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When members of that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church – the 'Tory Party at prayer' – encountered the far-flung settler empire, they found it a strange and intimidating place. Anglicanism's conservative credentials seemed to have little place in developing colonies; its established status, secure in England, would crumble in Ireland and was destined never to be adopted in the 'White Dominions'. By 1850, however, a global ‘Anglican Communion’ was taking shape. This book explains why Anglican clergymen started to feel at home in the empire. Between 1790 and 1860 the Church of England put in place structures that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. Though Church expansion was far from being a regulated and coordinated affair, the book argues that churchmen did find ways to accommodate Anglicans of different ethnic backgrounds and party attachments in a single broad-based ‘national’ colonial Church. The book details the array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the men and money that facilitated Church expansion; it also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. The colonial Church that is presented in this book will be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The book shows how the colonial Church played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and state.
religious revival, or, as Knight put it, the ‘large outpouring of the spirit’, failed to materialise. 1 Knight’s response to cholera shows that institutional churches had much invested in special displays of public worship. For the devout, divine visitations and deliverances, and the accompanying days of fasting and thanksgiving, represented opportunities for evangelism and mission. It is true that some religious groups refused to participate because they did not recognise state authority in spiritual matters. For others
changed since the nineteenth century. The role of the institutional churches and public worship was diminished. The private and personal aspects of prayer was once more emphasised, though in a nod to the ancient tradition of ‘common prayer’, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation began each silent prayer session with a short invocation, agreed on by the Commonwealth’s religious leaders. 22 This book was completed as the world struggled to a contain a Covid-19 pandemic that had killed hundreds of thousands and sent billions of
colonial territories where clergy were few the authorities had to rely on a culture of lay-led ‘informal family worship’. It has already been noted that civil officials in early nineteenth-century Quebec delivered forms of prayer to heads of families if a district had no clergyman. Here, perhaps, is evidence that the patriarchal family ‘functioned in symbiosis with the institutional church’. 40 Clergy remained important figures, however, and it was they who delivered the sermons that made sense of the causes of fasts and
worship in Canada was, for instance, much influenced by the New England tradition of seasonal fasts and thanksgivings. 43 Another significant development, one that encouraged the further proliferation of special acts of worship, was that churches increasingly took responsibility for ‘national’ worship and appointed special days and prayers on their own authority. This, the book suggests, reveals much about the public status of institutional churches in the colonies. Significance While little has been written
formal charitable institutions, church congregations, political clubs, coffee and merchant houses nurtured the development among expatriate Scots of insider knowledge and strong webs of lobbying, social and financial credit. 50 The formal organisations were supplemented by the 1760s with a number of boarding houses run by Scots which specialised in taking Scottish lodgers. Charles Stuart, the son of the ninth earl of Blantyre, who journeyed to London to complete his training before joining the EIC, was among those benefiting from this informal web of social provision
that includes Jesuits, Franciscans, and various religious institutions (churches, chapels, orphanages, colleges, etc.), incites numerous acts of religious devotion among its public (including kissing, touching, shedding tears, singing hymns, performing Masses), is adapted to an Indian setting (native participation is encouraged, alongside the wearing of rose garlands and the carrying of palm branches
Chapter one, which examines the recruitment of the foot-soldiers of the institutional Church, draws attention to the sheer variety of clergy who peopled the Church in the British world in the pre-1860 period. The chapter highlights common dynamics in the development of the colonial clerical profession in the three chosen case studies. We will see that the aims of churchmen from across the Church party spectrum were frustrated by a persistent set of recruitment problems back in Britain—the major problem being that was no centralised or coordinated system for recruiting clergy. The first part of the chapter surveys the range of government organisations, voluntary groups and private individuals that played a part in recruitment; the second half provides a detailed examination of the clergy themselves. A number of questions about the recruitment, training, education and social and ethnic backgrounds of the clergy are considered. The recruitment of clergy shows that power was far from being centralised in the colonial Church: this was an institution that was made up a variety of networks and connections; it was also one that allowed a range of actors to have a hand in finding the men who would staff and run the colonial Church.
broaden our understanding of how the institutional Church was transformed from a privileged establishment into what was ostensibly a great voluntary association. 12 While there is a growing literature on how the Church and individual clergymen negotiated this dramatic shift, 13 some of the implications of the change of status have not been fully examined. Here we will see how the
era of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund. Anderson’s history was founded on the assumption that there was such a thing as a unified ‘colonial Church’. 1 The establishment of a coherent and unified institutional church was an enduring preoccupation of Anglican clergymen in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chapter Four showed that efforts to tie the disparate colonial Anglican establishments together