The Anglican Schism Was Supposed to Split Christianity in Half. The Records Tell a Different Story.
Matt Baker predicted that one of Christianity's largest institutions was about to divide into two roughly equal parts. The evidence emerging from 2026 tells a considerably more complicated story.
His UsefulCharts video, Anglican Schism Explained, describes the October 2025 rebellion against the Archbishop of Canterbury as a historic rupture that would radically alter the rankings of the world's largest Christian communions.
The rebellion was real. Its leaders established a new governing council, rejected Canterbury's authority and declared themselves the rightful custodians of Anglican Christianity.
What remains unproven is Baker's central numerical prediction: that the Anglican Communion would divide approximately in half, producing two smaller, clearly distinguishable institutions.
The problem is not simply that he lacked precise membership figures. It is that his explanation treats theological allegiance, institutional membership and religious identity as though they were interchangeable.
They are not.
And the documents produced by the very people leading this rebellion make that distinction impossible to ignore.
1. The Rebels Did Not Announce Their Departure. They Claimed to Be the Real Anglican Communion.
On October 16, 2025, the conservative Anglican movement GAFCON issued a declaration rejecting the institutions traditionally responsible for maintaining worldwide Anglican unity.
These included the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates' Meeting.
GAFCON announced that it was reorganizing worldwide Anglicanism around a shared understanding of biblical authority.
But the declaration contained a critical distinction.
Its chairman, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda, insisted:
"we have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion."
That was not a minor theological flourish. It was a direct claim to institutional and religious legitimacy.
GAFCON was challenging Canterbury's authority to determine which churches constituted the authentic Anglican Communion.
Its October declaration also encouraged member provinces to remove constitutional references to Canterbury and established restrictions on participation in Canterbury-led institutions.
Baker described this development as a separation that would create two recognizable Anglican communions.
Yet the movement's own position was more radical and more complicated.
It was not merely attempting to establish a competing denomination. It claimed that the existing Anglican Communion had abandoned the principles that made it Anglican in the first place.
That distinction became explicit in March 2026.
At its conference in Abuja, Nigeria, GAFCON published the Abuja Affirmation, declaring:
"There are not two Communions, but two incompatible definitions of communion"
The document argued that authentic Anglican belonging should depend on shared doctrine rather than inherited institutional relationships.
It expressly rejected the description of the Global Anglican Communion as a breakaway or alternative communion.
These declarations do not establish that GAFCON has successfully assumed authority over Anglicanism. Canterbury's institutions plainly reject that implication.
They establish something different: the dispute concerns who has the authority to define Anglican membership in the first place.
A family tree can show competing institutions. It cannot settle that dispute merely by drawing two branches.
2. The Membership Figures Cannot Support a Clean Division
Baker's most consequential prediction concerned numbers.
He explained that the Anglican Communion had previously ranked third among the world's largest Christian communions, behind Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Following the schism, he expected the Anglican population to divide approximately equally.
He acknowledged that the figures were uncertain and sensibly postponed revising his chart until the March 2026 gathering.
But even a qualified prediction requires a defensible method.
Consider the available evidence.
In a May 2019 communiqué, GAFCON claimed that its provinces and branches represented 50 million of the world's 70 million active Anglicans.
That amounts to approximately 71%.
The figure was GAFCON's own representation of its constituency, not an independent count of people who had formally transferred institutional allegiance.
GAFCON's public materials have also cited more than 85 million Anglicans worldwide. These figures use different descriptions of the population and do not establish how many people belong exclusively to its proposed new structure.
The distinction matters enormously.
A province whose archbishop supports GAFCON does not necessarily cease to exist within Canterbury's institutional network.
A bishop attending a conservative Anglican conference does not automatically transfer every member of that bishop's diocese into a separate communion.
And individual congregations may endorse GAFCON's religious principles without leaving their existing provincial structures.
The difficulty became explicit in the March 2026 Abuja Affirmation.
GAFCON permitted participation through assent to its Jerusalem Declaration. That assent could come from provinces, dioceses, parish councils or individuals.
