Anglican vs Protestant: Is the Anglican Church Protestant? Yes, by History and Law

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The Anglican Church is Protestant, by history and by law. The Church of England broke with Rome in 1534 and took Protestant doctrine under Edward VI and Elizabeth I, and each new British sovereign must declare, “I am a faithful Protestant.” Many Anglicans add that it is also catholic, and the Church of England calls itself both “catholic and reformed.”

The church says both words, side by side, and means them: the King swears he is a faithful Protestant, and everyone ordained in his church hears that it is “part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.” Anglicans have spent nearly five hundred years learning to hold the two together, and most of what sets them apart from other Protestants comes from that double inheritance.

Question	Anglican	Lutheran, Presbyterian and Baptist
Bishops?	Yes, in historic succession	Many Lutheran churches; no Presbyterian or Baptist ones
Babies baptized?	Yes	Lutherans and Presbyterians yes; Baptists no
The Lord’s Supper	Christ’s body received “only after an heavenly and spiritual manner”	“Truly present” (Lutheran); “really, but spiritually, present” (Presbyterian); a memorial (Southern Baptist)
Sacraments	Two of the Gospel	Two (Presbyterian); two “ordinances” (Baptist)
Worship	The set prayers of the Book of Common Prayer	The Mass kept (Lutheran); only what Scripture institutes (Presbyterian); each congregation decides (Baptist)
Authority	Scripture; the creeds; the Articles, Prayer Book and Ordinal	Scripture, with the Augsburg or Westminster Confession; for Baptists, confessions are “only guides”
The King’s role	Supreme Governor of the Church of England	None; in Scotland he attends the Presbyterian church “as an ordinary member”

“Anglican” names the worldwide family of churches that grew from the Church of England, the Episcopal Church in the United States among them. They kept bishops and a written liturgy from the medieval church, and their Thirty-nine Articles of Religion teach the doctrine of the Reformation. So on infant baptism Anglicans stand with the Lutherans and Presbyterians, and on bishops they part from the Presbyterians and Baptists and agree with many Lutherans.

Each row of the table follows the churches’ own documents: the Thirty-nine Articles and the Canons of the Church of England; the Augsburg Confession and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; the Westminster Confession and the Church of Scotland; and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message.

To see what Protestants teach beside what Anglicans and Episcopalians teach on 55 questions, open our free tool, Compare Christian Denominations.

They say it because their church kept so much of the medieval church: its creeds, its bishops, its buildings and parts of its liturgy. When the Church of England tells its own history, it keeps both halves in view. Its Elizabethan settlement, it says, produced a church that “consciously retained a large amount of continuity with the Church of the Patristic and Medieval periods in terms of its use of the catholic creeds, its pattern of ministry, its buildings and aspects of its liturgy, but which also embodied Protestant insights in its theology and in the overall shape of its liturgical practice.”

Three broad traditions live side by side in that church. The Evangelical tradition stresses “the Protestant aspects of the Church of England’s identity,” with “the authority of Scripture, preaching, justification by faith, and personal conversion.” The Catholic tradition, reshaped from the 1830s by the Oxford Movement, stresses “the continuity between the Church of England and the Church of the Early and Medieval periods.” The Liberal tradition stresses “the use of reason in theological exploration.”

You can hear the difference when each wing speaks for itself, though both are describing the same church. Church Society calls itself “an evangelical Anglican charity established to promote and uphold the biblical foundations of the Church of England,” and finds those foundations in “The 39 Articles of Religion, the Prayer Book, and the Ordinal.” Forward in Faith, an Anglo-Catholic society, says, “We are committed to the catholic faith as the Church of England received it,” and it upholds “the threefold ministry in historic succession, which the Church of England shares with the Church throughout the world and across the ages.”

Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher put the two sides into two sentences, one after the other. The Anglican Communion, he wrote, “has only the Catholic Faith of the ancient Catholic Church, as preserved in the Catholic Creeds,” and then: “It may licitly teach as necessary for salvation nothing but what is read in the Holy Scriptures as God’s Word written or may be proved thereby.” The Anglican Church in North America quotes him, and describes Anglicans as “at the same time evangelical, apostolic, catholic, reformed, and Spirit-filled.” Anglican writers also call their way the via media, which the Episcopal Church’s glossary describes as “a term popularized in the 19th century that characterizes Anglicanism as a middle way between Roman Catholicism and Puritanism.”

Everyone ordained or licensed in the Church of England makes the Declaration of Assent, and it holds both in one breath. It is introduced with the words, “The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,” and it names the Thirty-nine Articles, that Protestant confession, as one of the “historic formularies” in which the church “has borne witness to Christian truth.”

It comes from the order of events: the Church of England broke with the Pope first and changed its doctrine afterwards. Until the Reformation, the English church “accepted the authority of the Pope.” Then came the Act of Supremacy of 1534, which, in the words of the UK Parliament’s history, “declared the King supreme head of the English Church in place of the Pope, who had opposed his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and remarriage to Anne Boleyn.” So the first break was over authority, and it began in a king’s marriage.

Under Henry VIII “many features of the old Church were retained, for instance the authority of bishops and the division of Church administration into dioceses,” though most monasteries were closed. The change of doctrine came under his son, Edward VI, when the church was reformed further, “driven by the conviction that the theology being developed by the theologians of the Protestant Reformation was more faithful to the teaching of the Bible and the Early Church.” In 1549 an Act of Uniformity established the Book of Common Prayer, the work of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, in place of the old Catholic forms of service.

Under Mary I (1553–58) the English church returned to the Pope. Elizabeth I reversed that and took the title Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and in 1559 a new Act of Uniformity “enforced the use of a modified prayer book which retained various Catholic practices.” The clergy agreed the Thirty-nine Articles in 1563 (1562 by the old calendar the Articles’ own title uses), and they were confirmed in 1571. What came out of it all was a church with bishops, cathedrals and a fixed liturgy, and with a Protestant confession of faith.

