Canterbury Fails
This article will appear in the upcoming December issue of First Things magazine.
When it was announced in October that the next archbishop of Canterbury would be a woman with progressive views on homosexuality and abortion, social media erupted with a combination of outrage, congratulations, derision, and triumph. A few days later, an even noisier eruption was caused by the news of subway-style graffiti plastered over Canterbury Cathedral, which prompted even the vice president of the United States to express disgust. The consensus among the loudest Christian voices on X was that the most ancient see in England had been desecrated: spiritually, by its impending occupation by Dame Sarah Mullally, a former nursing administrator fast-tracked into the post of bishop of London by her public-sector allies; and physically, by the graffiti “workshopped” in consultation with “Punjabi, black and brown diaspora, neurodivergent, and LGBTQIA+ groups.”
In fact the graffiti were merely stickers, a temporary art installation commissioned by a dean and chapter anxious to get down with the kids—a preoccupation of liberal Anglicans since the 1960s, when “with-it” bishops fawned over hippies in debates on BBC Two. Also, under English law, cathedrals are effectively owned by their chapters: The bishop’s role as visitor gives him or her no authority over what happens inside them. Even if Dame Sarah were already occupying the chair of St. Augustine, she could do nothing about the graffiti.
Yet it is understandable that the two events should be linked in the minds of commentators. We’re not in Barchester anymore. We’re not even in the era when television viewers would spend an hour on Sunday nights listening to a bishop waffle about current events. In the 1960s about 1.5 million people attended weekly Church of England services; now it is a little over half a million. Factor in population growth, and the proportion of the population attending Anglican parishes on Sundays has fallen by three-quarters. About 20 percent of Sunday worshippers didn’t return after Covid. The Canterbury graffiti project, a farcical attempt to seem “relevant,” ironically underlines the Church’s loss of relevance.
Clearly this is a denomination in decline—but that decline is hard to quantify. Since the Reformation, England’s established Church has enjoyed affectionate but lukewarm public support. Down the centuries its clergy have been portrayed as pompous, dull, or endearingly dotty. During the industrial revolution, Anglican social reformers alleviated the squalor of the slums while failing to evangelize the new working class. As an institution, the “C of E” experienced neither anticlericalism nor mass religious fervor. The pews were occupied—if rarely filled—by churchgoers more interested in parish fetes than calendar feasts, except on Christmas and Easter. Weekly attendance was never a sacramental obligation like that imposed on Catholics. Until well into the twentieth century, the main Sunday service in a typical parish was the “hymn sandwich” of Matins.
The Oxford Movement did not leave much of a mark on the countryside. Even in the Anglo-Catholic pockets, the finer points of ritual and apostolic succession were a preoccupation of the clergy. Hilaire Belloc once dismissed the Catholic fantasy of the conversion of England as “humanly speaking, impossible”; English religion was so bound up with Protestant national identity that not a single village had been reconciled to Rome. After the General Synod voted for women priests in 1992, most clerical leaders of the Anglo-Catholic faction became Catholics. So did lay people, but individually or in small groups. No congregation, however Anglo-Papalist its liturgy, swam the Tiber en masse. The pragmatic cultural Protestantism that characterizes most parishes, tolerant of (and often indifferent to) High and Low varieties of churchmanship, is a more resilient feature of the Church of England than attachment to specific doctrines. This fact explains why social media predictions that the appointment of a female archbishop of Canterbury will kill the established Church are so wide of the mark.
In the years before the ordination of women priests, there were many warnings that such a heretical departure from tradition would split the Church of England. It did not. Conservative Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals were provided with bishops untainted by female orders, several of whom eventually threw in the towel and became Roman Catholic priests. Those Anglican laity who were culturally opposed to the sight of a woman in the pulpit either died out or were won over. (“I wasn’t happy when Sally became our vicar, but she’s actually jolly good.”) Likewise, the ordination of women bishops in 2014 caused no great disruption.
Nor will the enthronement of a woman as primate of all England. Members of the Church of England, most of whom are only casually affiliated with it, find the concept of a woman archbishop of Canterbury no more disturbing than that of a woman prime minister. As for more devout churchgoers, including opponents of female bishops, they understand that the spiritual authority of the leader of the Church of England is that of a diocesan bishop writ large. As an innovation, a female successor of St. Augustine is much less theologically significant than was the introduction of women bishops more than a decade ago.
