At the end of Tony Hunt's recent essay, “On Anglican Identity: A Response to Ben Crosby,” Hunt draws attention to the irreducibly complex set of negotiations and arguments that are constitutive of any notion of a tradition’s identity. As Hunt so eloquently puts it, “It is a communal process wherein no one gets ‘the last word.’ We are always working with what has been said.” In the spirit of continuing to work with “what has been said” I argue that one of the key places to locate the discussion of Anglican Identities is precisely where Ben Crosby begins to gesture, writing “Anglicanism is less closely identified with British colonial ventures.” Willie Jennings, in his book The Christian Imagination points out that many of the resources that we turn to in discussions of Anglican Identity are, in fact, precisely the tools that were used in an original act of supersessionism that placed England, as producer of authoritative liturgical and sacred texts (The Book of Common Prayer & KJV), in the spot of Israel as the covenant people of God. (1) 

In my parish church, there is a three-panelled stained-glass window depicting the Epiphany. Mary is holding baby Jesus in the centre panel, and Joseph and the three wise men are balanced two-a-side in the right and left panels. In typical iconographic style, the three wise men are depicted as representative of the various races of the “known” world, an African, a European, and an Asian. If you follow the sight lines of these three men, it is difficult to tell whether they are gazing at Mary or at the Christ Child, which raises an interesting theological point about the role of the church in the work of witnessing to Jesus. But precisely in this ambiguity another, more nefarious, ambiguity arises. Both Mary and Jesus are depicted as white; Jesus is even given shockingly blonde hair. While the intended message of the window is clearly that in the Epiphany, Christ, through the church, is made visible to all nations, one is also left with the distinct impression that all the nations can only see Jesus by first beholding the Whiteness of Anglican Christendom.  

The scandal of the witness of any church is that it is necessarily particular and perspectival. It is also always a gentile witness, that is, a witness of a people that have been grafted into the people of God without replacing Israel as God’s covenant people. So an Anglo-Saxon Jesus is, in some ways, a fitting icon of incarnation, for an Anglo-Saxon church, just as the Metis Jesus on the crucifix in the Roman Catholic cathedral on the other side of my city is a fitting icon of incarnation in that community. The problem is not that our witness is necessarily bound up in our particularly located identity, the problem is when that identity is universalized as being a necessary step in encountering the incarnate Christ. 

Anglicanism, as a global church, is for better or worse, a product of the British Empire. Oxbridge trained clergy took the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer with them around the world, teaching English and bringing “civilization” and religion to every part of the empire. My own great-great-great-grandfather played his role in this work. Starting out as a Free Church minister in Scotland, at some point, the Rev. George Turnbull came south Yorkshire and joined the Church of England in the late nineteenth century. From there he was sent as a missionary to Argentina, where, according to family lore, he travelled to various Indigenous communities, stealing horses from the communities he left behind and offering them as gifts to the next community as a sign of good will. Allegedly he had to skip town quite quickly a time or two after people from the last community showed up in search of their property. Eventually his son James Norman Robert Turnbull, moved to Western Canada and homesteaded the farm I grew up on, after which, the Reverend came north and served from 1900-01 as the rector of St. Matthew’s in Binscarth, MB, before his retirement.  

Recently, I inherited his Bible, and, leafing through it, I caught glimpses of the Anglican faith that sustained the first three generations of the Turnbull family in the Canadian prairies. But, in 1925, my great-grandfather, Norman Leslie Turnbull, in the ecumenical spirit of the times, married a Methodist, Grace Atkinson, and instead of fighting over which “religion” to belong to, they joined the brand new United Church of Canada—a pan-protestant denomination that joined Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists together, and was, for a time, in close talks with the Anglican Church of Canada to join them as well. 

The generations from then to now followed a typically Anglo-Canadian religious trajectory, slowly secularizing, largely leaving the church, and concluding with my parents’ return to a local evangelical church “for the kids.” As my dad told me, “I figured I was already going to hell, but you kids probably still had a chance.” So, while I was baptized United, I was raised in the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Eventually I went on to study theology and in the process, uncovered the religious history of my dad’s side of the family that I have just recounted. While I was in seminary, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission came to a close, and I discovered that just as my testimony comes with a family history, it also comes with a history that had been purposely ignored or passed over in silence.  

Just a few miles from my family’s farm was the Birtle Residential School—not an Anglican one, but a church-run one, nonetheless. I also discovered that, just west of my town, here had been a Metis settlement, Ste. Madeleine’s, that had been burned to the ground by the settler government to create more pastureland. The political and religious forces that gave me a good life and the faith that I now hold dear are also implicated in these crimes.  

The story I’ve told has not been directly the story of Anglican identity. What it has been is the story of an Anglo-settler family that emigrated and prospered through the matrixes of power that the Church of England and the British Empire established. Global Anglicanism today is filled with stories like mine. My great-great-great grandfather undoubtedly blessed many people with his ministry of Word and Sacrament, yet he also likely did not appreciate the full human integrity of those people from whom he stole to further that same ministry. My great-grandfather was a cabinet minister in the provincial government during the time that Ste. Madeleine’s was destroyed, yet there is no record that he did anything to stop it. The faith that I have inherited, the faith of my forefathers, is implicated in Anglo-settler logics that have produced many of the best parts of the world we now live in, but is also responsible for the many dark crimes along the way. 

I cannot escape this history, nor should I want to. As Tuck and Yang remind us in their essay “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” (2) we should not seek to “decolonize” merely as a move to settler innocence. There are too many stolen bodies and lands to let “decolonization” become a slogan under which we might re-brand Anglicanism as a repristinated tradition. As I quoted Tony Hunt in the opening of this essay, Anglican identity is a tradition that is always “at issue” – there are disagreements about what constitutes it and there have been great successes and failures in this argument along the way. 

As we contemplate Anglican identity in its global reach, one thing we have to do is embrace the messy bits of that identity. Like in the stained-glass window of my parish church, there is an ambiguity to Anglican identity. The Christianity of the Island of the Angels, as Gregory the Great apocryphally called its inhabitants in a pun on Angle and angel that works in both Latin and English, has given particular gifts to Christianity as a whole, and has indeed born an Epiphany-like witness to the nations. But often that witness has forgotten that it is, in fact, particular and perspectival, we bear witness as those untimely born, grafted into a covenant that precedes and defines us. Insofar as Anglicanism has assumed Israel’s position as “the people of God,” it has played a role in the construction of the racial hierarchies that center Whiteness in Christian witness and continue to cause pain and oppression around the world. Anglican identity today must own this history. Perhaps, Anglican identity today can be disciplined by The Book of Common Prayer’s prayer of consecration, not letting our merits pardon our offences. It is Christ who, though we are unworthy, pardons our offences, and so the ambiguous legacy of Anglicanism need not be unduly shamed or celebrated, for our witness is not to the glory of this Church. Rather, it is epiphanic, with our Anglican identity as the name of the diverse set of agreements, disagreements, and histories that bear witness, in stained and imperfect ways, to the Christ who has taken up flesh in our midst for the sake of the world. 

1. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

2. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (September 8, 2012).