It also acknowledged that constitutional separation from Canterbury could require lengthy legal procedures, sometimes involving national parliaments.
Crucially, it allowed participation even where constitutional references to Canterbury remained unchanged.
This creates overlapping categories of membership.
An Anglican institution may have a legal connection to Canterbury while its leaders or congregations participate in GAFCON.
Counting such people exclusively on one side would misrepresent their institutional position. Counting them on both sides would inflate the combined total.
Baker's approximate half-and-half division does not resolve this problem.
It conceals it.
For his prediction to become a reliable population estimate, someone would need to identify the provinces that formally changed their relationships, establish their membership figures using comparable definitions and account for overlapping affiliations.
The evidence reviewed does not provide that calculation.
Yet the predicted change in Anglicanism's global ranking depends upon precisely such a calculation.
3. March 2026 Produced New Leadership, Not a Verified Membership Settlement
Baker identified March 2026 as the moment when the competing Anglican institutions would become clearer.
That meeting occurred.
Between March 3 and March 6, conservative Anglican leaders gathered in Abuja.
According to GAFCON's official record, 347 bishops and 121 other clergy and lay leaders attended from 27 provinces.
The conference established the Global Anglican Council, replacing GAFCON's previous Primates' Council.
Archbishop Laurent Mbanda became chairman, Archbishop Miguel Uchôa of Brazil became deputy chairman, and Bishop Paul Donison became general secretary.
Their announced terms run through GAFCON's 2028 assembly in Athens.
This was a substantial institutional development.
It confirmed that the rebellion had advanced beyond declarations into an organized governing structure.
But the attendance figures cannot be converted into evidence that 27 provinces formally departed the existing Anglican Communion.
They establish where participants came from, not the legal or constitutional status of every province represented.
Indeed, GAFCON's own new membership rules expressly allow continued institutional overlap.
The Canterbury-centered Anglican Communion, meanwhile, continued listing 42 autonomous member churches on its official website, including the churches of Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda.
All three countries are closely associated with GAFCON's leadership.
The contrast is striking.
GAFCON could claim the participation of major Anglican leaders while Canterbury continued recognizing their churches as members of its worldwide communion.
That institutional overlap persisted beyond March.
When the Anglican Consultative Council met in Belfast between June 27 and July 5, 2026, 37 of the 42 member churches were represented.
Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda were among the five absent provinces, but those three had already been boycotting major Anglican meetings for years. Their absence was not evidence of a newly completed constitutional withdrawal.
The meeting therefore did not produce the simple outcome Baker's proposed chart revision anticipated.
It confirmed the existence of rival leadership structures while leaving important questions of institutional membership unresolved.
GAFCON's seriousness should not be underestimated. In an October 1, 2026, statement, it rejected reports suggesting that its general secretary was engaged in continuing reconciliation negotiations with Canterbury.
The movement declared that the period for institutional negotiations had passed.
The division is genuine.
The claim that its population can already be divided into two neat totals is another matter entirely.
4. The Conservative Anglican World Is Not a Single Coalition
Baker's explanation largely divides Anglicanism between liberal Western churches and conservative churches in the Global South.
That distinction helps explain the religious disagreement.
It does not adequately describe the institutional landscape.
Alongside GAFCON exists another major conservative organization: the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches, or GSFA.
The two movements share significant theological commitments and overlapping leadership. Both have challenged developments concerning sexuality and biblical interpretation within Western Anglican churches.
But they have pursued different institutional strategies.
GAFCON has rejected the authority of Canterbury's governing structures.
The GSFA has instead sought doctrinal reform while maintaining relationships within the existing Anglican Communion.
GAFCON Australia acknowledged this difference in May 2026, explaining that the GSFA had wanted to remain within the Canterbury communion and persuade other provinces to accept its Cairo Covenant.
This was not merely theoretical.
At the July 2026 Anglican Consultative Council meeting, representatives from nine GSFA provinces participated.
