Anglicanism is a tradition of Christianity that began with the Church of England and has since grown into a worldwide family of churches known as the Anglican Communion. It traces its distinct identity to the English Reformation of the sixteenth century, when the Church of England separated from the authority of Rome under Henry VIII and, over the following decades, developed its own settled form of doctrine and worship under Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and their archbishops of Canterbury, most notably Thomas Cranmer.
Rather than aligning fully with either Roman Catholicism or the continental Protestant Reformers, Anglicanism developed as a via media, or “middle way.” It kept much of the historic Western Church's liturgy, sacraments, and bishop-led (episcopal) structure, while adopting Reformation convictions such as worship in the language of the people, rather than Latin, and the central authority of Scripture.
Today, Anglicanism is expressed through roughly 40 self-governing national and regional churches — called provinces — with an estimated 85 million members worldwide. These provinces are independent of one another in governance, but remain in communion, sharing recognisable patterns of worship, doctrine, and ministry, and are loosely connected through the Archbishop of Canterbury and other shared “Instruments of Communion.”
What distinguishes Anglicanism from many other Christian traditions is not a single distinctive doctrine so much as this particular combination: catholic in structure and sacrament, reformed in its appeal to Scripture, and comfortable holding a genuine range of theological emphasis — from Anglo-Catholic to Evangelical — within one communion rather than splitting into separate denominations.