

I’ve been thinking about two Anglicans named Charles lately.
But before I talk about them, I want to say something about how and why I still talk occasionally about my former ecclesial group.
When I was on my way out of the Episcopal Church and into the Catholic Church in 2018, a very clever friend of mine took me aside and explained an unwritten rule, kept among gentlemen churchmen: When you forsake Anglicanism, you explain yourself once (if you have to) and then you never speak of it again. Move on. Don’t think of the past. Don’t dunk on your old friends. Don’t punch down.
But the farther away from Anglicanism I get, the less compunction I have to avoid criticizing it from time to time. Maybe my friend’s advice is really just his own “cope” (more anon). I’m not trying to sink the ship already on its way down, but sound a loud alarm from the safety of shore to anybody left who will listen.
Now, some of my old Anglican friends are dyed-in-the wool Protestants. They would largely agree with an Anglican thinker like Gerald Bray, whose book Anglicanism: A Reformed Catholic Tradition, I critiqued at length last year in The Lamp. Far from being a branch of Catholicism, Anglicanism has always been, in fact, a hodgepodge of Protestantisms (including a Protestantism that calls itself Catholic!). Puritanism was ultimately ruled out. Paedobaptism has always been non-negotiable. But a wide variety of other Protestant flavors have come and gone in different measures from the beginning. Even those with High Church taste buds were dining happily, and for centuries, at the same “not-Roman-Catholic” table.
I’ve written in many places now about how I came to the conclusion that Anglicanism as Catholicism is ultimately a fiction, but a fiction with a lot of truth strewn within it – truth which now has a home in the Catholic Church. For this reason, I took issue recently over at Catholic Answers with a group of self-styled “Catholic” Anglicans who celebrated a Communion service at the High Altar of St. John Lateran in Rome.
If it’s ungentlemanly to say enough is enough…well, I’ll risk it. I never was a WASP to begin with.
With that, I want to talk about the quintessential WASP, King Charles III, whose recent coronation was in some respects a breath of fresh air. It was full of enchanting spectacle, in a city that deserves to be more than Big Brother’s surveillance fantasy or a “regional banking center-slash-refugee camp.” I love Britain and I love London, and as I have written here before, I even have a soft spot for the British monarchy, and I worry that whatever the monarchy has been good for over the past century may now be in jeopardy because of the moral failures and ideological self-immolation of Queen Elizabeth II’s children. We should all pray, for example, that His Majesty turns out to be more than a stooge of the World Economic Forum.
But the coronation naturally brought up a sticky subject: What about the King’s role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and his historic title “Defender of the Faith” – part of his royal inheritance from his deranged, debauched ancestor, Henry VIII? What does the continuation of this role mean for the future of the many theories of Anglican identity?
It is an astonishing thought that when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1952, assuming her role at the very top of the Anglican hierarchy, the modern ecumenical movement had not been born. Nor had the Church of England or any other ecclesial group in the Anglican Communion even remotely begun considering ordaining women, marrying same-sex couples, or jettisoning the Book of Common Prayer. Likewise, no one foresaw the introduction into Britain of millions of Muslims and other adherents of non-Christian religions, let alone the secularism that would wash over everything, leading Charles to propose decades before his accession that his country needed a defender of various faiths (or no faith!) rather than the Faith.
Nonetheless, King Charles III ascended the throne affirming what the Anglican thing has always been. He was asked,
Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England?
To which he swore,
I Charles do solemnly and sincerely in the presence of God profess, testify, and declare that I am a faithful Protestant, and that I will, according to the true intent of the enactments which secure the Protestant succession to the Throne, uphold and maintain the said enactments to the best of my powers according to law.
An Anglican friend of mine offered an esoteric reading of the ceremony that makes swearing to be a “Protestant” actually mean something else. But you can dress a king up however you like, and a cope is a cope (let the reader understand).
As I wrote elsewhere recently, I happen to think Catholicism is going to continue to attract converts in Britain and serve as a source of hope as the old Anglican establishment continues to crumble. In the United States, as in Britain, the data are a bloodbath. In America, I tend to think trying to re-brand Anglicanism as a hip Law vs. Gospel Lutheranism or even a heady, manly Calvinism could have some legs for a generation or two, and particularly in well-endowed parishes in the southern half of the United States. But sooner or later, it will be game over in those genteel enclaves too. In the end, there will just be Catholicism or nothing.
And this brings me to the other Charles – Charles “Charlie” Holt, whose present ordeal is shaping up to be a different example of what Anglicanism is, and why it’s doomed.
Charlie is an Episcopal priest, and an old colleague of mine from my past life in a collar. We both served as rectors (the Episcopalian word for pastors) in parishes in the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida, based in Orlando. He was happy to be a Protestant, even vigorously defending Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity on a clergy e-mail forum. I was fiercely defensive of my Catholic theory, but I always admired Charlie’s guts.
