Church and Chapel

I ought to declare a tribal interest in Patrick Collinson’s latest instalment of collected essays: he and I both grew up in that unjustly overlooked and astringently beautiful county, Suffolk, which figures largely in his text. Our respective childhoods embraced the polarity of Suffolk religion in the mid-20th century: solid Prot, of course, but divided by the great contraries of Church and Chapel.

I was the parson’s son: on Sundays I sat in the Rectory pew in the chancel of our parish church, staring at the monument to one of my father’s predecessors, the Regency baronet who had turned a Tudor farmhouse into an elegant parsonage (rather faded in splendour since his day). By contrast, Collinson recites with deep relish his genealogy of purest Chapel, ready-made to alarm my youthful Anglican priggishness: Ipswich Bethesda Strict and Particular Baptist Church; Colchester Railway Mission; Great Barton Independent Chapel, plus an array of independent evangelicalism, Primitive Methodism, Quakerism.

John Calvin, a Godot-like absent presence in Collinson’s essays, might have discerned a divine calling in two such complementary childhoods, a providential designation as church historians of that now much-altered East Anglian world. He would also have been puzzled and saddened that the Elizabethan Reformation, of which (with reservations) he had high hopes, had split into two such opposed identities.

Nothing quite like it happened elsewhere in Europe, but the English pattern reproduced itself more dramatically and exuberantly in England’s cuckoo in the nest, the future United States of America, where Church (Episcopalianism) has been dwarfed by Chapel, the competing Protestant denominations of English descent. The great divide took place on both sides of the Atlantic within the century and a half, bounded by the Canterbury careers of Archbishops Thomas Cranmer and William Sancroft.