Anglican Values 9: Church and State

 Anglican Values 9: Church and State

    The Christian faith has had an ambivalent relationship with official power since its earliest days.  In any monarchy, which is what the Roman Empire in fact was, any religion which calls its central figure a king, traces his line back to the founding royal figure, calls his expected triumph a kingdom, and looks for that kingdom to be manifested in our time and in this world, is throwing down a challenge to the existing authorities.  An interesting recent approach to New Testament interpretation traces this theme of engagement with Roman power.  Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: A Essential Guide (2006) is a good introduction.  
    In fact the Christian faith was for almost three centuries a movement divorced from this world’s power.  Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 recognized Christianity as a legitimate religion, and the rest of that century can be read in the light of the consequences the Church moving into the seats of power.  From that point on, Christianity held power and at the same time was power’s severest critic.  Over time every state in Europe and many in North Africa and western Asia came under the banner of the Cross.  Which raises the question, How can the state exercise its power through force and be Christian?
    Our own Anglican tradition, as is true also of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, has always been deeply embedded in this issue.  The conversion of England was in many ways a top-down affair.  The Venerable Bede’s charming story from the 600's of King Oswald accompanying St. Aidan as his translator on that monk’s missionary journeys has an underside: What is the message when the king is backing up the preacher?  Power is evident here.  The church in England has always been deeply involved with the monarchy, long before Henry VIII and his famous marital career.  
    Henry did not intend to create a new church; in fact he loved late medieval Catholicism.  His issue was whether the Pope had a right to interfere with a political question: in an absolute monarchy, providing an heir was the most important work the monarch could perform.  It was not personal.  Without an heir, the inevitable struggle for power could well ignite a civil war.  The last civil war had come to an end only in 1485.  But once the door was opened to one issue, many others followed, and the English church entered the Reformation.  This struggle did not end until Elizabeth, some 30-plus years later, defined the nature of the Church of England, embedding the Church in the English state.  Since then, the Church of England has been the religious face and voice of a state which, at least in its official self-definition, embodies Christian virtue and values in its public policy.
    All Anglicans share this history and heritage.  Anglican churches in countries still nominally under the Crown do not suffer much of an identity crisis in this regard.  But in the United States, as well as in other places not subject to the monarchy, Anglicans have had to find another way.   The American Revolution made it impossible for clergy and laity alike to swear loyalty to the King and continue their ministry in the new situation.  How to be loyal citizens of the new republic and faithful Christians in our Anglican tradition?  Our church found its way through this dilemma by creating a self-governing system in our General Convention, in which the Church is independent of the state, abandoning all official connection to public power.
    But interestingly, one thing did not change.  The Church of England’s assumption that it acted on behalf of the public, enshrined in the official status of that church, morphed into an American Anglican assumption that public issues were also issues which the Church had a right, even a duty, to engage in.  The Episcopal Church has always felt a responsibility to weigh in on the questions of the day: slavery in the leadup to the Civil War; the needs and rights of working men and women; the conditions under which the poor and disadvantaged live; the beginnings of an American colonial empire in the Philippines and the Caribbean; the entry of the nation into a world war; civil rights; ecology and climate change; immigration, to name only a few.  As a church we act as though the nation is waiting with bated breath for our latest official statement on public issues.  It isn’t.  In fact, the Episcopal Church is now quite small, and has lost the importance it once had as the religious expression of many American political and other leaders.        Nonetheless, although as a Church we are relatively powerless, we continue to act as though what we say and what we do matter.  Our church has found numberless ways to put its values into practice.
    In the face of smallness and what seems at times to be irrelevance, I believe that this continuity of Anglican/Episcopal engagement with public issues is a clear sign of one of the unique values of our Anglican heritage:  Even when we are not sitting in the seats of power, we think it is important to proclaim and do what we think the teachings of Jesus are, and to proclaim and do what we believe the voice of the Gospels tells us.  And to do it even when it seems it doesn’t matter, because in the light of what Jesus tells us about the Kingdom of God, small things do matter.