I was speaking the other day to a citizen of that selfsame country about why Americans are being drawn particularly to Anglicanism. By some chance after that conversation, Matthew Barrett dropped his essay on why he left the SBC and decided to join Anglicanism. As a direct response to Barrett, you can do worse that read Denny Burk here. So I thought I would speak into this wider phenomenon as I judge it.

One of the driving forces here is America’s perpetual desire for rootedness. America is a relatively young country with very little history. Added to that, America is regularly noted as a nation of a immigrants. It would be wrong to say this means there is no shared American culture or identity, but it would be equally wrong to think these factors do not often lead to a desire for more rooted and historical forms. Faced with a 500 year old church tradition or one whose history only goes back to 1845 (very much within the period of ‘modern history’), the pull of apparent historic rootedness is strong for those who have few other historic cultural moorings.

Another driving force is antiestablishmentarianism. In the UK, Anglicanism is the establishment. The New Model Army under Cromwell was replete with nonconformists who were pushing against the Anglican ascendancy. It is similarly true that the Test Acts in the UK – which barred nonconformists from holding public office, belonging to the historic professions or attending university – was only finally repealed at the end of the 19th Century. There is even a longstanding class bias, that continues today, between Anglicanism and nonconformity. Even the majority middle class UK nonconformist churches today are not of quite the same breed as Anglicanism. Nonconformist minsters might well be largely drawn from UK universities these days, but a significant number of Anglican clergy have been through the likes of Eton, Harrow, Westminster and the like with all the class associations still largely present. The establishment in the UK is, and always has been, Anglican and antiestablishment feeling is, therefore, non-Anglican.

This, of course, is not so in the USA. Leaving aside issues of class – which still exist in America (despite the protestations of some) but takes different forms – their largest grouping is the SBC. The majority of believers in America either belong to the SBC or have some links to it. The establishment and the majority culture in America is Baptist. That will mean, if you start to have antiestablishment sentiments in the USA, it is largely going to present as anti-Baptist. For those without the same class and historic associations, Anglicanism may appear to some as a more independent-thinkers move. This is particularly at play for those who have come to dislike majority cultural tendencies and moves within the church.

Some of this is writ large amongst those who sign on to Christian Nationalism. If you are convinced that some sort of Christianising force, with a preferential treatment given to the church, under some kind of ‘Christian prince’ is the way forward for your nation, an established church will seem remarkably attractive. This will be all the more compelling in a country without the historic ties and associations with such establishment churches. Those with less world-history behind them and less cultural understanding of the development of these things across Europe will easily be swayed by the vision of a national church that has preference. The obvious counter to such optimism is simply a look at the spiritual state of Europe in every country where this has ever existed. It is not an untested model and its success rate has been uniformly poor.

Those who grasp reality and recognise Christian Nationalism is a doomed project may still find the desire for historic, rooted, confessional Christianity to be something of a draw. There is, without question, a move among some to elevate tradition and history above the scripture. Quite why such people cannot recognise that the first Baptist Church was planted within 80 years of the Church of England’s break with Rome, and thus the claim of one being ‘historic’ but the other being ‘new’, is not especially compelling. Further, it is unclear why those who do so elevate tradition over scripture (and make no bones about that being what is often going on) do not simply jump headlong into the far more historic and rooted forms of Christianity like Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. If it’s historic rootedness above all that you want, these are the places to land.

Of course, the answer that inevitably comes back is that it isn’t historic rootedness at all costs. Which brings us back to the question: why not remain Baptist then? After all, Baptists value tradition and rootedness as much as the next denomination. They just consider tradition to be subservient to scripture. Such that one think the Catholic Church, with their longer history, have departed from biblical orthodoxy and thus ought not to be joined, that is a remarkably nonconformist case one is then making. It is Independents and Baptists who have considered the scriptures to triumph above all whilst Anglicanism in particular has always defended itself with reference almost exclusively to its tradition, simply assuming it to be right. Nathan Akin is apt to note in a thread on X:

In a four views book on church governance, Peter Toon representing the Anglican position states, “the Anglican form for church government is an attempt to conform in general terms to the pattern in place in the early church in the third, fourth and fifth centuries.”

In fact, in Toon’s 20-page chapter on the topic of church governance, only 2 pages even have biblical references. Toon later writes, “It is my judgment that nothing would be achieved by offering alternative readings of the New Testament evidence (verses and the like) for episcopal polity.” To which my dad (Danny Akin) responded in the margins, “True, it’s not there.”

In my discussion with my American friend (references at the top of this post), I noted that the Church of England was birthed in compromise. Cranmer, who was a fundamentally good man, was quite happy to compromise his views on divorce for the entirely pragmatic reason that he spied a good opportunity to setup a reformed church in England. The Church of England has largely continued in that tradition ever since, consistently arguing pragmatism over compromise. But, as Akin is also wont to note, that makes it ‘hard to take seriously that this is the superior tradition and polity’.

Claims such as Barrett’s that Baptists are anti-credal and seek to stand apart from historic Christianity are quickly and easily dismissed. Both Andrew T Walker and Denny Burk (see the link to Burk’s article above) highlight that the SBC affirmed the Nicene Creed in a resolution earlier this year. Similarly, the fairly historically rooted Grace Baptists have their 1644 and 1689 Confessions of Faith, the latter of which is linked reasonably tightly to the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Savoy Declaration. Indeed, these confessions were written to explicitly show that Independents and Baptists were not out of step with other Reformed groups. They are historic documents showing that they remain within the bounds of reformed teaching and stand in line with the historic church.