The organization's leaders continued pressing for doctrinal accountability while engaging with proposals to reform Anglican governance.
Their subsequent declaration described continued participation within the Anglican Communion as compatible with their conservative religious commitments.
That creates a critical problem for the simple division between Canterbury and Global Anglicans.
Not every conservative Anglican province has chosen the same institutional response.
Some have rejected Canterbury's structures. Others continue working within them while challenging their theological direction.
The division is therefore not simply geographical, nor is it a straightforward contest between liberal and conservative populations.
It is also a disagreement among conservatives about whether reform requires abandoning existing institutions.
A chart that assigns conservative provinces wholesale to a single new communion risks erasing precisely the distinction necessary to understand the dispute.
5. Sarah Mullally's Appointment Was Not the Beginning of the Separation Campaign
Baker places considerable emphasis on the timing of Sarah Mullally's appointment.
On October 3, 2025, she was announced as the first woman selected to become Archbishop of Canterbury.
Thirteen days later, GAFCON issued its declaration.
That sequence makes a compelling narrative.
But chronology alone does not establish the scale of her appointment's influence.
GAFCON's preparations were already underway.
On July 10, 2025, nearly three months before Mullally's announcement, Archbishop Mbanda issued an invitation for conservative Anglican bishops to assemble in Abuja in March 2026.
The invitation described the gathering as an opportunity to consider the future of worldwide Anglicanism.
The movement itself had existed since 2008.
Its longstanding disputes involved biblical authority, same-sex relationships, church discipline and Canterbury's willingness to recognize provinces holding different theological positions.
The Church of England had already introduced its Prayers of Love and Faith for same-sex couples in December 2023, following decisions by its governing bodies.
Even the question of women bishops was more complicated than a universal conservative prohibition.
A 2023 explanation from GAFCON Europe acknowledged differences among conservative Anglicans over women's ordination.
It described a moratorium on women bishops while recognizing that affiliated churches disagreed about women's eligibility for other ordained ministries.
Mullally's selection clearly intensified an existing dispute.
But the available chronology does not establish that her appointment created the campaign for institutional separation.
Baker's narrative places a highly visible appointment at the center of a conflict whose organizational foundations had been developing for nearly two decades.
A more revealing question is why Canterbury's authority had become unacceptable to some Anglican leaders long before Mullally was selected.
The answer lies in accumulated disputes over doctrine, governance and the limits of institutional unity.
Reducing those disputes to a dramatic fortnight obscures the longer struggle over religious authority.
6. The Most Important Change Is Not the Number of Anglicans. It Is Who Gets to Define Them.
Baker's chart remains useful as a historical illustration.
His account correctly identifies Anglicanism's origins in the English Reformation, the subsequent development of independent regional churches and the importance of the conservative movement challenging Canterbury.
He also explicitly acknowledges uncertainty about the final outcome.
Those qualifications matter.
But the explanatory weakness survives them.
The 2025 declaration and the March 2026 conference cannot be understood simply by drawing a second Anglican branch and dividing the population between two columns.
The competing institutions are attempting to establish different rules for determining religious legitimacy.
Canterbury maintains a network based on recognized member churches and longstanding institutional relationships.
GAFCON proposes a fellowship defined by assent to a shared doctrinal declaration and disengagement from Canterbury's governing structures by those holding leadership positions.
The same province can therefore appear within one institution's membership records while participating, through its leaders or congregations, in the other movement.
This is not an administrative detail.
It determines how institutional authority is exercised, who may represent a church internationally and whether membership figures mean anything comparable.
A responsible revision of Baker's family tree would distinguish formal provincial membership, doctrinal affiliation and participation in competing governing structures.
It would also distinguish established constitutional changes from declarations of religious allegiance.
Without those distinctions, the chart risks presenting contested institutional claims as settled demographic facts.
The Verdict: A Real Schism, an Unproven Division
Matt Baker correctly recognized that Anglican Christianity was entering a historic institutional conflict.
GAFCON's March 2026 conference confirmed the seriousness of that conflict by establishing new leadership and formalizing its rejection of Canterbury's governing authority.
