This work is as personal as it is magisterial. Gary Dorrien’s Anglican Identities is a magnum opus documenting the history of Anglicanism as a fruit of the author’s own Anglican tradition. However, the result is no rose-tinted or partisan account of the Anglican tradition. Dorrien pulls no punches. From the outset, the myth of the ‘state church halfway house between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism through which England colonised’ and ‘conferred the gifts of a superior civilization wherever it roamed, so its imperialism was not only justified but righteous’ is resoundly disowned. ‘Purging Anglicanism of this toxic conceit is impossible’ Dorrien recognizes, ‘but every step toward a decolonized Anglican faith is worthwhile’ (p. 1). Dorrien’s brilliance is not to shy away from the difficult or painful truths of Anglicanism’s past and contested present. He recognizes that whilst the history of Anglicanism is a history of spirituality, theology and devotion, it is also and sometimes more especially a history which is so interwoven with the legacy of colonialism and empire that it is impossible to tell the history of Anglicanism without also confronting these painful realities. He also reckons with the fact that part of Anglicanism’s peculiar history, both within England and beyond is ‘an intertwined relationship with worldly power’ (p. 5–6). Above all, Dorrien understands that the history of Anglicanism, like all institutions, is at heart a history of the people who make up those institutions, with all the flaws and evils they bring, alongside their particular positive contributions to shaping an institution and its unfolding tradition, if any.

I first became aware of Dorrien’s scholarship through his Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism. That work traced the history of modern labour movements through its religious – and often neglected – foundation. It is not surprising then that Anglican Identities is especially strong on the tradition of social Anglicanism, including Christian Socialism and its variants. With a work of this ambition and scope, there are bound to be those who would disagree with Dorrien’s summaries or overviews of the contribution of this or that particular individual. It is a significant feature of this work the breadth, as well as depth, of scholarship that presents various Anglican identities. However, given it’s breadth there are insightful reflections on each of the figures which stem from this work being the fruit of a lifetime’s inhabiting a tradition, as Dorrien set outs in the introduction. Just one example of many, are his observations on the catholic shape of C. S. Lewis’ Anglican faith and his ‘massive evangelical readership lacking any awareness of his Anglo-Catholicism’ (p. 32).

As Dorrien takes primarily an historical approach, with chapters dealing with Reformation, Elizabethan settlement, post-settlement Anglicanism and so on, this book might mistakenly be seen as yet another in a long line of Anglican histories. There is, however, more to Dorrien’s achievement than yet one other history of Anglicanism. Although he wisely (but perhaps unsatisfactorily for the reader) draws his survey to a close towards the end of the twentieth century, Dorrien’s gift is to interrogate the history of Anglicanism in a way that is both ruthlessly attentive to the politics and perversions of worldly power, whilst also serving a resource for reflection in the various contemporary struggles in which Anglicanism necessarily finds itself. In some ways, the book’s final chapter is the most salient for contemporary Anglicanism, as Dorrien confronts the colonial legacy, and moves to consider the potential for a post-colonial Anglicanism that has truly reckoned with its past. His description of Desmond Tutu as an ‘historical figure in Anglicanism comparable to Hooker, Maurice and Temple’ is an epitaph that should be recognized much more widely. As Dorrien notes ‘to the extent he (Tutu) symbolizes the rise of postcolonial Anglican Christianity, it can only be good for Anglicanism’ (p. 510).

In confronting the colonial legacy of Anglicanism and the emergence of postcolonial theology in the present, here too Dorrien does not pull his punches. He notes that post-colonial theology’s ‘move to the affirmation of post-colonial creativity, negotiating emergent multiplicities of identity, subject positioning and cultural recognition’ is not liberating ‘without challenging structural hegemonic relations of power, however, is not liberating’ (p. 519). Indeed, his final word is that the call for justice does not merely settle for affirmation. For these reasons, and for the care with which Dorrien handles his sources and analysis, this work stands as a helpful corrective to Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. The reader who wants seriously to grapple with the moral analysis of Anglicanism’s colonialist legacy would do well to start with Dorrien’s work here. This volume remains true to Dorrien’s aim throughout, to survey ‘Anglican emphasis on the word Incarnate, the role of English Anglican imperial whiteness in the racist sickness of Western civilization, and the dream of a radical ecumenism with a commonweal spirit’ (p. 2). One might think that an approach which directly confronts Anglican imperialism’s racist legacy and explores the often unrealized hope of radical ecumenism that Anglicanism pretends would be a volume that sounds a pessimistic note on the possibility of any Anglican identity. Despite Dorrien’s openness to explore honestly the Anglican tradition, and his resoluteness in paying attention to the dynamics of power, there is throughout a sense of hope that Anglicanism might yet be a path to the generous spirituality that this tradition has at various times in its history promised. Dorrien’s work is a contribution to realizing that hope and the development of an Anglicanism which lives up to one understanding of its name: ‘Anglicanism, the name, at its best, of a vision of God’s boundless mercy and the spiritual unity of Christianity’ (p. 145).