Historically-rooted works on Anglican political theology, particularly political theology of American Anglicans, remain in relatively short supply. Michael Bird and N.T. Wright have published their Jesus Among the Powers but its relatively contemporaneous and oriented generally towards debates among English-speaking Evangelicals of the Twenty-First Century. There is, however, an identifiable tradition of political theology among American Anglicans. Episcopal bishops in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century routinely preached political sermons and wrote on political theology. Anglicans offered a necessary voice in the development of Protestant political theology, but often used a different taxonomy than Evangelical Protestants in the United States.

Anglicans rejected both secularism and theocracy in the United States. Christ’s Lordship overt the powers was unambiguously affirmed. The bishop of Southern Virginia, Alfred Magill Randolph, could state clearly in 1902 “that historic faith and the experience of the Christian world testify to Christ as the seat of authority in Christianity” while simultaneously conceding that the question of the church’s relationship to Christ’s lordship was another matter. “It remains to ask,” wrote Randolph, “what answer has the Church given to the question asked of the Pharisees, ‘What think ye of Christ?’” For Randolph, Christ’s rule over the powers was at once separate and yet hierarchical.

Randolph believed the relationship of the church to temporal power lay in how the church was defined. The Church, said the bishop, “is the organized brotherhood of Christians, whose function it is through ministers, and sacraments, through teaching and worship to bear the historic message to the world; to gather and to feed the flock of Christ.” Outside the church’s direction “and the limits prescribed by them, history is continually weighing individual opinions and variations of thought and separating the transient from the permanent.” The Church’s function was not necessarily to weigh individual opinions or separate the transient from the permanent. Randolph stated that the church’s function “individually and collectively is to defend and to hold the faith.” Individual opinions were to be left “to the sifting processes of the consentient judgments of Christian society.” Politics was not insignificant, but it was not eternal. “Our little systems have their day, and history consigns some to oblivion, and from others rescues grains of truth and plants them in the soil to grow for the future.” Temporal politics and churchly politics mirrored each other, even as they were separate. “Controversies in theology find their parallels in the secular life of this world. Political and social theories in free society exhibit greater variety than religious opinions, and they also illustrate the law of the sifting process of the general intelligence of mankind, the consensus of public sentiment.”

Political controversies, however, were intrinsically transient and therefore a subordinate concern for the church. “The party politician presents his platform to the people as the issue involving the nation’s destiny. His party is defeated at the polls; but the government moves on and liberty still lives. The reputation and the influence of individuals illustrate this same principle.” Lists of “great names in a community, or a nation, in one generation is subject to revision in the next, and people live to see the idols of their youth shattered, and reputations discredited. Noted abolitionist Theodore Parker, noted Randolph, “was once an idol in New England as a preacher, and among the imperfectly educated classes, as a philosopher,” but even his impact was limited by the relatively shortness of human life and the inevitable changes in human society. “The confidence of one who was an orator, rather than a thinker, marks all that he says, and accounts at once for the extent of his influence in his lifetime, and its cessation when his personality was removed.”

The controversies of the Christian Church, for early Twentieth Century Episcopalians, ultimately assumed “a position of importance and of dignity in a far higher sphere than these ephemeral controversies of individuals, of coteries, or of parties in the irresponsible world of debatable opinions.” Politics was not unimportant, but the maintenance of the Christian religion for the sake of souls was the church’s primary mission, not the maintenance of Christianity in the name of politics. Randolph, it should be noted, was consistent with his generation in their comfort with Christian-infused civil religion. Nevertheless, the church’s role was always spiritual. Other institutions could carry Christian commitments in the civic and political realms.[1]

[1] Alfred Magill Randolph, Reason, Faith and Authority in Christianity, Being the Paddock Lectures for 1901-02 (New York: Thomas Whitaker, 1902), 202.