It is often trotted out that connexional churches can do more to uphold orthodoxy and deal with miscreants than independency. It is a total fallacy. Let’s be clear: no form of church order has a monopoly on abuse; all approaches to polity can be corrupted by sin; each form of governance has its respective strengths and weaknesses. The strength of Independency is that when abuse or doctrinal error occurs it tends to be less likely to spread. Like those fireproof apartments in a block of flats, any independent church may end up in error or harbouring sin, but there is something of a firewall between churches that is much stronger than that in connexional churches. By contrast, where leaders are in sin and congregations are not cognisant or confident to remove them, connexional churches have an external mechanism whereby they can be removed that can be difficult in Independency.

As Denny Burk rightly notes, ‘these questions have to be settled at the level of exegesis and theology, not at the level of tendentious claims about the incorruptibility of episcopacy. The Bible is our authority, not pragmatic observations about what polity seems to work best.’ But if you will set up pragmatism as the test, it bears saying – even on the most casual reading – the defence of orthodoxy and the addressing of abuse has hardly been a resounding success in the connexional churches. Independents and Baptists do not fare poorly by comparison, even on the terms set by Barrett. As somebody who has actively supported the planting of an Independent Church, led by a former Church of England minister, who could only look outside the Church of England for meaningful fellowship on matters of orthodoxy and for moral courage to stand up to what can only be described as both theological and moral drift in its upper echelons, it is incredible to me to see somebody citing this as their specific grounds for jumping in.

The strongest grounds Barrett has for his departure from the SBC is that he has become convinced of Anglican polity and determined paedobaptism is, in fact, what Jesus instituted. Of that as a basic position i.e. I am now convinced paedobaptism and Anglican polity is biblically correct, there is little to say. If that is Barrett’s conviction, if he is convinced scripturally such is the case, it is entirely right and proper for him to leave the SBC and join the Anglican communion. In itself, I have nothing more to say.

The problem is that the arguments Barrett advances are exceptionally weak. I accept I am a confessional Baptist and remain unconvinced by any of the arguments for paedobaptism and Anglican polity, but that really isn’t what I am saying. The specific scriptural arguments highlighted by Barrett – a one-time Baptist theologian, steeped in Baptist theology and practice, who is now utterly convinced (so he says) of Anglicanism and paedobaptism – are incredibly poor. It’s not that there are no good arguments for paedobaptism, it’s that Barret simply doesn’t produce them.

Barrett’s ‘aha!’ moment, his major scriptural ground to change practice, is a single verse that is neither quoted in full nor in context. It is also a verse regularly addressed in Baptist discussions of baptism. As Barrett well knows, Baptists point to John the Baptist, who even Tertullian recognised only baptised professing believers – and Peter at Pentecost to the same effect – and note no effort is made to enact the principle of ‘to you and your children’ by men who would have been, because of their Jewish background, painfully aware of it. Again, it’s not that paedobaptists have no answer for these things, it’s just interesting that Barrett doesn’t offer them. His explanation, that is presumably directed at his one-time Baptist friends and colleagues, seems incredibly weak, particularly coming as it does from one who would be aware of the particular barriers to belief that stop others adopting his view.

What is quite telling in his explanation was the following:

the scales fell off my eyes when I saw for the first time that the Baptist hermeneutic is truly individualistic—it’s modern to the bone. After noticing it could not account for the whole canon, I also had to ask myself, “Was the entire church wrong to baptize the children of believers for a millennium and a half? Was believer’s baptism taught by the apostles only to disappear under the supervision of the greatest theologians of the church, and then reappear for the first time in sixteenth century?” For someone serious about catholicity, that pill was too big to swallow.

Let’s leave aside here a couple of things: (1) there is a debate about the earliest means of baptism prior to the third century and, therefore, (2) the ‘millennium and a half’ referenced by Barrett is by no means universally acknowledged. A more accurate statement would be about dismissing the practice of the majority church for c. 1200 years. But these are not relevant to the underlying point which comes back to something mentioned earlier.

What we see here is a distinction between those who acknowledge tradition but place it under the authority of scripture and those who allow scripture to be read primarily, if not exclusively, through the lens of tradition. Barrett effectively admits if church tradition is paedobaptist, then paedobaptism must be read into scripture. The Baptist argues they do not see paedobaptism in scripture and so credobaptism should be read back into church practice. It seems what has really led to Barrett’s move is a hermeneutical one that is more concerning than if someone had just been convinced that that Anglican polity or paedobaptism was, in fact, biblically correct.

Similarly, Barrett argues that if credobaptism is true, why did it disappear ‘under the supervision of the greatest theologians of the church’? Apparently he has no room for the possibility of sin and error. When one can see hierarchicalism and the seeds of episcopacy entering the church under the watchful eye of the Apostle John and against his expressed teaching (cf. 3 John 1:9-10), and you can see factionalism and even Gnosticism take hold whilst Paul has oversight in Corinth, and you even see Apostles themselves (namely, Peter) engaging in the kind of division and factionalism that makes Paul have to publicly challenge it (cf. Gal 2:11), it beggars belief that a theologian of Barrett’s ability could not conceive of other error creeping in among non-Apostolic, fallible theologians who came after them. If the reformation was about anything, was it not a retrieval of the final authority of scripture over and against this kind of church-ultimate, tradition-first interpretive model?

Perhaps the most surprising thing here is not that Barrett has jumped ship from the Baptists and identifies himself with the Anglicans. Rather it is that his driving hermeneutic principles haven’t yet reach their telos and taken him all the way back to Roman Catholicism. For, make no mistake, that is where arguments like ‘were the church really wrong for the last 1500 years…’ ultimately end up.