ANYONE who is looking for a contemporary one-volume overview of the history of the Church of England could not do better than Jeremy Morris’s A People’s Church.
The author describes himself as an Anglican priest and “a somewhat renegade Anglo-Catholic”, but the partisan spirit is largely absent from his book. The organising theme is the story of the attempt to build a Church to embrace all the people of England.
After a chapter describing the organisational and theological continuities with the Western Latin Church, there is a balanced account of the sharp break in England’s religious identity engineered by the Tudor monarchs in the 16th century. This is followed by three main sections, which review the various strategies intended to shape a Church that could comprehend and command the loyalty of all the people of England.
In a masterpiece of concision and balance, we are given a narrative informed by the latest specialist studies, but not dominated by the current controversies that pre-occupy academic historians.
Part 1 deals with the “Age of the Monarch” from the turmoil of the Reformation to the Restoration of Charles II and the new settlement of 1688. Part 2 covers the “long 18th century”. Under the title of the “Age of the Oligarchs”, Morris describes the Evangelical Revival and the crises that brought an end to the confessional state. Finally, in the “Age of the People”, the story is carried through the 19th-century Tractarians and liberals, until the final chapters that deal with the challenges of the 20th century.
During these various periods, the character of the Church of England has changed radically and never more so than in the past half-century. The diminishing number of active churchgoers in our own day puts a question mark against the plausibility of any Anglican claim to be still the National Church. As Morris argues, however, “the relative decline of mainstream Christianity and Christian practice should not blind us to the impossibility of understanding the history of England and its people aright without attending to the history of their religion.”
AlamyJohn Wesley preaching from his father’s tomb at Epworth, in a painting by George Washington Brownlow (1835-76), reproduced in the book
Despite the extensive canvas on which the author operates, the number of topics covered in detail is impressive. Wales, for so long a part of the Province of Canterbury, is not neglected. The significance of church music is explored, and a careful distinction is made between the elite traditions of the Chapel Royal and the more usual diet in parish churches until the great musical revival of the second half of the 19th century.
Various myths are exposed and corrected. For example, the record of the Church of England and Anglican chaplains in the First World War is examined, and, despite the “selective quotation of jingoistic and militaristic sentiment”, Morris provides evidence that the myth of failure is unjustified.
He does not pretend, however, that the Church’s present situation is a happy one. The age profile of Anglican congregations is not encouraging, and the number of people who identify with no particular religious tradition continues to grow. One result has been a plethora of commissions and inquiries, all of which might profit from a longer and better-informed historical perspective that can preserve us from being “too soon dejected and too soon elate”. This book makes a timely contribution to the debate about the continuing vocation of the Church of England.
The Church has always sought to serve the wider community without being too concerned to satisfy the zealotry of the religious enthusiast. In its local life, Morris argues, while the Church of England “cannot any more pretend to be the people’s church — it can continue to be a church for the people”.
The Rt Revd Lord Chartres is a former Bishop of London.
A People’s Church: A history of the Church of England
Jeremy Morris
Profile £30
(978-1-78125-249-9)
Church Times Bookshop £27