I have long thought that the Great Litany of the Book of Common Prayer represents most fully the originating character of Anglicanism. And “full” the litany is. It is a long prayer, composed in 1544 by Thomas Cranmer for use in a national emergency. It soon became part of regular reformed Anglican liturgy, incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer, to be said three times a week.
The litany addresses every facet of human need: prayers for forgiveness of and deliverance from all kinds of sins; from the depredations of evil men and rulers, heresy, and religious indifference; from civil injustice and violence; and from various natural disasters, the suffering of illness, unprepared death, and final judgment. It pleads for mercy for the weak and orphaned, prisoners and captives; for the protection of women, mothers, and children, and those who labor or work in dangerous settings. It asks for renewal of faith, conversion of heart, love for enemies. And in all this, the Great Litany proclaims the truth and grace of the Trinity and of the incarnate life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God.
The ambition of this upsurge of prayer is to evoke all of God: creating, ordering, judging, and redeeming human life—my own and my neighbor’s. Taken as an expression of faith, the Great Litany represents Anglicanism’s rich, communal, and detailed sense of Christian existence. If I were to use academic jargon here in hopes of conjuring a sense of objective observation, I would say that Anglicanism in its sixteenth-century origins had a “thick ecclesial imaginary,” a shared and complex way of making sense of the world within the Church.
That thick ecclesial imaginary is mostly vanishing, not least because so few now recite the Great Litany. I observe this diminution with a certain sadness, though with little religious fear. I have never thought that membership numbers indicate anything about God’s promises. After all, at the end of time, “few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14). I dare to hope that God will save all he has created. But this hope is hardly certain, and indeed there is little evidence in the world that things are going that way. So, as I watch my own Anglican tradition seemingly falter, the observations I’d like to relate are mostly without theological evaluation. Still, we should be aware of the signs.
Western Anglicanism has developed an extraordinarily thin ecclesial imaginary, both in its stated ideal and in its practice. Anglicanism’s self-conception is a stunted creedal fundamentalism: Nothing but the creed counts in Christian belief. This seems a firm ideal, but it entails the conclusion that everything else is optional. Not surprisingly, this thin conception too easily slides toward a plain creedal indifference.
Either way, Christian reality touches little of a person’s experienced world. With parents, children, male-female marriage, and the shape of human bodies all a matter of, at best, secondary religious interest for Western Anglicans, little else is left to snag us in our lives with God. A host of other activities rush in to swallow up the ever-unmet passions of human desire: sex, politics, money, cannabis, sports, TV, do-gooding. The lives of most Anglicans in the West are indistinguishable from their secular counterparts. The thin ideal dovetails with thin practice.
Some may object: Anglican liturgical life is traditionally quite thick! But rounds of prayer like the Daily Offices, Sunday catechesis and expository preaching, moral preparation for Communion, and private scriptural and meditative devotion have withered in parish practice and priestly example. Congregations are mostly interested in activities that, however ethically elevated they may be, do little to shape a life. That baptisms, confirmations, and marriages have plummeted in Western Anglicanism—in short, steady erosion of membership—is but the thin icing on a cake that has ceased to rise.
There are exceptions, and some quite notable. The split from the Episcopal Church in the United States that led to the establishment of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA)—and parallel splits elsewhere in the West—promised a retrieval of some of the doctrinal and devotional thickness of the Anglican bequest. That has happened in places. But busyness is not itself a sign of thickness, particularly in our contemporary culture of desperate pastimes. The adoption by many Anglican churches of commercial evangelicalism—with its thin musical practice, digitized media, routinized politics, and morally superficial polemics and preaching—has hobbled the attempted renewal. Rather than recovering the thick ecclesial imaginary, the Church drifts along in the standard flow of America’s current cultural polarizations.
