A Detour Into Archbishops Of Canterbury

Yesterday I resumed my occasional ruminations on bad ideas that originated in the UK, in this case, Fabian socialism. This morning I ran into a piece on another bad idea from the UK that's had far less traction, the Archbishop of Canterbury: The posh plot to stick Mullally in Canterbury. As best I can tell, it breaks down the controversy in class terms, which is an almost exclusively intra-UK issue, when the occupant of the Canterbury see is at least politely said still to be the leader of world Anglicanism.

But here's the issue as outlined in the piece:

The BBC presented Sarah Mullally as a ground-breaker in its coverage of her installation as Archbishop of Canterbury. But the real ground-breaker in the Church of England was George Carey, the archbishop that Margaret Thatcher chose in 1990.

This is because Carey was non-U.

Carey was the first Archbishop of Canterbury since the Reformation not to have been educated at Oxbridge. Born as the son of a porter in London’s East End in 1935, he left school at 15 to work as an office boy at the London Electricity Board. He went to a secondary-modern school having failed his 11-plus.

. . . He did National Service in the RAF as a radio operator with a deployment in Iraq. After the RAF, he started pursuing a vocation to be ordained in the Church of England. Within 15 months he passed three A-levels and six O-levels, and won a place at King’s College, London, to study Theology. He came up against snobbery in the established Church of the 1950s, being told by a snooty cleric that he would never make it to ordination. But he was ordained in 1962, serving as a parish minister and theological educator. He became Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1987.

The idea of Carey as a potential regenerative force in both the Church of England and world Anglicanism was something I experienced as a then-Episcopalian. Our parish at the time brought in a morbidly obese lesbian rector as part of this grand transformation, as a result of which my wife and I stopped going to church for several years. One point the search committee found in her favor was that she was a personal friend of George Carey. Carey was in favor of ordaining women but a moderate on the issue of same-sex.

But even though the Church of England ordained women during his tenure, it was overall less a breakthrough than a distraction. The controversy over ordaining women on one hand drove about 700 Anglican priests out of the Church of England and into the Catholic Church, and currently, a majority of Church of England priests in formation are women. But after his retirement, a much bigger scandal arose over successive investigations of his coverup of abuse by priests and bishops:

During Carey's term as Archbishop of Canterbury, there were many complaints of serial sex abuse made against Peter Ball, the Bishop of Lewes and later of Gloucester until his resignation in 1993 after admitting to an act of gross indecency. Archbishop Carey wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Chief Constable of Gloucester police, supporting Ball and saying that he was suffering "excruciating pain and spiritual torment". In October 2015 Ball was sentenced to 32 months imprisonment for misconduct in public office and indecent assault; he admitted the abuse of 18 young men aged 17–25.

. . . [Carey's priestly faculties were revoked on 17 June 2020 after new evidence came to light about failures to consider child protection in regard to leading schools' children's activity and Bible camps run by John Smyth in the 1970s. [They were] then reinstated in January 2021.

On 4 December 2024 Carey submitted his resignation as a priest from the Church of England, writing "I wish to surrender my Permission to Officiate".

The piece at the first link, though, seems to want to make Carey into some sort of hero for promoting the ordination of women -- but his tenure did nothing to stop the trend of Anglican decline in the UK, the US, and Canada:

In 1970, the combined membership of [The Episcopal Church] and the Anglican Church of Canada came to 4,373,000. In 2015, the combined membership of TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada came to 2,537,000 and it has dropped considerably since then. In half a century North American Anglicanism has halved in size.

North American Anglicanism has been declining by some metrics for a long time, but much of the decline is recent. As late as the 1990s, membership in the American South grew and it was holding steady in the West. The Anglican Church of Canada’s decline only really picked up from the turn of the century. But it picked up with a vengeance. The Anglican Church of Canada’s membership nearly halved between 2001 and 2017.

Historical perspective matters, even when looking at recent history. The last Lambeth Conference at which the bulk of Anglicanism was represented was in 1998. TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada are profoundly different (and much smaller) now than they were then.

For the rest of the West the picture is mixed. The numbers for England, Scotland, and Wales are as bad or nearly as bad as for North America.

The odd thing is that the piece blames Mullaly's installation on a "posh plot" -- except that Carey's own project to ordain women, which came to fruition in 1992, made Mullaly's installation possible. There simply wouldn't have been a woman Archbishop without the non-U Carey. Where's the posh?

[I]n 1990 the Prime Minister made the appointment from two candidates submitted by the Crown Nominations Commission. The unsuccessful candidate was not disclosed but it is reasonable to believe that Mrs Thatcher chose Carey, an evangelical from a working-class background, in preference to the then Archbishop of York, John Habgood, an Oxbridge-educated theological liberal from an upper-middle-class background.

. . . Since Carey stepped down as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, the Church of England has been led by an Oxbridge academic in Rowan Williams, an Old Etonian oil executive in Justin Welby and now a female NHS executive in Sarah Mullally. Could any sensible person believe that an institution that has been so captured by middle-class neo-Marxists will ever again be led by a man from a working-class background?

George Carey was the true ground-breaker and, under God, Mrs Thatcher made it happen.

It seems to me that Whig vs Tory or U vs non-U have nothing to do with whether any Archbishop of Canterbury has been effective in recent decades -- that's a minor distraction intramural to the UK. If anything, though, it seems to me that Carey was complicit in implementing the same British bourgeois temporizing agenda as all his predecessors and successors. I wouldn't call them "middle-class neo-Marxists", though -- I think it would be more precise to call them respectable temporizers.

But hasn't this been baked into Anglicanism from the start? When I went through Episcopalian confirmation class about 1980, the big point that the priests made was about how Anglicans were able to resolve their differences through compromise. That's where it's always gotten them.