But it seems to me, reflecting on the case of Bp Ives, that there were two major events that drove, if not large-scale, at least prominent, conversions to Catholicism among Anglicans in modern history. The first was the industrial revolution. On one hand, this drove changes in British society that resulted in the Reform Act of 1832, which in turn emancipated non-Anglicans and forced churchmen like Newman to reconsider the idea of a natinal confession. However, other destabilizing influences like the movement of rural populations to the cities and the advent of railways also increased levels of social anxiety.
This brings me yet again to the highly underrated presentation on YouTube by Dr David Cambell, Christian Kenosis. One of Campbell's points is that "New Age" beliefs tend to die out during periods of national crisis, such as the US Civil War and the Great War of 1914-18. I think it's significant that the Civil War historian Allen Guelzo in his history of the Reformed Episcopal Church relates the popularity of Anglo-Catholicism in part to the national stresses that led up to the US Civil War.
But I would go somewhat farther and refer to commentators who in turn relate the Civil War to the industrial revolution and the rise of a market industrial economy. Certainly one interpretation of Reconstruction was to incorporate an agricultural, in many ways pre-industrial economy into the Yankee industrial base. One needs only point to the re-gauging of Southern railroads to be compatible with those of the North following the war as evidence for this interpretation -- but a cultural reflection of market capital's influence is also the proliferation and prestige of Anglo-Catholic liturgy housed in ostentatious Gothic churches during this period as well, often sponsored by the families of industrial robber barons.
Bp Ives is a reflection of this trend and a confirmation of Guelzo's view, but in Ives's case, his conversion wasn't just stylistic. It suggests that there was a seriousness about the Oxford movement that crossed the Atlantic.
But there was a second wave of conversions among Anglicans after the Great War, this one I think culturally even more important. In Surprised by Joy, C S Lewis, who remained Anglican, nevertheless stressed the importance of his war experience in forming his mature Christianity. Other converts, like Chesterton, Knox, Butler, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, had no direct Great War experience, but Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory points out the profound cultural effect the war experience, both at home and on the front, exerted on the language and popular imagination. T S Eliot in "The Waste Land" describes London as a city "undone by death" following the war.
The influenza epidemic of 1918, now often forgotten, though often as well compared to pre-industrial plagues in its effect, was a similar stressor. Kinsman says in Salve Mater that he delayed his resignation as Episcopalian Bishop of Delaware due to he effect of the war, as well, we may be sure, of the even more local effect of the epidemic, and it would be difficult not to consider the effect of the war on his later health and disposition.
But this brings me to a puzzle. Anglo-Catholicism, with a lesser tendency to actual conversion to Roman Catholicism, was an important cultural response to two modern social stress points, the industrial revolution and the Great War. Dr Campbell's view would be that this wort of thing was inevitable, serious crises bring people to serious religion. So what is the reason for the disappointment in Anglicanorum coetibus? Why don't the examples of Newman, Manning, Ives, Kinsman, Knox, Butler, Chesterton, Waugh, and Greene make it easier for the idea of becoming Catholic to enter mainstream popular culture in the 21st century?
I'm only starting to think about this, but one factor, it seems to me, is that there must be a different set of social stresses at work. The industrial revolution has occurred, there's no going back to arcadia. The problem of industrialized killing in total war, or by totalitarian societies, seems at least for the moment to be in abeyance. The stresses that we're dealing with now seem less clear, but if there's a problem to be solved, we can be pretty confident that Anglicanorum coetibus hasn't addressed it.
