Where Defeat Is a Mandate

Some headlines last month in the august Times of London were rather less than accurate. “Anglicans Against Unity: Methodists in Favour,” it said, when the merger scheme failed to go through (see News, August 1, page 38). For those too busy to read the smaller print, this description of what had happened perpetuated a durable fallacy—and showed that the publication which claims to be read by Britain’s top people badly needed a religion editor.

Dr. John Moorman, Bishop of Ripon, and the most prominent Anglican dissentient to the union scheme, had carefully emphasized that the minority’s vote was not being cast against unity, but rather against this specific way of achieving it. Taken merely as journalism, it is a strange interpretation that converts a 69 per cent majority vote into an implied total rejection. The scheme’s failure came because a 75 per cent majority had previously been agreed by both churches. While the Methodists had made it with 2.4 per cent to spare, the Anglican figure fell short.

Nevertheless, if ever a scheme seemed to have everything going for it, this was it. In the Church of England especially. There it had the support of both the Archbishops of Canterbury and York (a canny couple not normally given to backing losers), the three senior bishops of London, Winchester, and Durham, and thirty-three of the thirty-eight other diocesan bishops.

Concentrating on the Anglican side, we might ask where things broke down to the extent that 31 per cent of convocation members voted against. The deciding factor was a rare alliance between Anglicans of the very lowest and the very highest sort who, looking critically at the proposed service of reconciliation, refused to accept it for diametrically opposed reasons. The first group questioned why it was necessary to reordain their Methodist colleagues, whom they already considered to be true ministers of Word and Sacrament. The second group were not convinced that the service constituted ordination in any proper sense (though the moderately high Church Times was prepared to accept it as such). All future merger schemes would do well to rate low the virtue of deliberate ambiguity.

The Archbishop of Canterbury manifestly did his best, with appeals many and varied. There was the now-or-nothing approach: “If we can’t unite with the Methodists, whom can we unite with?” There was the don’t-shame-us-before-our-friends line: “It won’t be surprising if other churches in the Anglican Communion do not take us very seriously if, having exhorted them to seek unity on these lines, we are unwilling or unable to do it ourselves.” He tried sweet reasonableness: “A pause will prolong the miseries of church politics.” There was an uncharacteristic MRA-type angle: “I think a voice is saying, ‘Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward.’ ” (“I didn’t realize they were a party to the transaction,” murmured one commentator disingenuously.)

Despite that last quotation and the customary selective approach to John 17, advocates of unity were not overweighted with biblical or theological allusions. What would they tell their grandchildren in a few years’ time?, their vice-president designate demanded of the Methodist Conference. What could they say to a divided world now?, asked another. (This rightly earned the reply: “We say what we have always said, Don’t look at us, look at Christ. He, and not the reorganization of the Church, is the hope of the world.”) Someone rather unwisely expressed astonishment that “any devout person” could vote against the scheme—a remark which might have been worth a few votes to the other side.

Despite the vote, some clergy in both churches will proceed with intercommunion and share church services on the local level. Concentration of negotiations within the upper echelons on both sides has certainly contributed to the opposition.

Even if the merger vote had been favorable, parliamentary approval would have been necessary for organic unity. This in itself would have raised legal difficulties because of the Church of England’s established status.

But Professor Margaret Deanesley of the League of Anglican Loyalists has declared that such snags will be aggravated. “If there had been a sufficient majority,” she says about the present scheme with the Methodists, “lawyers would have been engaged and there would have been a fight in parliament.” For those whose memories go back four decades, this is more than the bleating of a cranky clique. The House of Commons on two occasions (in 1927–28) flung out a Prayer Book revision project which had been submitted to them for approval after it had been passed by the Church Assembly. There is an element of the farcical in the British setup which permits Roman Catholic, Church of Scotland, Jewish, nonconformist, and non-believing legislators to pronounce judgment on matters affecting the Church of England.

Many Anglicans down the centuries have warmly endorsed this arrangement, and the Victorian Dean Stanley explicitly asserted that “the religious expression of the community should be controlled and guided by the State.” The much less orthodox Sydney Smith was, indeed, regarded as living up to his eccentric reputation when he declared: “If experience has taught us anything, it is the absurdity of controlling men’s notions of eternity by act of parliament.”

Despite his earlier this-or-nothing plea, the Archbishop of Canterbury has bounced right back, holding out hope that a repeat vote may be taken within a very short time. “For him, even a defeat is a mandate,” said one observer, not without admiration. It is evident that the majority, rightly or wrongly, does not accept the first part of the ancient saying prefixed to the Anglican-Methodist report when it was initially published in 1963: “It is not given to thee to finish the task but neither art thou free to desist therefrom.”

One is left with the impression that last month’s attempt to merge the two denominations failed because it sidestepped vital issues, did so deliberately, and failed to spell things out when conscientious pleas were made that words should be used and understood according to their plain meaning. One Anglican layman, looking at the proposed scheme of union with the Methodists, said that he didn’t know much about theology, but as a businessman he could spot a phony prospectus when he saw one.

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