It seems incredible today, but in 1939 the Church of England came within a whisker of approving Spiritualism as acceptable religious practice. Most Christians today consider Spiritualism anathema, so why were attitudes so different in the 1930s? A thread 
In 1939 a commission convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury submitted a majority opinion that Spiritualism should be approved. The Archbishop sat on the report, and the outbreak of WW2 allowed the church to bury the issue
The report leaked in 1940, but by then the nation was focused on other things, and the church's priorities were much changed when war ended in 1945. It's interesting to speculate whether Spiritualism would have become a major controversy in the CofE without WW2
The report is a reminder that Spiritualism was embedded in the British establishment by 1939, with support from Lords, MPs and even clergy
Contemporary Christian hostility to Spiritualism derives either from a consensus that Spiritualist mediums are charlatans and frauds, or from an evangelical emphasis on Spiritualism as forbidden by the word of God (or even both)
In the 30s there was no such consensus on the fraudulent nature of Spiritualism; and even opposition to Spiritualism as sinful dabbling in the occult was only one strand of theological response to the movement
After all, for those in the Catholic tradition there can be nothing wrong, in and of itself, with talking to the dead; Catholics talk to saints and sometimes receive replies from them, and there was a strong tradition of communicating with spirits returned from Purgatory
Anglican Spiritualists routinely exploited the Anglo-Catholic revival in an effort to show that they were merely continuing Christian tradition. But there was also concern from the church that condemning Spiritualists would drive them away and create a schism
The CofE, as a national church, has always had to accommodate popular spirituality to some extent; and Spiritualism was no exception. In the 30s séances sometimes took place in church halls, often with members of the congregation (and even clergy) present
The church's softening of its traditional Protestant line against prayer for the dead has also been attributed partly to a desire to make the CofE appealing to Spiritualists
But the pre-War bishops were nevertheless deeply concerned about Spiritualism. Not so much because they thought it was Satanic, or even because they thought mediums were frauds, but because mediums represented a challenge to traditional authority
By claiming authority purely on the basis of an innate 'gift', mediums rendered the bishops and clergy unnecessary. Theirs was a charismatic authority completely divorced from ecclesiastical hierarchy
In this sense, the CofE's clash with Spiritualism in the early c20th was just another outworking of the age-old battle between hierarchical and charismatic models of authority within the Christian church
For more on this see my book about Anglican Exorcism, or Georgina Byrne's excellent book 'Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England' boydellandbrewer.com/modern-spiritu…
