The Church of England in the Colonies

The Church of England was, by intention, the established church of the British colonies — the religious arm of British rule, the bearer of English civilisation in non-Christian lands, and the principal institutional form in which Anglican Christianity was propagated abroad. In practice, however, the colonial Church of England was never a single body: it was a network of bishoprics, dioceses, and parishes, often on bad terms with each other, frequently in conflict with the colonial state, and constantly in negotiation with the Nonconformist missionary societies and the Catholic orders. The history of the colonial Church of England is, in effect, the history of a series of attempts to make a single church of a very unpromising material.

The SPG and the Eighteenth-Century Foundations

The earliest institutional form of the colonial Church of England was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), founded in 1701 by the Bishop of London, Henry Compton, and chartered by William III. The SPG was, in its early decades, principally a North American mission: it established churches and schools in the plantation colonies of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and the West Indies, and it sent missionaries to the Mohawk and Mohican nations of the New York frontier. By 1783, the SPG had 100 missionaries in the thirteen American colonies; the American Revolution destroyed the SPG’s North American work, and the society turned, in the early nineteenth century, to the British colonies of the Caribbean, India, and the Pacific.

The SPG’s most consequential work was in the Caribbean. Codrington College, Barbados (1745), the oldest Anglican theological college in the Western Hemisphere, was an SPG foundation. The Codrington Trust, established in 1745 by the bequest of the Barbados planter Christopher Codrington, was the principal source of the SPG’s Caribbean income; the trust was, as the historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy has shown, derived from the labour of more than 300 enslaved people, and the SPG’s reluctance to abolish the trust until 1838 was, in many respects, a long-standing embarrassment.

The Colonial Bishoprics

The colonial bishopric was the principal institutional form of the colonial Church of England. The first colonial bishop was Charles Inglis, Bishop of Nova Scotia from 1787 to 1816; the second was Jacob Mountain, Bishop of Quebec from 1793 to 1825. The colonial bishopric of Calcutta was established in 1814, with the consecration of Thomas Middleton as Bishop of Calcutta; the colonial bishoprics of Bombay and Madras were established in 1837, and the colonial bishopric of Sydney was established in the same year. The colonial bishopric of Cape Town was established in 1847, with the consecration of Robert Gray; the colonial bishopric of Jamaica was established in 1824, with the consecration of Christopher Lipscomb.

The colonial bishops had, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a difficult constitutional position. They were, in the main, appointed by the Crown on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and they were, in theory, subject to the metropolitan jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. In practice, however, the colonial bishops were, very often, men of considerable independence — Inglis, Mountain, Selwyn, and Gray all established, by virtue of their remoteness, a substantial degree of autonomy. The colonial bishops were also, very often, men of considerable learning. Charles Inglis was an Irish-born Anglican; Jacob Mountain was an English-born Anglican; Thomas Middleton was a Cambridge man; Robert Gray was an Oxford man; George Augustus Selwyn was a Cambridge man and a member of the Apostles.

The Colonial Church and the Oxford Movement

The Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s — the Tractarian revival — had a profound effect on the colonial Church of England. The Tractarian emphasis on the Catholic heritage of the Church of England, the authority of the apostolic succession, and the centrality of the sacraments was taken up by a generation of colonial bishops and missionaries, who imported both the theology and the rituals — surpliced choirs, reserved sacrament, weekly communion — that caused repeated friction with the Low Church missionary societies.

The most consequential colonial bishop of the Tractarian generation was George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand from 1841 to 1868. Selwyn was a Cambridge man, a member of the Apostles, and a personal friend of Charles Simeon; he was also a Tractarian of the moderate kind, and he imported the cathedral chapters, the choral foundations, and the theological rigor that would characterise the Anglican church in the Pacific for the rest of the century. The parallel trajectory of Robert Gray, first Bishop of Cape Town, was more fraught: Gray attempted to impose Anglo-Catholic discipline on a colonial church that was already overwhelmingly Evangelical in sympathy, and the resulting litigation went to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in what is now known as the Bishop of Cape Town v. The Bishop of Natal (1865).

The Colonial Church and the Imperial State

The colonial Church of England had a complicated relationship with the imperial state. The Church of England was, in theory, the established church of the British colonies: the colonial governor attended church, the colonial legislature made provision for the maintenance of the church, and the bishops of the established dioceses were, very often, members of the legislative council. In practice, however, the colonial church was a small body. In 1851, the census of England and Wales returned 4.5 million Anglican church-attenders — a figure that was, in many ways, the limit of the established Church of England’s reach.