Charlie went on to start Bible Study Media, which produces small group study resources, and he later joined the staff of a large Episcopal church in Houston, Texas. Last year he was elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Florida (based in Jacksonville), but as of this writing, he has not been able to receive the Episcopalian version of consecration and start using the miter and staff (and cope!).
Before I say more about Charlie’s situation, I should briefly explain how one becomes a bishop in the Episcopal Church. In most dioceses, an announcement is made that a new bishop will be elected on a given date, and nominations for candidates are invited. In most cases, a candidate needs the support of at least a few clerics and laypeople of the diocese to get on the ballot. In some cases, the diocese’s rules make it much harder. But once on the ballot, there is a “walkabout” period where all the candidates’ names are made known, and they are invited to various events, usually over a period of a few months. The election then takes place, with all canonically-resident clergy voting, as well as a fairly large number of lay people elected from their parishes. The clergy and laity vote separately, and a successful candidate must win two-thirds majorities in both orders, with the results announced after each ballot. Voting continues until one candidate reaches the necessary threshold.
Once elected, the winner must receive consent for his or her episcopal consecration from two-thirds of the sitting diocesan bishops in the Episcopal Church, as well as two-thirds of the Standing Committees of the dioceses. (A Standing Committee is a small group of clergy and lay people elected to serve a diocese in various ways, including serving as the ecclesiastical authority in the absence of a bishop.)
If this all sounds strange to Catholics, it should. Although Episcopalians claim a tenuous connection to the episcopal electoral practices of the Early Church, what in fact has happened is that the selection of bishops is held completely hostage to ecclesiastical hobbyists who care enough to get themselves in a position to vote. And this is related to another big problem with Anglicanism – namely, the convention and/or synodal governance that has authority to put even the basics of the faith to a vote, all with a blasphemous veneer of following the Holy Spirit where she leads. I joked to some friends the other day that I hope the Holy Spirit shows up soon and tells Anglicans to vote that she doesn’t exist anymore and the whole charade will be over.
Anyway, my old colleague Charlie is against “gay marriage”, although the General Convention of the Episcopal Church voted in 2018 (I was there) to mandate it in every church of every diocese. So, while he does not personally have to preside at a “gay wedding”, and as a bishop, he could certainly ordain more people who likewise refuse to do it, it’s going to happen in his diocese. He can even teach that “gay marriage” is unbiblical, untraditional, against the Natural Law…whatever…but the matter is settled for Charlie’s ecclesial group at large. There is one teaching and one practice, and it mirrors all the tiresome secular tropes: “love is love,” etc…
So here’s what’s happening: Charlie was elected bishop, and predictably, progressives did not like the result. They then found procedural grounds to force a re-do, but Charlie won again. Now the bishops and committee members who need to sign off on the results appear to be hesitant to consent. Charlie’s former bishop (a progressive) supports him. But one of his old friends, another bishop, is not so sure (see here and here). If all else fails, his detractors may try to play the racism card, which, knowing Charlie as I do, is a bad faith bluff if there ever was one.
So, why is Charlie’s case worth my violating the former Anglican gentleman’s gag order?
Well, on the face of it, it’s just one of thousands of examples of just how sad Anglicanism has become when a man who believes what Christians have always believed is not allowed to lead. But the fact that Charlie is, to my knowledge, a proud Protestant, makes it all the more ridiculous. He is happy enough to take comfort in his own biblically-rigorous religious opinion and act on it accordingly; but he is also happy to serve in a church where the opposite opinion is the majority.
In the end, there is no way for a conservative like Charlie or the mainstream Progressives who oppose him to say to each other that one is right and the other wrong. That’s the big problem with Protestantism, including Anglicanism. Without a living authority, everything is private judgment – a point of such monumental importance, but which is almost universally ignored by my former co-religionists, that I feel no compunction disappointing my old comrades to make it again and again. An Anglican can side with the progressive majority or the minuscule, conservative minority, but it’s still every man his own pope.
Just because I like Charlie Holt, I hope things work out for him the way he and the people who elected him want. But part of me hopes an epic fail here will change hearts. I joked on Twitter: “Can’t wait for the conversion story that begins, ‘It was on the fourteenth failure to get Charlie Holt elected Episcopal bishop of Florida that I suddenly realized the claims of the Roman Catholic Church were true…’”
Charlie replied to my tweet, “Haha. That is actually pretty clever Andrew.”
But to my mind, it’s Anglicanism that has been too clever by half for too long. Too clever for me anyway.
So before I play dumb again, I’ll leave you with the conclusion I offered at the end of my article from The Lamp, mentioned above:
Anglicans stand at a fork in the road, unable to continue on their nineteenth-century way. The way forward for Anglicans as individuals and collectively is not in the past. By God’s grace, the Protestant Humpty Dumpty of Anglicanism had a great fall, and it is foolish to try to put him together again. Nor is there a new creature waiting to be constructed from the remnants. All that remains now is to pick up the pieces—some of them quite lovely—and bring them home where they belong.
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