Some English Protestants, the Puritans, wanted more reform. At the end of the sixteenth century Richard Hooker defended the settlement against “its Puritan critics who wanted further changes to make the Church of England more like the churches of Geneva or Scotland.” The quarrel reached its height in the Civil War, and from 1649 to 1660 the bishops were abolished and the Prayer Book was banned. Both came back with the monarchy in 1660, and the Book of Common Prayer issued in 1662 is the one the Church of England still names among its historic formularies.

The Church of England sets out where its doctrine comes from in Canon A5: “The doctrine of the Church of England is grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures. In particular such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, The Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal.”

The creeds come first among those teachings. Article 8 says that the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed and the Apostles’ Creed “ought thoroughly to be received and believed,” and clergy affirm the faith “uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds.” What the creeds confess is the subject of Christianity: What Christians Have Believed for 2,000 Years, a free course.

On the questions the Reformation fought over, the Articles plainly take the Protestant side. “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation,” says Article 6, so nothing it does not contain is to be required as an article of faith. Article 11 says: “We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings.” Article 17 teaches predestination to life in terms close to the Reformed churches’: God “hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ.” Article 19 says that “the Church of Rome hath erred,” and Article 22 rejects purgatory and the invocation of saints.

How many sacraments do Anglicans have?

Article 25 counts two: “There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.” Confirmation, penance, orders, matrimony and extreme unction, “Those five commonly called Sacraments,” are “not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel.” The Episcopal Church says the same today: “We recognize baptism and Eucharist as the two sacraments Christ gave the church.” It counts the other five rites, from confirmation to the anointing of the sick, among its “sacramental markers.”

Among other Protestants, Anglicans have drawn closest to the Lutherans: six Anglican churches, the Church of England among them, belong to the Porvoo Communion with ten Lutheran churches, most of them in the Nordic and Baltic countries.

When Anglicans worship, they pray from a book. The Book of Common Prayer sets out the words of the services, the baptism of infants among them, and much of it is the Bible read and prayed: the Episcopal Church says passages of Scripture make up “about 70% of the Book of Common Prayer” it uses.

Here again the Lutherans stand nearest, and the Augsburg Confession answers the charge that they had abolished the Mass: “the Mass is retained among us, and celebrated with the highest reverence,” with German hymns added “to teach the people.” The Westminster Confession is stricter: “the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men.” Baptist congregations order their own services, since the Baptist Faith and Message calls each church “an autonomous local congregation.”

Holy Communion shows the same double inheritance. Article 28 echoes Paul’s question, “The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16), when it says that for those who receive with faith “the Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ.” It also rejects transubstantiation and says the body of Christ is received “only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.” That puts the Anglicans close to the Presbyterian view, and further from the Lutheran.

Bishops lead each Anglican church, with priests and deacons under them, but no one person rules the whole family. As of 2026, the Anglican Communion is made up of “42 autonomous Member Churches (often referred to as Provinces) and five Extra-Provincial areas” in more than 165 countries. Its member churches are in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom the Church of England calls “their focus of unity,” and they meet through the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting and the Anglican Consultative Council.

In England the King has a place in the church too. He holds the title “Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England,” and, on the Prime Minister’s advice, appoints its archbishops, bishops and deans. Canon A7 calls him “the highest power under God in this kingdom,” and Article 37 sets the limit: the church gives its princes no part in “the ministering either of God’s Word, or of the Sacraments.” It is the Accession Declaration Act 1910 that has each new sovereign declare, “I am a faithful Protestant,” and promise to uphold the laws “which secure the Protestant succession to the Throne.”

The King has no such role in Scotland, where the Church of Scotland “is a Presbyterian church and recognises only Jesus Christ as ‘King and Head of the Church’,” and the King attends its services “as an ordinary member.”

Not quite, because the Church of England is one church, the established church in England, while the Anglican Communion is the family of 42 churches that grew from it, with the Church of England as its “mother church.” The word comes from the medieval name of the English church, Ecclesia Anglicana. And before any of those names, as the Anglican Church in North America puts it, “First and foremost, Anglicans are Christians.”

It is, by history and even by name. The Episcopal Church is the Anglican church of the United States, and its official name is still “The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America”; its General Convention adopted “The Episcopal Church” as an approved alternate in 1967. It calls itself “the only U.S.-based member of the global Anglican Communion,” “descended from the Church of England,” with about 1.5 million members in more than 20 countries and territories as of 2026. The Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study places it in the mainline Protestant tradition. There is more on what “Episcopalian” means, its beliefs, and why some Episcopalians reject the word “Protestant”.

Like its mother church, it claims the catholic inheritance as well. Its constitution calls it “a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” and it describes itself as “rooted in the truth of Scripture, tradition, and reason.”

The Anglican Church in North America is a separate body, with dioceses in the United States and Canada, and it does not appear on the Anglican Communion’s own list of member churches. Its Inaugural Assembly adopted its constitution in 2009; that April the primates’ council of GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference, said they recognised the proposed church. It describes its place in its own words: “Our unity is found in our shared confession, the Jerusalem Declaration, rather than in institutional ties to the See of Canterbury.” It receives “the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1571, taken in their literal and grammatical sense,” and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and Pew counts it in the evangelical Protestant tradition.

This family is catholic and reformed, divided as well, and still it calls itself a Communion. It takes the word from the Lord’s table, where Paul first used it: “The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16).

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• Episcopal vs Catholic
• Protestant vs Lutheran
• Lutheran vs Anglican beliefs
• Anglican vs Catholic
• Protestant vs Baptist
• Protestant vs Catholic

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