Daily Archives: February 6, 2010

More on Holy Women, Holy Men

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I’ve continued to think about my reaction to Holy Women, Holy Men. My earlier post is here. It was initiated on Friday when I went on Episcopal Cafe and found no mention of the Martyrs of Japan and instead a quotation from a work on Anne Hutchinson. I think I’ve figured it out. I’ve not read it carefully. It’s not available in print and I haven’t been interested enough to go back to the materials presented at General Convention. So, my only exposure to it is through Episcopal Cafe.

Speaking to the Soul provides no historical context for Williams and Hutchinson, no discussion of what influenced them. There’s nothing that would help a non-expert make any sense of their relation to Anglicanism, why they are worth commemorating, and how their commemoration might enrich our current life as a communion.

To me, that reeks of arrogance–assuming that anyone who is of interest religiously or spiritually is inherently worth recognizing by Anglicans and worth coopting.

Granted, I come to this as someone from an outsider background whose academic specialty was religious outsiders. Still, I think it more hubris than humility to pay lipservice to the diversity within Christianity without acknowledging it, and without acknowledging the deep differences that persist between the Anglican tradition and others, like the Baptists, of whom Williams was one of the leading lights.

Holy Women, Holy Men

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I suspect I posted something on this last summer in the run-up to General Convention. There is a major revision in the works for Lesser Feasts and Fasts, which is the liturgical book dealing with commemorations of the saints and other notable figures in the history of Christianity and the history of the Episcopal Church. There has been some debate about the inclusion of this or that figure (John Muir, who wasn’t a conventional Christian by any stretch of the imagination), people who left Anglicanism for the Roman Catholic Church, like John Henry Newman, and many more.

My sense when I first looked through Holy Women, Holy Men was that it was something of a politically-correct attempt to acknowledge everyone who has made an important, or not so important, contribution to contemporary religion and culture. There are two aspects of it that deeply bother me. First, the expansion of commemorations. One of the things the Protestant Reformation did was simplify the religious calendar, removing the commemorations of many saints from the annual ritual year. Now we are back where we were in the Middle Ages. Perhaps that’s not so bad, but on the other hand a proliferation of commemorations might lead to the lessening importance of the whole enterprise.

Secondly, I am deeply concerned about what I suppose I should call religious imperialism. One of my most memorable moments from the time I spent teaching History of Christianity in an Episcopal Seminary was when a student commented after our discussion of Erasmus, “He was an Anglican.”

Well, no.  He wasn’t an Anglican, he remained a Catholic and died one. As I was reading on Episcopal Cafe the entry on Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson yesterday, I sensed the same thing. To adopt or assimilate members of other denominations or Christian traditions, or even from other religious traditions, seems to me rather arrogant. Williams challenged not only the Puritan orthodoxy of colonial New England, he would have been equally vocal against the Church of England. To learn from and respect those who would have had deep disagreements with Anglicanism is one thing, to place them in our ritual calendar is quite another.

I presume the goal is to honor their contribution and their faith; but how can we do that authentically by eliding the deep differences between themselves and us?