I owe a great deal to Billy Graham. When I was in my twenties and had fallen away from the Presbyterianism in which I was raised, the radio station I often listened to ran Graham's program on Sunday nights. It always began with him calling out, "This is the hour of decision!" My life had been going badly enough that I never quite turned the radio to another station or turned it off entirely, and the girlfriend with whom I'd broken up was out of the picture -- she would never have tolerated Billy Graham -- so I listened.
Was this "Baptist spirituality"? Of course not. Graham is an Augustinian. His "hour of decision" was probably my "Take up and read!" Actually, when I studied English literature in college and graduate school, my professors seldom stressed Anglicanism with authors like Donne, Herbert, Milton, Bunyan, Swift, or Johnson: they called them "Pauline and Augustinian Christians", which may be redundant, except perhaps if contrasted with "complacent and halfhearted Christians".
But if you think about it, John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim's Progress and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, is probably the most-read English spiritual writer, a figure almost comparable to Dante, but he wasn't Anglican. Neither was John Milton. Neither was Isaac Watts, who wrote the words to some best-loved hymns. What on earth is "Anglican spirituality"?
Actually, it reminds me of the university that, in response to complaints from Muslims and atheists that there was a cross in the chapel, elected to remove it from the altar and place it in a vitrine as a "historical exhibit", allowing it to be placed back on the altar only during actual Christian services, after which it had to be promptly removed. That's more like a first cousin to "Anglican spirituality", a somewhat precious and pedantic historical exhibit.
