3 - Church and Nation: Anglicanism, Revision and National Identity

Summary

In 1926, while the bishops were still absorbed in preparing the new liturgy at Lambeth Palace, the World Evangelical Alliance organised a rally at the Royal Albert Hall. The main speaker was E. A. Knox, the retired bishop of Manchester. His speech began with the patriotic and conservative assertion that England had survived ‘two great perils’ in recent times, the Great War and the General Strike, but then he predicted that these dangers from Berlin and Moscow would be followed by ‘a peril from the Vatican of Rome’. The hyperbole continued as he declared

if England were to gain the whole world and lose Her soul, what would it profit Her? I am not going to apologise for saying that a national submission to the Church of Rome would be the losing of the nation's soul.

There are various important reasons why national religion and its corollaries, national identity and character, were crucial in the debates surrounding the liturgical revision. Traditionally, Anglicans understood their Church to be inextricably bound up with the nation and the English character. In the nineteenth century Thomas Arnold had asserted that it was the role of the Church to defend and maintain Englishness, which he understood to be Christian, manly and enlightened. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mandell Creighton, Bishop of London, described such a relationship explicitly, saying

The Church cannot be too far from the main ideas of the people. ‘The nation’ exists by virtue of a particular type of character. Character is largely founded by religion.

The Book of Common Prayer defined the identity of the English Church and so, in turn, was a central symbol of the relationship between Anglicanism and the nation. Historically, the national liturgy, alongside the Authorised Version, was perceived to be the great vernacular medium of English consciousness. Thus, liturgical revision was particularly salient to issues of national identity. In one sense the events of 1927–28 resonate as a very English controversy; however, the crisis had constitutional ramifications beyond the borders of the English nation. Parliament's final say in the process, the Protestant undergirding of the British constitution and the concept of a common Reformed faith transcending national boundaries and identities, gave Prayer Book revision an important British dimension.