The attenuation of the Anglican inheritance in supposedly “conservative” circles has been ongoing. The sober and rich commitments of more traditional Anglican evangelicalism—of the kind that made heroes like William Wilberforce and many of the now-forgotten early Church Missionary Society missionaries so perseverant and fruitful, true “confessors”—were rotted away by the infiltration of American pop evangelicalism into the British church in the 1980s.
Alas, it has now contaminated whole swaths of African Anglicanism as well. To be sure, the African church remains the ballast of thick Anglicanism within the Anglican communion. There are—to maintain my sociological inflection—good reasons for that. The Prayer Book evangelicalism (and later the more catholic-oriented spirit) of the first Anglican missionaries in Africa encountered peoples well attuned to the fullness of something like the Great Litany’s faith. (The prayer remains in many of the Prayer Books in use in Africa). Birth, parents, family, siblings, toil, harvest, marriage, war, famine, storm, brigands, enemies, authorities, elders, children, illness, generations, death: All these human realities were ready to be captured by the prayers and divine concern of Scripture and the Church, bound up in the incarnate Lord, Jesus Christ. One can speculate about the doctrinal head-knowledge of African Anglicans in the decades following their conversion to Christianity. But the phenomenon is plain to see: Their hearts were snared on a daily basis, touching the fullness of their existence. When the East African Revival took place in the 1920s and ’30s, it led to an indigenization of the penitential and cross-centered faith (very medieval from a European point of view) that lay at the heart of Anglican piety. The revival embraced communal realities, and so transformed local cultures that became integral Christian societies. Later, Pentecostal aspects of Christian piety, with their emotionally and expressive articulations, fused with Anglican worship and order. The combination proved to be one of the more vigorous thickenings of ecclesial life in the history of the church.
But this achievement has been diluted by the spread of commercial evangelicalism, with its ready-made, slickly executed, externally produced, hollowed-out substance and devotion. The drive to engage “young people” caught up in the allurements of the internet (a way of escaping the dreariness of economic deprivation with images of a fantasized and moneyed Christian culture) is even stronger in places like Africa than in America, though the motives are similar. However, the drag of the real world remains powerful. Spotty wireless service, dysfunctional and incomplete electrical grids, and unreliable internet connections happily foil the reaching grasp of America’s commercial Christian tentacles. Reality also asserts its venerable limitations on human striving. African Anglicans continue to hit against the walls of social and human inadequacies—think of miserable healthcare services and constant insecurity. Thus they are forced still to reckon with the whole of their lives, and not just discrete and optional portions of it, as God’s own field of working and revealing. For this reason, African Anglicanism, for all its missteps, retains a vitality that far outstrips that of its Anglo-American elders.
Catholicism is definitionally thick. Its seven sacraments—including marriage, penance, and the anointing of the sick or last rites—bind the believer to the whole range of human existence, from birth to death, much more than the Protestant limitation of sacramental life to the two “dominical” sacraments. For a long time, Anglicanism avoided the attenuating effect with a Prayer Book that followed the medieval sacramental practice in all but name. Moreover, Protestant scripturalism can have a thickening effect. Personal and extensive Bible reading—a tradition that after the Reformation turned Britain from among the least literate to the most literate of nations in Europe within a few decades—provides a daily discipline that encourages us to comprehend the breadth of human existence in Christian terms. But these thick practices, sacramental and scriptural, have been diminished, chipped away bit by bit as devotional practice becomes optional. (Do we really need it? There’s so much else to do, and we’re free to do it!) The thick ecclesial imaginary has melted into thinner and thinner puddles—global ecclesial warming.
I tend to think that only a catastrophe of vast proportions will re-thicken Anglican and other ecclesial imaginaries. Something that pushes us back against the cliff walls of life, something that drives us to wake up from our narcosis of plenty so that we can see, again, that all is in God’s hands, to dispose, withhold, and judge as he sees fit. That was the urgent sense behind the Great Litany, and—here I move from the sociological to the theological—it is a sense we ought rightly to apprehend anew. For it is true.