But the event did not establish that the world's Anglicans had divided into two approximately equal institutional populations.
Nor did it resolve the competing definitions of membership that make such a calculation difficult.
The continued recognition of 42 provinces by Canterbury, the participation of 37 at its July 2026 council, and the separate institutional strategy pursued by the Global South Fellowship all demonstrate why the eventual outcome cannot be reduced to two simple membership totals.
The central failure of Baker's explanation is that it mistakes a struggle over authority for a completed redistribution of membership.
His proposed solution is to redraw Christianity's family tree.
The evidence points toward a more difficult task: establishing which institutions have actually changed their relationships, what those changes legally and religiously mean, and how many people can be counted without duplication.
Until that work is done, the predicted collapse in Anglicanism's global ranking remains an unverified forecast.
The Anglican schism is historically significant.
That is precisely why it deserves something more rigorous than arithmetic built around an institutional boundary that remains contested.
References
1. Anglican Schism Explained — UsefulCharts, Matt Baker, 2025.
Watch the original video
The original work under review establishes Baker's account of the October 2025 declaration, his expectations for the March 2026 meeting and his prediction of an approximately equal division.
2. The Future Has Arrived — GAFCON, October 16, 2025.
Read the declaration
The original declaration establishes GAFCON's rejection of Canterbury's institutions, its proposed constitutional changes and its claim to represent the authentic Anglican Communion.
3. Invitation for Global Bishops to Attend G26 Abuja in March 2026 — GAFCON, July 11, 2025.
Read the invitation
Documents that GAFCON's March 2026 conference was being organized before Sarah Mullally's appointment was announced.
4. The Abuja Affirmation — GAFCON, March 7, 2026.
Read the affirmation
Establishes the conference attendance figures, GAFCON's definition of communion, its membership conditions and its acknowledgment that constitutional separation may remain incomplete.
5. A Council to Lead the Communion — GAFCON, March 5, 2026.
Read the leadership announcement
Confirms the establishment of the Global Anglican Council and the election of Laurent Mbanda, Miguel Uchôa and Paul Donison.
6. Member Churches — Anglican Communion Office, accessed October 2026.
Examine the membership directory
Shows that the Canterbury-centered institution continues to recognize 42 member churches, including major provinces associated with GAFCON.
7. A Communiqué from the Gafcon Primates Council — GAFCON, May 2, 2019.
Read the 2019 communiqué
Documents GAFCON's claim that its constituent provinces and branches represented 50 million of 70 million active Anglicans; it does not establish a count of formal institutional departures.
8. The Nineteenth Meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council Begins in Belfast — Anglican Communion News Service, June 2026.
Read the attendance report
Establishes that 37 member churches were represented at the 2026 Anglican Consultative Council meeting.
9. ACC Leaves Archbishop of Canterbury's Role Unchanged in Ongoing Talks on Anglican Identity — Episcopal News Service, July 4, 2026.
Read the report
Identifies the five provinces absent from the Belfast meeting and documents the longstanding nonparticipation of Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda.
10. Statement on the Nineteenth Meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council — Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches, July 6, 2026.
Read the GSFA statement
Confirms that nine GSFA provinces participated in Canterbury-centered discussions while maintaining conservative theological positions.
11. Is the GSFA Part of the New Global Anglican Communion? — GAFCON Australia, May 14, 2026.
Read the institutional comparison
Explains the overlapping leadership and different institutional strategies of GAFCON and the Global South Fellowship.
12. Gafcon Women in Family, Church and Society — GAFCON Europe, October 18, 2023.
Read the statement
Documents differences among conservative Anglican churches concerning women's ordination and distinguishes those disagreements from GAFCON's position on women bishops.
13. Statement Concerning Inaccurate Reports in The Tablet — GAFCON, October 1, 2026.
Read the statement
Establishes GAFCON's public rejection of reports about continuing reconciliation negotiations, confirming the movement's stated commitment to institutional disengagement.