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

A.J. Pell is rector of Christ Church in Hope, B.C., editor of the
Canadian Evangelical Review, and an instructor of Liturgy, Anglican
Studies Programme at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Divisions within North American Anglicanism have been in the news from
time to time in recent decades. While these divisions have many sources,
in this book William Katerberg explores one possible source—namely the
varying ways in which Anglo-Catholic, evangelical, and liberal Anglicans
from 1880 to 1950 attempted to form and stabilize their identities in
the midst of multiple cultures in North American society and the
Anglican church itself.

The book is an interesting intermingling of biographies and general
historical narrative. The three narrative chapters provide the context
that allows the reader to understand the issues and events recorded in
the five biographical chapters. Three figures in Canadian Anglican
history (Dyson Hague, William Henry Griffith Thomas, and Henry John
Cody) and two from the American church (Carl E. Grammer and William T.
Manning) are studied to discover how they formulated and communicated
their senses of Anglican identity in response to the growth of modernity
and secularization in society at large and within the Anglican church.

The book’s greatest strength is its exploration of how these five
clergy wrestled with being Anglicans within their own sections of a
tripartite Anglicanism on the one hand and within societies attempting
to develop comprehensive and unified identities on the other. Katerberg
points out the inconsistencies in each man’s positions and actions,
and demonstrates that none of them was able to develop a comprehensive
Anglican identity around which all Anglicans could rally in an ever more
secular society. Katerberg is weakest in his final chapter when he
raises, as he did in his opening chapter, the post-1960 malaise in both
the Anglican Church of Canada and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the
United States of America, and merely wonders whether the struggles with
modernity are a partial cause. But that question, which proves too great
for the scope of this book, might be the seed for another.