Archbishop Welby has just completed 149,000 miles travelling with his wife Caroline to visit all 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion. He told The Times (6 Dec 2014): ‘Will there be an Anglican Communion [in 30 years time]? Very, very likely indeed. But it will look very different’.
He was surprised to find that being part of the Anglican Communion enabled Christians to have contact with government and local leaders, even when they were very small minorities with relatively few adherents.
This, he believed, was because in almost all cases the churches themselves were deeply engaged in reconciliation. ‘They’re building bridges in all kinds of directions. They are almost all heavily involved in their local communities and looking outwards.’ The visible manifestation was the large number of highly regarded schools and health clinics run by Anglicans. Though some schools catered for rich elites, most were open to all people, of all faiths, and catered particularly for the poor.
Poor and effective
What impressed him most was that Anglican churches were overwhelmingly ‘churches of the poor, with the poor’. There were very few places in the world where they were made up of the comfortable middle class, as was largely the case now in the UK and USA. ‘The vast majority of Anglicans are the desperate people. And that’s very striking.’ Despite being poor, however, the leadership was often very effective, involved in development issues, and in issues of justice and in evangelism. For that reason, many were growing rapidly in numbers.
Dr Robert Woodberry has produced research which gives some evidence and rationale for the role of the Church in empowering the poor, published as ‘The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy’ in the American Political Science Review 1.
His studies conclude that: ‘Conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable representative democracy more likely, regardless of whether people converted to Protestantism. Moreover religious beliefs motivated most of these transformations’.
Access to God’s Word
This was rooted in the Protestant belief that everyone should have access to God’s Word and make their own choice of religious belief. So CPs spread literacy, printing and mass education. Elites had guarded these jealously, as they did not want to share their power.
Woodberry writes: ‘Protestants themselves did not always provide the most educational, printing, and civil society resources, but Protestant initiatives spurred others to invest heavily in these areas and to pressure governments to create schools that restricted Protestant content. These resource transfers to non-elites helped alter the class structure, fostered the rise of political parties and nonviolent political movements, and facilitated broader political participation’.
The influence is not just in numbers of churches or conversions but through institutions such as schools and hospitals. These are an important part of the current defence of Christian minorities against persecution, since many people in the majority cultures benefit from, and therefore defend, these institutions.
British values
The current debate about British values cannot avoid the role Christianity has played in the development of the British nation. The emergence of democracy and mass education stemmed from the availability of the Bible to the masses, religious competition and liberty.
Democracy does not represent the triumph of secularism over religion. Woodberry states: ‘Arguments for political pluralism, electoral reform, and limitations of state power were originally framed in religious terms. For example, Calvinists tried to reconstruct states along ‘godly’ lines and limit sinful human institutions. Perhaps as a result, most Enlightenment democratic theorists came from Calvinist families or had a Calvinist education, even if they were either not theologically orthodox or personally religious, (e.g. John Locke, Rousseau, Hugo Grotius, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton), and they secularised ideas previously articulated by Calvinist theologians and jurists. Hobbes’s and Locke’s social contracts are secular versions of Puritan and Nonconformist covenants, and Locke’s ideas about the equality of all people are explicitly religious’.
Internationally, non-state missionaries moderated colonial abuses, particularly when abuses undermined conversions and in British colonies (where CPs had greater influence). To reach their religious goals, non-state missionaries punished abusive colonial officials and counterbalanced white settlers, which fostered the rule of law, encouraged less violent repression of anti-colonial political organisation, and facilitated peaceful decolonisation.
The challenge facing the Anglican Communion, and Conversionary Protestantism, is whether the Communion’s governance can be representative of its vast majority and of the ‘average’ member who is a poor, black, evangelical female.
