Denomination Differences

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.

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.

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.

While the Anglican Church still contains people who want it to be more Protestant and people who want it to be more Catholic, the Anglican Church is still a compromise between the two. Total depravity is believed, but the sacraments are still believe to be key to salvation. Services are still typically liturgical, but a wide variance in practice is permitted. Transubstantiation is denied, but not the real real presence of Christ. Purgatory is denied, but no doctrine of what does happen after death has been established. The Apocrypha is not believed to be canon, but it is still regularly taught from. The Catholic roots are still quite visible in the Anglican Church, but it is certainly divergent.