Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism (review)

Hassett’s study is a timely one. The recent extension of African ecclesiastical jurisdiction over dissident congregations in the United States seems to confirm an immanent schism in the Anglican Communion, in which a conservative American minority—allying with a global Southern Anglican majority—will break from the “liberal North.” Indeed, the debate over the policy of the U. S. Episcopal Church on homosexuality has cast the Anglican Communion as an exemplar of the realignment of world Christianity, characterized by a corresponding polarization of liberal and conservative values. African archbishops have crucially shaped the terms of this debate within both the Episcopal Church and the larger Anglican Communion, inasmuch as the transformation of many American Episcopal parishes into “missionary churches” of African dioceses has reversed the legacy of colonial evangelization.

Drawing on the work of Philip Jenkins, Hassett sets out the terms of this “global-shift” model and shows that the partnership of American conservatives and African Anglicans is the result of neither a uniform social or theological orthodoxy nor an inevitable rise of Southern Christian authority. Instead, the globalization of conservative Anglicanism is the work of strategic coalition-building across space and culture (exemplified best by the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Bishops, when mobilization around the sexuality resolution supplanted a competing focus on debt relief and poverty, on which Southern Anglicans shared more common ground with liberal constituencies). Meticulously researched, the book is based on (but not limited to) extensive fieldwork in an American dissident congregation and in the Church of Uganda, and the sources offer a range of perspectives among leadership, clergy, and laypeople. This comparative framework demonstrates how homosexuality is in fact the touchstone for a host of larger issues, which have as much to do with contests over material resources and power as they do with moral authority within the Anglican community.

At the heart of Hassett’s intervention lies a critical investigation of the “global” as a frame of both analysis and experience. Hassett “writes against globalization” (10) by treating the development of Anglican globalism as the product of human agency rather than structural forces. She also situates the Anglican case within a widespread debate about whether globalization perpetuates or unhinges older forms of Western hegemony. The book’s collective progression suggests the answer to this question. The first five chapters demonstrate how conservative attempts to reshape authority in the Anglican Communion have indeed been a collaborative enterprise between Episcopal dissidents and African Anglicans, premised on the capability of transnational relationships to erase difference and unseat the historical hierarchies of the colonial church. Indeed, she demonstrates how African partnerships have genuinely increased the global consciousness of conservative Episcopalians. However, chapters 6 and 7 reveal the limits of this globalism: the Church of Uganda’s dependency on outside assistance and the persistence of colonial discourses have restricted the ability of these relationships to develop on equal terms. African partnership is itself a rhetorical battleground between Northern conservatives and liberals, each of whom argues that the other is using financial resources to push a neocolonial agenda in the global South. African Anglicans have not been passive recipients of this discourse, but Hassett also shows the difficulty with which Africans must reconcile their claims to autonomy and cultural authenticity (particularly in linking anti-homosexuality and anti-colonialism) with the imbalance of resources that constrains their agency over the terms and meanings of the debate, and confines the reach of their authority.

This summary is but a crude simplification of a story that weaves together many layers of complexity about the appropriation, negotiation, and contestation of this global framework, and which shows how the most vocal tones of the debate do not always capture the mentalities and lived experience of those on the ground. Hassett’s close attention to the short-term, contingent nature of these transnational relationships occasionally obscures the longer-term dynamics of dissent...