The recent turmoil within the Anglican Communion over women bishops and homosexuality is showing that the old classifications of different traditions/theologies don’t work anymore. Referring to ‘traditionals’ and ‘liberals’ has always been a simplification, but even the threefold division of ‘Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals and Liberals’ doesn’t seem very helpful now, given both the splits within the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic traditions and the rapprochement of some Evangelicals with Anglo-Catholics in FOCA). There’s also the fact that whatever the official Catholic line, there are clearly quite a lot of Catholics who don’t have a problem with women priests or homosexual acts. I’m starting to think that a more useful classification for many purposes (and one that goes beyond Anglicans) is that between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ churches, denominations and groups (using churches to mean individual congregations, denominations the aggregation of churches, and groups to mean other fellowship/support networks).

I would say that hard churches/denominations/groups are made up of people who want to believe Christian beliefs and do Christian acts. Their leaders are teachers and correctors, or perhaps tour guide leaders. Their theology is of clear boundaries between church/world, us/them, good/evil. They are a community of saints, those fully committed to God. Their tendency is to reject society’s mores unless they can be shown to be good.

Soft churches/denominations/groups are made up of people who want to be Christian (though they may have very varied ideas of what this means). Their leaders are supporters of learning, advisers, or perhaps map-makers for individual explorers. Their theology is far more fuzzy on boundaries. They are what St Augustine would see as a mixed community, both the fully committed and the less committed to God. Their tendency is to accept society’s mores unless they can be shown to be bad.

Some denominations have both kinds of church/group co-existing in them. For example, while remaining an Anglican all my life, I have gone from a broad rural church (soft) via Evangelical Anglicans at St Aldate’s Oxford (hard) to a liberal suburban church (soft). A schematic look at the history of Christianity in England is also revealing. (I’m focusing on England here, not because the Scottish and Welsh denominations aren’t important, but because I don’t know them so well):

HC 1

From the fourth century, when Christianity became the official religion in the Western Roman Empire, Catholicism has always comprised a hard group (often, though not invariably of professed religious) of very committed believers, inside a much wider soft group which practices, or at least accepts ‘folk religion’ and the ‘mediocre’ Christians, whose well-being St Augustine was concerned for.

HC2

This ‘hard within soft’ structure is inevitable for any would-be universal/national denomination, and so, although Protestants started off trying to create purely hard denominations (comprised only of the godly), the Elizabethan Church of England ended up again as largely soft, with a hard centre.

HC3

From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the main development was denominations splitting off from the Church of England and each other (mainly to form hard denominations, but also some soft ones, such as Unitarians). For the first time, there were also some people (though not yet very many) who became non-church, no longer adhering, even nominally, to any religion.

HC4

Between about 1800 and 1960, as Cameron Brown has shown in The Death of Christian Britain, there isn’t a simple narrative of advance followed by decline in the English churches. Evangelical ideas of deep personal commitment had an important effect on people throughout the period, and there were times of revival, such as the 1950s, even if there was also a countervailing tendency for people to drift away from religion altogether. The overall trend was for the hard groups/churches within Protestant denominations to expand slowly, while the overall size of the denomination declined. Although I’m less well-up on the Roman Catholic church in England at the time (which also had a zealous hard core, surrounded by groups of those affiliate more through cultural traditions e.g. some working class Irish), I think the same move towards greater commitment by believers who remained, with slight decline in overall numbers was also seen there.

HC5

Then came the 1960s and the collapse of Christianity in England. I think it’s important to point out that this wasn’t due to ‘liberalism’ in the church. The soft church in the 1950s wasn’t generally liberal, because society as a whole wasn’t liberal; when soft groups/churches ‘conformed to the world’ it was by too great an emphasis on social respectability. Liberal Christianity (among Anglicans, Catholics and other denominations) was a reaction to the problems of Christianity, not the cause of them. The changes by soft churches weren’t successful at stemming the collapse, but nor was a hard-line approach: the Catholics under Paul VI didn’t do a lot better.

The hard church view from the 1980s onwards (Evangelical Anglicans, new Protestant movements, traditionalist Catholics) has been that soft churches/denominations (now mostly liberal, though some still broad church) are doomed, whereas hard churches/denominations are booming. This is true to a certain extent, but the hard church success has been limited. Despite all the prayers and excitement over nearly 30 years, there hasn’t been mass conversion or ‘revival’ in England, and it’s hard to see it suddenly happening (which may just show to the hard church that I don’t have enough faith). I want to write in my next post about future mission and hard/soft churches, but I think it’s important to see first of all where we’ve come from.