6 - Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic Relations, 1928–1983

Summary

Denyer and Larcombe proposed a three-day conference with invited delegates from all the various clerical and lay associations and diocesan evanJohn Maiden

An important historical theme of Anglican evangelicalism has been its troubled relations with the Catholic party. In the nineteenth century anti-ritualism became an ‘all-consuming passion for many Evangelicals’. Indeed, the weight of anti-ritualism fractured the unity of the party in the 1870s when ‘moderates’ rejected the Church Association’s strategy of litigation. One historical survey appropriately uses the term ‘neurosis’ to describe ongoing evangelical anxieties in the early twentieth century. In 1928 Leonard Elliott Binns’ survey of evangelicalism suggested that the party had become ‘associated with the refusal to take the Eastward position in the Eucharist or with a morbid fear of “lights”’. Anti-Catholicism was a core aspect of Anglican evangelical identity.

This chapter examines relations between Anglican evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics during the twentieth century. As will be shown, even towards the end of this period there remained a residual antagonism towards Anglo-Catholicism on the Reformed traditionalist wing of the movement. Furthermore, when considering ‘party’ relations it is important to recognise that evangelicalism has sometimes oscillated between the High Church and liberal parties, unequally yoked either in the name of orthodoxy or anti-medievalism; for example, siding with E. B. Pusey against Essays and Reviews in the 1860s and with modernist bishop E. W. Barnes against Prayer Book revision in the 1920s. Nevertheless, during our period a definite trajectory of improving party relations can be discerned. This direction of travel was particularly apparent at the National Evangelical Anglican Congresses (NEACs) of 1967 and 1977: both road signs indicating the markedly less partisan course of conservative neo-evangelicalism. ‘Since the mid-1960s’, wrote one Church Society council member in 1988, ‘many evangelicals have taken the ecumenical view, that evangelicalism is one insight among many.’ Such pluralism would make ‘no clear statement on the errors of Anglo-Catholicism’. Recent developments are also telling: it is remarkable that in 2009 conservative evangelicals sought Catholic partners in a Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, formed to defended ‘traditionalist’ concerns in the Church.

The present survey offers a new perspective to a historiography which has prioritised conflict over reconciliation. With the exception of Christopher Cocksworth’s admirable study of evangelical eucharistic thought, no significant study addresses the improvement in party relations in the post-1945 period.