Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880-1950 (review)

Organized around the intellectual biographies of five clerics who occupied key intellectual and leadership posts in the Anglican Church of Canada and the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, and connected by a series of chapters detailing theological developments within each denomination, this book seeks to accomplish two major goals. Through biographical analyses of Dyson Hague, a forceful advocate of the Anglican evangelical wing, W. H. Griffith Thomas, whose links with transatlantic holiness tendencies drew him increasingly toward fundamentalism, the high-church American bishop William T. Manning, the liberal evangelical champion Carl Eckhardt Grammer, and the moderate evangelical Henry John Cody, Katerberg provides an assessment not only of the richness and diversity of theological options within Anglican church order, but offers the reader an accessible account of the fate of each of these church parties in the complicated religious and cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. In so doing, the author emphatically places himself within the current revisionist tendency of scholarship in the history of religion, of resisting casting the period prior to World War II as one of inevitable religious decline. "The point," concludes Katerberg, "is to avoid simplistic, linear readings of mainline protestant decline that occurred in the 1960's back into the 1920's and 1930's" (p. 140). Although Protestant "hegemony" in both Canada and the United States faced new social and cultural dilemmas, radical disruption was not a feature of either theology or religious practice. Indeed, one of the great strengths, as well as a source of internal conflict and disunity for Anglicans, was the weight of history and tradition in terms of formulating the identities of "high church," "low church," and "evangelical."

Indeed, it is Katerberg's characterization of his leading Anglican clerics as all heavily imbricated in the continuities of the past that provides the central tension in this study. The main theoretical axis of this volume is not "secularization," the debate that has raged among social historians of religion, but "modernity," which Katerberg defines as the simultaneous experience of both consolidating and fragmenting tendencies that was experienced in a particularly acute form in North America during the seven decades of this study. Modernity, according to Katerberg, "is better described as competition for identities in a pluralized, modern social and cultural setting." Because it sought to cast its identity in terms of historical continuity with tradition, Anglicanism, unlike other Protestant denominations, was shaped by a struggle over how to use the past to respond to modernity. In the process, however, Katerberg argues that Anglican identities tended to become more fragmented, and that the traditions espoused by the five intellectual leaders became "objects of consumption and self-conscious manipulation" (p. 8).

On balance, the story of this fragmentation and competition of historic identities is sensitively handled by the author. It is possible, Katerberg concludes, to trace the post-1960 difficulties faced by North American Anglicans to a much earlier period. The articulation, preservation, and competition of historic identities within the denomination hampered the Anglican Church's response to the age of "high modernity" faced by Western societies in the era after the late 1950's, by leaving the church without a "readily marketable" (p. 217) denominational identity beyond an unstable appeal to ecumenism and comprehensiveness. This book, however, would have been richer had it deployed a fully transatlantic frame of reference. Indeed, the "North American" frame of reference does not work effectively for Anglicanism, which continued, both in Canada and the United States, to be shaped by historic "English" theological identities and developments—matters that are insufficiently explored in the narrative chapters which the author provides. On balance, however, Katerberg convincingly advances the theoretical perspective of "modernity" as one worthy of much further application by historians of religion looking to refine and nuance conventional treatments of twentieth-century religious decline.