Anglo-Catholicism and Transfeminism?
A sketch of the terrain
For the last couple of years I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between church and gender. In particular, there is a little knot around the ‘Anglo-Catholic’ tradition where gender is regularly transgressed but also violently re-instated.
My hope in what follows is to give a quick sketch of the terrain I’ve been working in. I’m currently working on a longer research project in this area, and I’d value feedback and collaboration. Welcome!
Anglo-Catholicism
What is now called ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ is a constellation of approaches to theology and liturgy with roots in the 19th century. What it means is contested — for some adherents it involves an orientation towards the Roman Catholic Church, while for others it is more about seeking an ‘English’ form of Catholicism.
Some see Anglo-Catholicism as an inherently conservative movement, a recovery of past traditions, a desire to ‘return,’ while others point to a counter-tradition of socialism and even radicalism, to argue that it contains resources for a more forward looking, liberatory theology.
One thing that has been true throughout the history of Anglo-Catholicism is a curious relationship with gender. Early Anglo-Catholics came into conflict with other Christians who felt that the luxurious aesthetics and general ‘vibe’ of this new form of worship was, as historian David Hilliard put it, ‘un-English and unmanly’. Satirical magazines lampooned Anglo-Catholic clergy as ‘parsons in petticoats,’ and there was even legislation passed in 1874 to ban certain liturgical practices. Anglo-Catholics were seen to transgress Victorian gender norms in ways which were seen as threatening by church and state alike, and this became the subject of a moral panic.
More recently, the relationship between Anglo-Catholicism and gender has been less subversive and more conservative. Some of the same convictions which led Victorian ‘muscular Christians’ to suspect a problematic effeminacy led Anglo-Catholics, from at least the mid-1980s onwards, to be widely associated with strong opposition to the ordination of women in the Church of England.
Drawing in particular on Roman Catholic understandings of the nature of Holy Orders, some Anglo-Catholics have argued that women simply aren’t the right kind of ‘stuff’ to receive the sacrament of ordination, while others have argued that the Church of England has no authority to ordain women until other churches take the lead. This has led to a long period of increasingly difficult compromises as the Church of England as a whole has moved to ordain women first as Deacons, then as Priests and finally as Bishops in 2015.
In this context of compromise and division, priestly associations like the Society of the Holy Cross (SSC) and institutions like the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham retain a tension between the extravagant liturgy and vesture criticised by the Victorians as dangerously gender-transgressive, with a more conservative, sometimes ontological, understanding of the gender binary.
Gender Transgression
Much of this history has been traced before in relation to questions of homosexuality. Evelyn Waugh’s comment in Brideshead Revisited that Anglo-Catholics at Oxford University are ‘all sodomites with unpleasant accents’ is typical of a history in which a liking for liturgical lace has stood as a kind of metonym for ‘the love that dare not speak its name.’
However, my hunch is that this exclusive reading of ‘effeminacy’ as ‘homosexuality’ itself stems from twentieth-century preoccupations. Just as more recent thinking about gender and sexuality has wanted to acknowledge fluidity in both categories, so some works of Nineteenth Century sexology often elided the two entirely. Karl Ulrichs, one of the first people who might qualify as an ‘out gay man’ understood himself as ‘a feminine soul confined by a masculine body,’ and this kind of understanding was repeated by many of his colleagues.
This isn’t to say that these Victorian theorists were right in ways that twentieth-century queer activists were wrong. However, in a period where gender transgression is once again a subject of moral panic, and when the Church is also attempting to grapple with sacramental theologies of both gender and sexuality (who can be ordained? who can marry who? what is the theological weight of gender and sexual difference?), it seems helpful to remember that we too are thinking about these issues within particular frameworks.
I suggest that we can read Anglo-Catholic ‘effeminacy’ not simply as a Victorian euphemism for same-sex desire, but rather as pointing towards a more thoroughgoing gender transgression. By changing our perspective in this way, we might be more able to identify continuities and discontinuities between past forms of gender transgression and those which are the subject of moral panic in contemporary society.
This isn’t the place to discuss in detail the fraught question of how historical gender transgression might relate to contemporary trans, non-binary, or gay experience. My claim is not that any particular Anglo-Catholic figures were somehow ‘trans’, but rather that we can read their gender transgression as part of trans history in the way suggested by Kit Hayam in their Before We Were Trans: as any history ‘that shows us the movability of gender […] the history of people who’ve troubled the relationship between our bodies and how we live’ (28).
I’m also suggesting that the reaction to Anglo-Catholicism reveals much about how gender functions as a regime — it doesn’t matter whether individuals were ‘trans’ or understood their actions as gender transgressive, because to their society they simply were gender traitors. As part of the established church, their gender transgression was particularly dangerous, as unlike Roman Catholic effeminacy it couldn’t be safely considered to lie outside the English political body.
Liberation
My project doesn’t intend to be even primarily one of historical excavation, or sociological critique of a Victorian religious tendency which still retains some influence in the contemporary church. Rather, because the reaction to Anglo-Catholicism reveals something about the regime of gender, it can also point us towards liberation from this regime.
A key insight of various theologies of liberation is that God is on the side of the oppressed, God’s desire is for the freedom of those crushed by the powers and principalities of this world, by the forces of capital and race and gender. This suggests that the Christian tradition can and should be read, not just as a history of complicity with these forces, but also as a history of resistance to them. It also suggests that contemporary theology is faithful when it seeks liberation, and risks infidelity when it seeks to shore up those systems which dehumanise and destroy. Theologies of liberation are theologies which seek lives which can be lived, life in its fullness.
Anglo-Catholicism was suspect to the Victorians because of the threat it posed to the gendered structure of its society. Through the proposal of clerical celibacy and vowed religious orders, it offered modes of being together beyond reproduction and the nuclear family. Through its commitment to contemplative forms of prayer, it proposed ways of inhabiting masculinity and femininity which, it was feared, could fatally undermine church and nation. Through its association with effeminacy and the ‘love that dare not speak its name,’ it gestured towards a church in which humanity trumped respectability.
It, largely, failed to achieve anything like this impact. Its commitment to the poor was often circumstantial and patriarchal. It lacked the conceptual tools to recognise why it was attacked as it was, and its desire for establishment acceptability rapidly compromised its ability to offer any real change. Anglo-Catholics did not set out to destroy Victorian gender norms, they merely stumbled into a space where their faith commitments placed them at odds with gender as it was constituted in Victorian society.
And so the traces are there. As we enter a period where fascist policies which rely on clear categories of race, class and gender are on the rise, as we see trans and nonbinary people in particular targeted on the basis that they undermine Good Christian Morality(tm), we need to draw on all the resources we can.
By looking at Anglo-Catholic gender transgression, its potentials for liberation and its use by the forces of reaction, I hope to frame a trans theology of liberation. This does not just seek to create spaces in which trans and nonbinary people can exist under sufferance, but to dream of what it might look like when the powers and principalities which destroy our collective humanity are defeated, and to work together in achieving this aim.
I’d like to invite others to dream with me, because freedom isn’t achieved by theologians dreaming at keyboards, but by building networks of people who seek freedom together. Although history can help us to analyse the regime of gender, it cannot tell us what must be done to transgress and undermine its dehumanising force in the present.
