Laurie Maffly-Kipp's address to the American Society of Church History proffers the challenge of engaging seriously with the “church” in church history. She notes that scholarship on Christianity has increasingly focused on broader cultural themes in lieu of a more strict concern with churches as institutions in their own right. Maffly-Kipp's challenge reminded me of a particular context in the history of Christianity: the eighteenth-century city-state of Ogua (or, more familiarly, Cape Coast), in present-day Ghana. In the 1750s, the family of a local youth sent their child, Philip Quaque, to study abroad in London under the auspices of the Anglican Church. The young Quaque spent the next eleven years of this life cultivating expertise in Anglican liturgy, Christian theology, and British mores. Before returning home in his early twenties, he was ordained to the Anglican priesthood—the first African to have done so.Footnote 44
Quaque's route to priesthood in the Anglican Church was more than a bit serendipitous. When he was yet a small child, the governor of Cape Coast, Cudjoe Caboceer, was already eager for local youths to travel abroad to study in England. The governor had no interest in Christian conversion. But he did recognize that an elite education was an important form of social capital that easily translated into economic advantage and political influence. In 1752, the white Anglican missionary Thomas Thompson arrived in Cape Coast from the American colony of New Jersey, where he had spent several years working among British settlers. It was in the American settler colony that Thompson had first encountered Africans. His official mission was to maintain Christian fidelity among the British settlers, but Thompson managed to convert a few Africans to Christianity. And he quickly became more enthused about the prospect of converting greater numbers of Africans and bringing them into the Anglican Church. He eventually succeeded in petitioning the London church authorities to reassign him as a missionary in West Africa. Caboceer soon persuaded the newly arrived Thompson that sending African youths to London to study the Christian faith would produce an indigenous cadre of Christian missionaries. So, the Anglican Church's Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) funded the enterprise.Footnote 45
Upon his return to Ogua/Cape Coast, Quaque took over the work of Thompson. He was stationed at Cape Coast Castle, one of the numerous forts that Europeans built along the West African coast on land leased from the region's governing polities. There he served as a chaplain to the fort's white employees and black servants and slaves. More importantly for Quaque, whose ambitions of converting Africans en masse seemed to have exceeded even those of Thompson, the newly ordained priest began evangelizing the residents of Cape Coast, hopeful that he might single-handedly rid his hometown of the indigenous religion that he learned to despise. From the 1760s until his death in 1816, Quaque remained loyal to his assigned labor as a priest and missionary of the Anglican Church, a noteworthy fact given the dismal results of his efforts (with rare exceptions, the people of Cape Coast took no interest in converting to Christianity).Footnote 46
It is striking to consider the Anglican Church's networks of institutions and affiliations. The Church of England itself began more as a pragmatic decision (for the sake of effecting a marital divorce) by the English monarch Henry VIII to separate from the Roman Catholic Church. But this fact should not elide the rampant nationalism that was already animating interests in vernacular Bibles and ecclesiastical control by regional monarchs in lieu of papal governance. That the Church of England, moreover, set in motion the English Reformation is a tired and familiar factoid. Of paramount significance, however, is the fact that because the Anglican Church was a church, its nationalist moorings never impinged on the universalism of its historic self-conception. This means that expansionism and the cant of empire were never in tension with the Church of England as an English church. It was a church.
It is in this light that one might begin to appreciate how even accidental progressions and developments (such as Quaque's experience) of institutional churches nevertheless manifest as iterations of a more fundamental paradigm—in this instance, world-conquest. And I mean this in a very complicated sense. Whereas England the territorial state repeatedly sought to rationalize its imperialism, the very philosophy of empire—most eloquently concretized by the Anglican cleric Samuel Purchas (x1626)—was in turn rooted in the putatively natural reason of the church's ontological expanse. The Church of England was a mystical community (a spiritual population), not a territorial state. The physical head of the Anglican Church has been the English monarch. But this head of state (currently Elizabeth II) merely represents Jesus the divine sovereign, the lord of the universe—dominus imperio, one who governs through imperium and whose reign extends beyond that of any human sovereigns. This is why the church was conceived as an already-universal entity. Its habitus and realm, unlike territorial polities, is unimpeded by oceans, mountains, linguistic difference, race, servile status, or even the passage of time. In their earliest iteration, the Anglican Church's missions to England's settler colonies were unconcerned with Africans and indigenous Americans. But the SPG quickly retooled to target so-called heathens, partly as a consequence of missionaries like Thompson. This focus on Africans, moreover, only reaffirmed the longstanding nature of the Anglican Church.Footnote 47
Because it is conceived as the mystical body under the divine government of a universal, divine sovereign, the church—and this includes national churches like the Church of England—is impervious to the more parochial imaginaries of demographic constitution that characterize nations. This does not mean that nationalism does not directly shape and influence churches. It does mean, however, that the simultaneous presence of the Anglican Church in Cape Coast, the New Jersey colony, and the London metropole is not an anomaly but a paradigmatic manifestation of ecclesiastical formation.