If there is damage to unity, it will be caused by the issue of homosexuality, and most of that damage will be to the nebulous concept of “global Anglicanism.” In 2023, the General Synod voted to permit blessings of same-sex couples already in civil partnerships or marriages, though it stopped short of allowing those marriages to be solemnized in church. Thirty-six bishops voted in favor, four were opposed, and two abstained. Justin Welby did not reveal how he voted (almost certainly in favor); Sarah Mullally publicly supported the measure. This October, however, the House of Bishops decided that the introduction of stand-alone same-sex blessings would require two-thirds majority approval by the whole General Synod, a hurdle that it is unlikely to clear. Meanwhile, clergy are free to conduct church blessings of same-sex couples, including those who are civilly married, as part of other services. In other words, the situation is utterly chaotic. Yet, despite the bishops’ latest move—a response to threats by wealthy evangelical parishes to withdraw funding from their dioceses—the ultimate direction of travel is clear: toward services that, at the very least, are hard to distinguish from homosexual weddings.
Church blessings of gay couples are such a drastic departure from Christian tradition that it seems odd to argue that their effect will be limited. But never underestimate the Church of England’s ability to accommodate new secular orthodoxies while containing conservative dissent. The same does not apply, however, to the Anglican Communion. After the General Synod vote on same-sex blessings, the archbishops of ten out of forty-two provinces, including the 13 million–strong Church of Uganda, repudiated the spiritual leadership of Welby, though they insisted that they still belonged to the Anglican Communion—a dubious position, given that since 1868 the defining feature of that body has been the primus inter pares status of the archbishop of Canterbury.
There was a more spectacular fracture after Sarah Mullally’s appointment. On October 16, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON)—a conservative Anglican network that includes the provinces of Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Congo, and Chile—announced that not only was it out of communion with the Church of England, but it had replaced the existing Anglican Communion and wished to be known henceforth as the “Global Anglican Communion.” Statements by GAFCON’s leaders made clear that the immediate casus belli was Archbishop-designate Mullally’s stance on homosexuality. According to Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, primate of the Church of Nigeria—whose 22 million members make it the second-largest in the Anglican world—Mullally’s appointment was “devastating” because she had described the 2023 vote for blessing gay married couples as “a moment of hope,” demonstrating that she was “a strong supporter of same-sex marriage.”
Another leading conservative, Bishop Mouneer Anis, former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, argued in First Things in October that conservative global Anglicans now have “a historic opportunity to reform and redesign the Anglican Communion.” Significantly, however, Bishop Anis is not part of GAFCON and, at the time of writing, had not endorsed its claim to be the new Anglican Communion. He is aligned with the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), an older body that includes all members of GAFCON alongside some other bishops.
Such is the fog of confusion that, at the moment, no one can definitively explain the differences between GAFCON and the GSFA, and there have been many online jokes about the rival Judean resistance groups in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. But two points need to be made. First, Mullally’s appointment has killed off the Anglican Communion centered on the Lambeth Conference, which had been on life support for years. Second, despite the grandiose claims of GAFCON and the GSFA, it is hard to see how the Anglican Communion can be replaced by any African-dominated fellowship of conservative Anglicans—and it seems unlikely that the new “Global Anglican Communion” will stay intact for long. Its members may be united in their belief that homosexual activity is sinful. But on crucial theological questions they are divided.
These “orthodox Anglicans” disagree on whether women can be bishops or priests, the number and nature of the sacraments, and even the nature of the Holy Trinity, treating the filioque clause in the Creed as optional. Despite the huge gulf between the most Catholic and Protestant congregations within the Church of England, the glue of establishment has held them together. By contrast, the history of “continuing” Anglican denominations is one of furious fissiparous rivalry. If a post-Mullally “revived Communion” is to survive, then the ties among churches will have to be so loose as to render global Anglicanism not so much nebulous as meaningless.
If they were honest about it, many Church of England bishops would concede that the Anglican Communion is no great loss; placating its members is more trouble than it’s worth. Their focus will be on maintaining the unity of the mother Church as it moves away from the messy holding position that same-sex marriages can be blessed but not solemnized. That progression is inevitable. The Synod will eventually vote to allow gay weddings in church, a change already supported by a small majority of its clergy and a much larger proportion of laity. The Church of England never distances itself from bien pensant secular opinion for long. It has never held strong views on abortion, and Mullally’s vaguely pro-choice opinions have provoked little comment. On the other hand, Evangelical objections to homosexual marriage, although expressed less crudely than those of African or American conservatives, are as uncompromising as, and less susceptible to change than, the objections of 1990s Anglo-Catholics to women’s ordination.
