History can Confirm

So someone has asked for some thoughts about Confirmation - that ritual of the Anglican (and Catholic) Church that confuses lots of people - and that some credobaptists love to have a go at! After all, isn't Confirmation just proof that our children really missed out on something by not being able to choose to be baptised for themselves? And doesn't this just make a mockery of the gospel that doesn't see us saved by our family affiliations but by each person's individual faith in Jesus as Saviour? As a convinced paedobaptist, I have responses to all the common objections, but I don't want to make them the point of this post. Perhaps for another time... But also, in order to understand Anglican Confirmation properly, baptism isn't the place to start anyway, church history is. Let me explain.

In England the Church is established. Christianity is (currently) the official religion of the nation. The people have lived under Christian monarchs for countless generations and - before the rise and rise of cultural pluralism, mass immigration and hyper individualism - the expectation has been that all English people were Christians. By default, this also meant that they were all also members of the Church of England. Now, we might all agree that there's a level at which this is pretty fanciful stuff: there's never been a nation where all the subjects were truly Christian; this is a sure way to breed rank nominalism; etc; etc. But none of that's really the point for now. The point is just that the English Church has historically been cleaved to the machinery of the State.

Now, this is significant here because it used to be that you couldn't participate in English civic life if you weren't a Christian. Just as there was once a time when women or black people weren't given a vote, so too there was a time when non-Christian people couldn't hold public office or take up a full place in society. In England, a non-Christian used to be persona non grata. So, how then did the State know whether you were a committed Christian or not, given that most everyone was baptised as a baby? It was by Confirmation. The bishop would come and publicly examine the confirmee on their understanding of the basics of the faith as expressed in the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer, and you had to pass to be a full member of the national Church and a full citizen of the State.

Now there's an upshot of all this for anyone who thinks it's worth people learning something about Jesus and Christianity. It's that it meant that in preparation for their big exam, every person in England was schooled in those three formulae, which were, and still are, the basis of the Church Catechism. And consequently, the Church Catechism did, and still does, make up the bulk of the Anglican Church's Confirmation service that's in the Book of Common Prayer.

So, that's where Confirmation comes from. It was a formal rite of passage for both the Church and the State. Now, let's jump forward and ask about today. What's the point of Confirmation in a post-Christendom society where Confirmation no longer confers any privileges at all?

Well, it certainly has less significance now, and its certainly not something that Anglicans consider to be mandatory (unless you want to be ordained). But it still does allow children baptised as infants to make a public profession of their faith if they feel they want to. It's a way they can say to the world that they've owned the faith they were brought up in at a personal level. Of course, their participation in the life of the church might make the same statement anyway. And they can have this involvement because Anglicans don't exclude their children from full participation until such time as they've been through a public ceremony. (Which, in a nice irony, makes us far less enslaved to church ritual than some of the credobaptists at this point!)

But aside from its reduced relevance, there are some real problems with modern day Confirmation. One is that it's often not done 'by the book' and involves no real interrogation by the bishop at all. Sadly this means that it's not always completely clear what the service is meant to be confirming. Is it the fact that the confirmee wants to partake in a ritual of the Church? Is it that their pastor thinks they're a really decent guy or girl? Is it that they want to own their Anglican heritage? Or are we confirming that they believe the basics of the Christian faith as expressed in the Creed, that they they want to uphold the Ten Commndments and that they they've learnt to approach God the Father through the prayer that Jesus taught - without necessarily even referring to those things in the service at all?

Another problem is that sometimes confirmees can simply be going through the motions in compliance with the wishes of their parents or other significant adults. That is, it's no more about them choosing to declare their faith in Jesus than their baptism was (ok - so there's one pitched up for you credobaptists to have a swing at!) But despite these problems, it would be unfair to reject the whole idea of Confirmation because any dimension of religion can be corrupted by hollow ritualism. Everything can be broke.

So then, two sentence summary: Confirmation used to have an important social function as it was the way of entering into full participation in England's Christendom society. Now its significance is much less, although it can be one great way for those baptised as infants to confirm that they love being part of the family of Jesus' saved people.