One might easily mistake the foregoing to constitute a hyper-politicized account of the Christian church. After all, the Christian church cannot be reduced to its political theology. So, it might be useful to consider a point that Maffly-Kipp raised in her annual ASCH address. Speaking of the African minister Richard Allen, who in 1816 helped establish the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination and was its first bishop, Maffly-Kipp writes, “He did not repudiate church traditions or history; in fact, he seemed to relish the implementation of regulatory structures.”Footnote 48 As a coherent institution with disciplinary procedures, membership rosters, and a specific genealogy of denominational formation, the AME Church embodied both an independent African church movement and an ecclesiastical entity of universal communion. One should bear in mind how the Church of England cohered simultaneously as a nation-based project (conceptualized through the political body of the English crown, who ruled a monarchical state) and a mystical body whose true sovereign was a divine king. For it is in this same fashion that the AME Church cohered as an independent African denomination and full-fledged entity of the universal ecclesia of Christians, the beginnings of which are traced to the Jesusine communities of first-century Palestine. What Maffly-Kipp suggests as a source of puzzlement could just as easily be seen as a logical, virtually intuitive move by Allen and other free Africans who had loyally entered into submission to Jesus (the divine sovereign) and into communion within his mystical body.
As with all ecclesiastical societies, both the AME and the Anglican Churches manifested as historically-specific iterations—their publishing enterprises were particular, their individual sites of worship catered to specific congregations, etc. But in no sense should this be understood to diminish the fact that their constitution as churches obtained as an efficacious phenomenon precisely because it transcended the immediate boundaries of class, race, nation, etc. This is why the Anglican Church has existed as a global formation. For its part, the AME Church formalized its status as a denomination of globally-dispersed congregations in the late-1800s (the denomination formally incorporated Black Methodists from West Africa and southern Africa under Henry McNeal Turner's leadership) and has continued to expand throughout South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.Footnote 49
Of course, this also foregrounds the importance of accounting for the church as a dynamic, transnational entity. As Maffly-Kipp urged in her list of guiding aims near the close of her address, “Church history must become even more self-consciously comparative and international, in order to shrink the theoretical purchase of the nation-state down to a manageable size.” This of course is not a disavowal of studying nation-states. It is, rather, a sound and sensible recognition that the scholarly study of Christianity should not be controlled or constrained by national boundaries and the narrative logics of state-building. In relationship to this, she adds, “There is no good reason, given our subject matter and the demographic realities of Christian dispersion, for the United States and Europe to so dominate our discussions of Christianity.”Footnote 50
The clearest imperative for this is perhaps the corporate rationality of the Christian church, structured through what I have termed above as its will to world-conquest. The corporate ontology of the church has been conceived through participation in the mystical body of its divine sovereign. This is why the Christian church, strictly speaking, has not been a specimen of nationalism (although it has been deeply shaped by nationalism). Throughout its history, membership in the Christian church has functioned as a means of joining a distinctive body. The early African bishop Augustine of Hippo called this the totus christus—the encompassing spiritual body of the “whole messiah” that fiercely defied the provincialism of territorial polities and geographical regions. Alternatively, one might indeed find clarity in Augustine's conception of what he called the civitas dei—the city of god, the celestial polity in which members of the Christian church held ultimate citizenship and to which they owed unbounded loyalty.Footnote 51
The Christian church was born within the crucible of empire. The infrastructure, practices of governance, spatiality, and materialities that inhered to the conduct of the Roman Empire constituted the spiritual DNA of the church. Because imperium can be exercised across physical space, the imperative of expansionism—traversing distant lands, seeking converts, and replicating communities of Christian order—has been a lasting hallmark of Christianity. It is a birthmark achieved under the duress and impress of empire. And this imperial birthmark (which is a very particular political imaginary) is among the most important features of the Christian church's enduring legacy.
The universalism of this corporate imaginary, thus, should not be read naively as a necessarily auspicious formation. It should instead be regarded with a critical level of ambivalence similar to that often reserved for the gargantuan multinational companies that thrive in the present. Whether winning market-share or commanding ultimate religious loyalty, the expanse and scale of transnational corporate entities—churches no less than profit-based companies—derive their universal embrace of constituents from a desire to arrogate to themselves an exclusive dominance across boundaries of all sorts. There is, after all, something disturbing about Thompson and Quaque being installed as Anglican chaplains just a few feet above the captive children and adults imprisoned hundreds at a time in the slave dungeon of Cape Coast Castle. European transoceanic empire, the invasion and conquest of indigenous Americans, and the institutions for executing human trafficking of African peoples were all enabling conditions of the Christian church's transnationalism.
Scholars of Christianity should execute their work with an eye to the thoughtful directives of Maffly-Kipp's challenge. Indeed, absorbing the political sensibilities of ecclesiology can become a productive means for understanding anew how studying the Christian church can become a productive site for scholarship to proceed through critical engagement with (instead of being in service to) the imaginary of territorial states; the facile, exclusive focus on Western Europeans as historical subjects; and the provincial time of so-called modernity.
