reluctance. Some Americans refused to give up either church or king. Of their number, many fled subsequently to a more welcoming Canada.
The end of the Revolution found the church in disarray and distress. Many of its clergy and laity had allied themselves with the crown; a number of these fled to Canada at war’s end. Some who remained became objects of suspicion, as if membership in what had been the English church implied vestigial loyalty to England itself. Still, the remnant persisted, as remnants often will. Indeed, a noted Virginia Episcopalian, George Washington, would become the infant nation’s first president.
Different local jurisdictions began referring to themselves as “the Protestant Episcopal Church,” a convenient way of distinguishing themselves from the English church without puritanically renouncing the headship of bishops—episcopi. In fact, the “Episcopal” name was more pledge than reality. There were at the time no American bishops at all. Three Scottish bishops finally supplied this deficiency in 1784, consecrating the American Samuel Seabury for trans-Atlantic service. The Church of England consecrated two more Americans in 1786. Three years later, the new church’s first General Convention drew up its own constitution and published its own Book of Common Prayer, shorn of prayers for the king but otherwise little altered in tone or language from the mother country’s liturgy.
The new church was basically a confederation of dioceses, geographical units headed by bishops. Its prospects cannot have seemed especially sunny. With just one of every four hundred Americans claiming Episcopal affiliation, some energetic missionary work was clearly indicated. Some—indeed, much—energetic missionary work duly took place. A popular canard concerning Episcopalians has their missionaries arriving in frontier locations only after the railroads got there first. Stereotypes are notoriously hard to put down, but there is no historical warrant for the gibe that Episcopalians, as a body, were luxuriously indifferent to the hard calling of the missionary.
Great missionary bishops like Daniel Tuttle in the far West, Leonidas Polk in the South, and Alexander Garrett in Texas subjected themselves to inconveniences and dangers of every sort as they carried the Gospel to the rawest frontier settlements and outposts. When Helena, Montana, caught fire in 1869, Tuttle captained the firefighters—along with Gentle Joe, a gambler, and Bitter Root Bill, a “desperado.” Polk, a West Point graduate and future Confederate general, whose notable North Carolina and Tennessee family included President James K. Polk, likened himself to a pioneer as he evangelized first Texas, then Louisiana.
Garrett came somewhat later than the others, but his quiet exploits have impressed me since, years ago, I first read his diaries. Whenever the frontier beckoned, which was regularly, he would hitch horse to buggy, bid his family goodbye, and journey forth from Dallas, on meager trails and sometimes through ferocious thunderstorms. Not infrequently he slept under the stars and celebrated Holy Communion on saloon tables. It was all by way of fulfilling the Episcopal calling. Still another great missionary bishop, Jackson Kemper, put the matter thus: “Possessing as we fully believe all those characteristics which distinguished the primitive [Church]:—A scriptural Liturgy—evangelical doctrines—and the apostolic succession—having the form of godliness and the power thereof—may it not be our duty to convert the world . . . !”
If Episcopalians were less outwardly fervent than, say, Methodists, it was largely because Episcopalianism, so to call it, was always a less fervent form of religious expression than others. Dignity and formality are among its enduring hallmarks; also a certain quietude, a particular dignity and self-restraint. It strikes me that one way of describing Episcopalians is as People Who Do Things in a Certain Way—the more so if those certain ways bear the imprint of ancient or just slightly mildewed practice. The Episcopal Church is a place for self-expression, but never in excess. Please.
The church in colonial times had marked itself out as the religious preserve of, to use an exceedingly broad and deceptive term, gentlemen. Gentlemen, as opposed to what? Peasants? Serfs? Not in the least. The church flung wide its doors. What many experienced on entering was, in purely democratic terms, not wholly inviting. First, a hushed and well-ordered worship space; then ceremony—words prayed from a book; music of a certain dignified solemnity; clergy arrayed in distinctly undemocratic-looking (and certainly foreign-appearing) garments that covered most of the body.
Yet the Episcopal Church’s identification with property, education, and social position has some connection to reality. It was not unknown among Methodists in the 1950s (for such I was then) to pass among themselves, not hostile but less than well-pleased, remarks about the grandeur that Episcopalians supposedly imputed to themselves. An Episcopalian was known (quite aside from personal attributes, which often were delightful) for two things: enjoying a nip or two or three on social, and even non-social, occasions, and possessing means larger than most Methodists possessed.
In this there was much exaggeration, as in all characterizations of large human groupings. Certainly some social resentment was on display. The Episcopalians were good enough people. On the other hand, what made them such superior Christians, as Methodists, in peevish moods, sometimes put it? What was so wonderful about a book of written prayers, which happened to be essentially the same book from which John Wesley had adapted the Methodist Communion service?
Peter Taylor limned the perplexity in a short story, set in the middle of the twentieth century: “What a different breed [Episcopalians] had been from their Methodist and Presbyterian contemporaries. They danced and they played cards, of course, and they drank whiskey, and they did just about whatever they wanted on Sunday. . . . There were no graven images in the old church, but the Episcopalians had talked about the church as though it were the temple in Jerusalem itself. That was what their neighbors resented. Yes, they always spoke of it as ‘the Church,’ as though there were no other church in town.”
Whether by accident, intention, or an odd conjunction of both factors, the Episcopal Church oozed specialness. Here was not just any church. Here was one that presented, as Episcopalians saw it, a beguiling blend of all that was best in Christianity—orthodox doctrine; sacramental devotion balanced by devotion to Scripture; intellectual attainment; scholarship; architectural richness; liturgical know-how; good manners; good taste—and, with it all, intellectual spaciousness; willingness if not necessarily to believe a new story, or a new account, at least to hear, as a judge from his bench might hear an arresting new theory of contract law.
Where was the harm in hearing, after all? Some new insight might emerge, some new way of understanding old problems and challenges. In the Episcopal Church no book could be presumed closed. Narrowness of outlook was frowned upon. Narrowness implied both sterility and finality, neither one acceptable to Christians. The globe on which we lived was ever spinning, ever dying, ever renewing itself. A good way to become irrelevant—except possibly for tourist purposes, such as the Old Order Amish served, with their beards and buggies—was to pretend that whatever needed to be known was known. But who was likely to listen long as you argued to this effect?
A distinguished, certainly orthodox, twentieth-century archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, spoke for many when he noted: “Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit we are given fresh understandings and fresh articulation of what has been revealed originally in all kinds of hidden seeds.” Anglicans—Episcopalians—waited expectantly for those seeds to germinate. Meanwhile, tall brass processional crosses led the way to the Altar, where all such questions could be laid with pious expectancy. All would in due course be revealed. The church abided that moment.
It was never, of course, as good as all that. Of no institution, no human grouping or coalition whatever, anywhere, may it be said that ideals and practice are as one. That is not the way of the world. I leave the reader to point out, if he likes, any notable exceptions to that assertion. Unless we are to tarry, I need to mention those special ways in which the Episcopal Church fell short of that specialness to which Episcopal theorists sometimes pretended.
There was first the whole elite aura of the church, its social as well as ecclesiastical propriety. If the Episcopal Church was never really the Church of the Rich, still it welcomed a very large number of the rich, people who endowed it with their own way of looking at life. Clarence Day, Sr., of Life with Father fame, had in the Gilded Age embraced the Episcopal Church as “a