Denomination Differences

Anglicanism is a product of history. To truly understand it, it is important to understand its development, and to view it within the context of its historical competition with the Catholic Church.

Historically, England has been a Catholic nation. When Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, England adopted it readily. By the 400s, England was faithfully following Roman Catholic Church. It would then continue to do so for over 1,000 years.

1534: King Henry VIII

However, on November 3, 1534 King Henry VIII passed the First Act of Supremacy, officially declaring himself head of the Church of England instead of the Pope. With this act, he officially created a separate Anglican Church. The next few monarchs would waver back and forth between Catholicism and Anglicanism, but eventually England largely submitted to its new religion (not least because of the harsh punishments for following a different religion than the monarch until the Toleration Act was passed in 1689).

The original cause of this break was because Henry VIII was childless and believed his wife to be infertile. As divorce is strictly prohibited among Catholics (and his wife's nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor, was currently occupying Rome), King Henry felt unable to secure an heir while his nation followed the Pope. Once King Henry was head of the church, he had his marriage annulled, but otherwise little changed immediately.

King Henry did not have any religious disagreements with the Catholic Church. In fact, just 13 years earlier, King Henry denounced Martin Luther as a heretic for his statements against the Pope. King Henry just wanted a son, so initially Anglicanism was the same as Catholicism except for being a bit more permissive with royal annulments.

However, King Henry soon began dissolving the English monasteries and selling the church lands to pay for the numerous wars he was involved in. Untethered from the Pope and with a pervasive Protestant influence in England, the Anglican church would diverge greatly from Rome over time.

1547: King Edward VI

After Henry VIII died in 1547, his son Edward VI became king, and he did have significant disagreements with the Catholic Church, having largely Reformed theology. Icons began being destroyed as idolatry, relics and holy water were denounced as superstitions, denying the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and liturgy underwent major changes. The largest liturgical change was that English supplanted Latin as the language of the church. Perhaps the biggest theological change was that the Anglican Church began to teach justification by faith alone, without works.

Eventually Queen Mary I would take the throne and briefly restore Catholicism and persecute Protestants instead, but her childless death would mean that her Protestant sister Elizabeth I would become queen.

Queen Elizabeth eventually settled on a confessional statement called the Thirty-Nine Articles. Although this did not go as far as her brother Edward VI's reforms, the Elizabethan Settlement would permanently define the Anglican church as a "middle way" between Catholicism and Protestantism.

1776: 🇬🇧 💔 🇺🇸

As North America was colonized by the United Kingdom, Anglicanism spread to America with the British. However, an issue arose with these parishioners in 1776 when the Thirteen Colonies declared independence from Britain. Clergy of the Church of England were still required to swear allegiance to King George III, but their country was in open rebellion against such king. Many Anglican clergy therefore fled to Canada or England, while the remaining clergy was cut off from London.

To sustain the church, Samuel Seabury, unable to convince the Archbishop of Canterbury to name him a bishop, instead got the Scottish bishops to consecrate him in Aberdeen in 1784. The General Convention then names this new American church the "Protestant Episcopal Church". Seabury remained uncooperative with the Archbishop Cornwallis. The Archbishop, worried that the Americans would follow the Scottish instead of the English church, conceded and named two further American Episcopal bishops.

As a result of this history, the Episcopal church mirrors many principles of the American government instead of the more medieval system used in the rest of the Anglican church. While retaining the British hierarchical system, it tied it to a representative democratic governance and made the General Convention the ultimate authority instead of an archbishop or a king. The Episcopal church also places much more importance on the role of the laity, which both follows Protestant trends and American philosophy, but also was a necessity during the Revolution when clergy was scarce.

Nonetheless, the Episcopal Church remained in full fellowship with the Church of England and part of the Anglican Communion. This model would continue to be followed in many other countries, as Canada, Nigeria, Uganda, Australia, and many other countries and regions have since become autocephalous and are now headed by their own primates. The Anglican church is thus many different independent churches who all submit themselves to the see of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet there remain some Anglican churches such as the Anglican Church in North America who have separated from Anglican churches which have changed their doctrine in recent years and have not yet received recognition from all other members of the Anglican Communion.