The colonial church was also, very often, at odds with the imperial state. The colonial bishops were, with notable exceptions, critics of the imperial government’s policies — particularly its policies on the slave trade, on the treatment of indigenous peoples, and on the question of religious liberty. The most consequential case was the abolition of the slave trade, in which the Church of England was, throughout the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, one of the principal institutional actors. The most consequential case in the late-Victorian period was the controversy over the treatment of the Māori, in which Selwyn and his successor as Bishop of New Zealand, William G. Cowie, were among the most prominent critics of the imperial government’s land policies.

The Colonial Church and the Missionary Societies

The colonial Church of England had, throughout the nineteenth century, an uneasy relationship with the missionary societies. The CMS, the principal Anglican missionary society, was, in its origins, a Low Church body, and it was, on the whole, suspicious of the Tractarianism of the colonial bishops. The SPG, on the other hand, was a more High Church body, and it was, on the whole, sympathetic to the Tractarianism of the colonial bishops. The two societies were, in many respects, complementary — the CMS in the field, the SPG in the parishes — but they were also, in many respects, rivals.

The most consequential tension between the colonial church and the missionary societies was the question of episcopal oversight. The CMS, as a voluntary society, was, in its origins, independent of the established church; the colonial bishops, on the other hand, claimed jurisdiction over the CMS’s work. The resulting tensions were most acute in West Africa, where the CMS’s mission was, throughout the nineteenth century, a substantial enterprise, and the colonial bishop (the Bishop of Sierra Leone, established in 1852) was, on the whole, a small figure. The tensions were settled, in part, by the 1851 Concordat, which gave the colonial bishops a substantial degree of oversight over the CMS’s work.

The Disestablishment of the Colonial Church

The colonial Church of England was disestablished, in piecemeal fashion, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 was, in many ways, the model: the Church of Ireland was disestablished by the Irish Church Act 1869, and the Church of Ireland became a voluntary body. The disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales was the work of the Welsh Church Act 1914 and the Welsh Church (Temporalities) Act 1919; the disestablishment of the Church of England in India was the work of the Indian Church Act 1927, the disestablishment of the Church of England in the West Indies was the work of the West Indies Church Act 1926.

The disestablishment of the colonial church was, in many respects, the consequence of the political development of the colonial states. The Canadian church was disestablished in 1854 (in Newfoundland), 1858 (in the Maritime provinces), and 1867 (in the Dominion of Canada). The Australian church was disestablished in the 1830s and 1840s, in a series of acts of the colonial legislatures. The South African church was disestablished by the South Africa Act 1909, and the constitution of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa was, from 1870, on a voluntary basis. The Indian church was disestablished by the Indian Church Act 1927, and the constitution of the Church of India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon was, from 1947, on a voluntary basis.

The Twentieth-Century Decolonisation of the Church

The twentieth-century decolonisation of the Church of England was, in many respects, a consequence of the political decolonisation of the British Empire. The Church of the Province of West Africa was established in 1951, the Church of the Province of East Africa in 1960, the Church of the Province of the West Indies in 1883 (as the “West Indian Church” and reconstituted in 1958), the Church of South India in 1947, the Church of North India in 1970, and the Church of Pakistan in 1970. The Anglican Church of Australia was established as a self-governing body in 1962, the Anglican Church of Canada in 1893, and the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia in 1974.

The twentieth-century decolonisation of the Anglican church was, in many ways, a quiet revolution. The church went from being a small body of European clerics and indigenous catechists to being, in many regions, a predominantly non-European body. The most consequential change was the African decolonisation: the Church of the Province of West Africa became, in 1979, the Church of the Province of West Africa (renamed the Church of West Africa, 2002), and the Church of the Province of East Africa became, in 1970, the Church of the Province of Kenya and the Church of the Province of Tanzania. The 1990 Lambeth Conference, the principal consultative body of the Anglican communion, included bishops from more than 30 African provinces — a remarkable change from the 1958 conference, which included perhaps a dozen.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the colonial Church of England has been transformed, since the 1960s, by the work of Stephen Neill, J. S. Mbiti, and the contributors to the Cambridge History of Christianity. The earlier celebratory accounts — the histories of the SPG, the CMS, and the colonial dioceses — have been supplemented, and in places supplanted, by the more critical accounts of the post-colonial generation. The unresolved question in the field is the same as for the missionary movement more generally: how to weigh the genuine humanitarianism of the colonial church’s work against the destructive consequences of the Christian encounter with non-Christian societies. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the colonial church a clean bill of health.

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