principle that there was really only one “race” the human race. Also surprising is how the Conference confidently spoke on the subject the Church’s need to work to rescue the victims of STDs and human trafficking calling this in Resolution 72 “protecting the weak and raising the fallen.”
The last resolution spoke against the exploitation of labor in both domestic capitalism and the empires of both Britain and the USA.
Resolution 73
We desire to emphasize our conviction that the pursuit of mere self-interest, whether individual or corporate, will never bring healing to the wounds of society. This conviction is at once exemplified and reinforced by what has happened in and since the war. Nor is this less true when that self- interest is equipped with every advantage of science and education. Our only hope lies in reverent allegiance to the person of Christ, whose law is the law of love, in acceptance of his principles, and reliance on his power.
And furthermore
Resolution 76
In obedience to Christ’s teaching as to covetousness and self-seeking, the Conference calls upon all members of his Church to be foremost both by personal action and sacrifice in maintaining the superiority of the claims of human life to those of property. To this end it would emphasize the duty which is laid upon all Christians of setting human values above dividends and profits in their conduct of business, of avoiding extravagance and waste, and of upholding a high standard of honour and thoroughness in work. In a word, they must set an example in subordinating the claim for rights to the call of duty.
With final resolution reading:
Resolution 80
If the Church is to witness without reproach for justice and brotherhood in the world, it must show itself serious and insistent in reforming abuses within its own organisation, and in promoting brotherhood among its own members. Further, if Christian witness is to be fully effective it must be borne by nothing short of the whole body of Christian people.
The Anglican Communion attempted to speak with authority at the moment when all over the Western world, traditional authority was being challenged. Communists, Fascists, Nazis, social Darwinian capitalists, racial imperialists, segregationists, eugenicists, and rebellious youth were all pulling at the threads that bound the Christian order of old Europe, already unraveling due to the Great War. The contradictions of the church of the British Empire preaching for peace and the end of racial discrimination should not prompt smugness. On the contrary, they reveal something important about the Anglo-American elite’s struggle with modernity.
The bishops did not retreat into reactionary politics, nor did they transform into revolutionary prophets. They did something different, and harder under the circumstances: they sought to double down on the actual principles of their faith and the past and their own failures to live up to them. Intellectually I can see how this morality could lead eventually to a sort of FDR like liberal-conservatism; Franklin Roosevelt was an Anglican after all. However, whether this would have an impact depended on the laity—the ordinary folks in the pews who had the personal responsibility to respond to the call and seek to reform their own lives, their families, and then their communities. Or they could join the rest of the West and become quiet, small-time transgressives.
This became just one of the struggles for social order in the period before the Second World War, a struggle for modernity that would take the USA, the UK, the British Dominions, as well as Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, and France down divergent paths toward the 1930s.