This is where the choice of Sarah Mullally as archbishop of Canterbury may be vindicated. She does not have the intellect of Rowan Williams or the elite education and social connections of Justin Welby, but her track record in London—a diocese full of spiky Anglo-Catholic parishes that do not recognize the orders of women bishops—evinces impressive pastoral dexterity.
One of her suffragans, Jonathan Baker, bishop of Fulham, oversees a non-territorial jurisdiction whose parishes do not allow women to minister the sacraments to them. Yet they have grown unexpectedly close to “Bishop Sarah,” stressing at every opportunity that they acknowledge her legal authority as bishop and inviting her to attend their Solemn Masses in choir dress. Precisely how the Fulham jurisdiction squares the circle of recognizing the leadership of a (supposedly) invalidly ordained bishop is something of a mystery, but it does seem that the nature of Anglo-Catholic objections to female ordination has quietly shifted. Whereas once most London traditionalists agreed with Pope John Paul II that women cannot be bishops, now many regard Bishop Sarah as possibly or probably validly ordained. They reluctantly decline her sacramental ministry on the grounds that the Church of England should not bestow orders on women without the agreement of Rome and Constantinople—but they are moving closer to the point where alternative episcopal oversight will be required only by scattered hard-liners and therefore withdrawn by the Synod.
The question now is whether Mullally, a former director of nursing at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital who has expertly bandaged the limbs of Anglo-Catholics in London, can heal the more severe injuries of opponents of homosexual blessings. It will be a terrific challenge, not least because at times of crisis the primate of all England is expected to produce national solutions while lacking the power to overrule diocesan bishops or the General Synod. If Mullally decides to throw her weight behind same-sex church weddings, then she can probably rely on the support of the English public and any future British government, even one led by Nigel Farage. But that may not be enough to avert the first schism in the history of the Church of England, as wealthy evangelical parishes represented by top-flight lawyers search for ways of breaking communion with Lambeth while holding on to their benefices and buildings. One can hardly blame Dame Sarah if she tries to kick the eventual Synod vote on formal church weddings of gay couples into the long grass of her compulsory retirement at the age of seventy in 2032.
Finally, there is another danger lurking for the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Unlike the issue of homosexuality, it may be one that she does not recognize. Mullally is a formidable woman with the skills of a public-sector administrator but also the limited imagination and the political prejudices that come with them. For more than fifty years, public opinion on certain subjects that have preoccupied the Church of England—race relations, immigration, the role of women in society, the normalization of homosexuality, and unlimited access to public services—has been molded by the liberal consensus in government, academia, and the legacy media. Recently, however, there has been a divergence of elite and popular opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Digital media are highlighting the destructive consequences of unrestricted immigration, together with the sinister restrictions on free speech (and especially religious free speech) demanded by the transgender lobby that has been performing biological experiments on children while allowing men to intrude into women’s bathrooms and changing rooms.
Until now, Sarah Mullally’s public voice has been indistinguishable from those of other left-leaning bishops in the House of Lords. Does she realize that the pent-up anger that swept Donald Trump to a second term in America and may produce a Reform government in Britain is shared not only by the general public but also by communicant members of the Church of England, whose slightly right-of-center views have traditionally been ignored by the clergy?Mullally’s published sermons are dense with liberal platitudes. That is not surprising: This has been the lingua franca of the Anglican hierarchy for decades. But it is more perilous for her than for any of her predecessors in the See of Canterbury, because such boilerplate now provokes fury from members of the public, newly empowered by social media. She may have no formal authority to stop the dean of Canterbury from plastering columns with graffiti, but she should note the intensity of the anger provoked by an infantile stunt that, until recently, would have merited no more than a mocking headline in the Daily Mail. If one day that sort of anger is directed at her, it will not be because the Church marries gay couples but because it is tone-deaf to the plight of ordinary people trapped by the collapse of civil society. Earlier this year Bishop Mullally, to her credit, opposed parliamentary legislation that encourages vulnerable people to explore the option of “assisted dying.” Now we wait to see whether she can persuade the Church of England not to commit suicide.
