Avant-garde Conformist?

In a recent review of Benjamin Guyer’s How The English Reformation Was Named, Alec Ryrie noted ‘Church historians have been engaged for some years now in a bout of terminological self-examination. At times this has felt a little wearying, as the language police keep coming for terms we had been using without any malicious intent’. But, like Ryrie, I think that such reflection on historigraphic labels is, on the whole, a very good thing, insofar as it makes us ‘conscious of the value judgments baked into our terminology, judgments with which we might be perfectly content but of which we ought at least to be aware’ and highlights the easily forgotten fact that ‘the labels we use to describe major movements or events in the history of Christianity themselves have histories’. Conscious of the risk of further wearying readers of church history, I suggest that the term ‘avant-garde conformist’ is overdue for reconsideration.

Peter Lake's coinage 'avant-garde conformist' is a convenient label for those in early Stuart Britain variously called ceremonialists, Arminians, and Laudians. It has caught on because it avoids the problems that have been noted about each of those other common labels. But it is potentially quite misleading itself in more ways than one. Avant-garde can, of course, mean non-conformist, resulting in a clever oxymoron that may capture the mixture of (strict) conformity and (flagrant) non-conformity vis-à-vis the Book of Common Prayer that characterized the group. That subtlety, however, is often lost, with Laudians (for lack of a better label) treated simply as (the only kind of) conformists in contrast to (puritan) non-conformists, squeezing reformed conformists like Joseph Hall, John Williams, Thomas Morton, and James Ussher quite out of the picture. Worse still, avant-garde may be read as "ahead of its time" and, in that sense, the label may be taken to refer to the circle of Archbishops Laud and Richard Neile as a far-sighted cultural elite, thus both assuming a particular outcome to the battles over the identity of Church of England and suggesting a value judgment on the partisans in these battles, which is the wrong way to write history.