To outsiders, Anglicanism must appear a bit eclectic. Not for nothing has a pundit described it as Lutheran in origin, Catholic in polity, Reformed in its Articles of Religion, Pelagian in preaching, and Augustinian in liturgy. But there is one phrase that such commentators would never add: evangelical in ethos. The popular mind has identified Anglicanism with restrained emotions, a cultured clergy, an affluent laity, sumptuous sanctuaries, and rites drafted in Shakespearean prose. As a youth, this reviewer mentioned the possibility of receiving a superb education at Trinity College, Hartford, an Episcopal institution. His Baptist Sunday school teacher snapped, “I’d think you’d prefer an evangelical institution!”
Yet, thanks to the labors of Diana Hochstedt Butler and Allen C. Guelzo, we can establish how strong the evangelical movement was in American Anglicanism. Both books are well written, intensively researched (and indeed have both received prizes from the American Society of Church History); both tell a story that resonates with late twentieth-century developments.
One must begin by noting that by the end of the American Revolution, New World churches in general were in what historian Sidney Ahlstrom calls religious depression. In 1790, there were only 200 Anglican clergy in all the American colonies, while hardly more than one out of 400 people was a communicant. A decade later, the grand total of Episcopalians was about 12,000. Membership was largely limited to the privileged, or as a rector in Boston put the issue, “The Episcopal Church is a place for ladies and gentlemen.” Moreover, the newly formed Protestant Episcopal Church was forced to rely upon voluntary contributions rather than the traditional subsidies from England. Despite the introduction of bishops, for many Americans a symbol of alien rule, the church acted as a loose confederation of dioceses, not as a single body.
This very slump, however, opened the door for a movement based upon deep conviction of human sin, experience of New Birth, and a warm personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Unlike many groups that placed a similar emphasis on conversion, the evangelical Episcopalians downplayed momentary experience in favor of a life-giving commitment.
Originally, the evangelicals’ main rival was the entrenched High Church party, led by a man whom Ahlstrom suspects was the greatest leader the denomination has ever produced—Bishop John Henry Hobart of New York. This body stressed the real presence in the Eucharist, baptismal regeneration (which involves a moral change in the recipient), the apostolic succession, and the church as the body and bride of Christ. It defined true faith in terms of right doctrine, not vital experience. The Bible alone was not the final basis of authority, for Scripture must be interpreted by the witness of the primitive church.
The evangelicals found their own Hobart in Charles Pettit McIlvaine (1799-1873), bishop of Ohio from 1831 until his death. Quite wisely Butler organizes her study around his life. McIlvaine attended the staunchly Calvinistic Princeton College (technically the College of New Jersey), whose influences never left him. Before becoming bishop, he was rector of a church in Washington, D.C. (during which time he was briefly chaplain of the U.S. Senate), chaplain of West Point (where he led an “unseemly” revival among the cadets), and held a parish in Brooklyn. He would ask his Brooklyn confirmands, “Have you fled to [Christ] and committed your soul to him as all your refuge and righteousness?”
As bishop of Ohio, McIlvaine showed himself a dynamic leader, preaching often, building parishes, supervising the budding Kenyon College, writing theological position papers, and in the process cooperating with Presbyterians and Methodists. He drew the line, however, on the revivals led by Charles Finney and the sectarianism he saw embodied in Alexander Campbell, a founder of the Disciples of Christ. Such Protestantism, he said, manifested the “spirit of reckless innovation, contemptuous insubordination, formal fanaticism and fanatical informality.” At one point, he went so far as to claim that “Episcopacy is the only form of Church-order contained in the Scriptures and manifested from ancient authors” (emphasis his).
Yet, when the Anglo-Catholic movement began, McIlvaine took the lead in fighting it bitterly. To the Ohio prelate, such innovations as incense, vestments, processions, and prayers for the dead were anathema. Furthermore, so he argued, presbyters were not priests, the holy table was not an altar, and the Eucharist did not involve the central sacrifice of Christ. During the Civil War, McIlvaine represented Lincoln on a diplomatic mission to England. (Butler hints that McIlvaine helped resolve the famous Trent controversy, a dubious claim). When the conflict was over, McIlvaine became a fundamentalist, rejecting higher criticism and adhering to plenary inspiration. “It is all God’s word as it is written,” he said of the Bible (emphasis his). He preached the imminent coming of Christ and prepared to do battle with the more Catholic-minded Anglicans over baptismal regeneration. He died in Florence just as schism was portending.
Allen Guelzo, former dean of the Reformed Episcopal Seminary and currently Grace F. Kea Associate Professor of American History at Eastern College, tells the story of this schism and its aftermath. If Butler describes temporary success, Guelzo recounts little but failure. Briefly, what happened is this. In 1873, George David Cummins, assistant bishop of Kentucky, issued a call to evangelical Anglicans to form a new denomination more in line with classic Protestantism. Cummins had particularly been troubled by the doctrine that was McIlvaine’s old bugbear, baptismal regeneration. Moreover, he had been reprimanded by Horatio Potter, the powerful bishop of New York, for participating in an ecumenical Communion service. Some 20 clergy and laity responded to Cummins’s plea, within a year organizing the Reformed Episcopal Church.
Yet almost immediately the new body was in trouble. Authority was so decentralized that warring factions blossomed. Most prominent Anglican evangelicals failed to support the movement. The one person who could give direction to the body, Bishop Cummins, died in 1876. The theology became increasingly reductionist, with crucial passages of the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles altered or omitted. The Reformed Episcopalians have always remained a small body, numbering at most 10,000 today. Over time, they have embraced revivalism, fundamentalism, dispensational premillennialism, Prohibition, and lately Christian Restorationism.
If both authors show great sympathy for their subjects, neither is uncritical. Butler indicts the evangelicals for failing to present their core message in a way that engaged modern thought while maintaining traditional theology. One does wish she had spelled out a bit what they could have done or what a counterscenario would involve.
Guelzo’s account is particularly damning. What he calls “open season” was declared on the Prayer Book and the Articles of Religion, resulting in “outlandish liturgical changes.” All claim of an apostolic succession in the episcopate was dropped. So was the use of the line of the Apostles’ Creed concerning Jesus’ descent into hell.
So too was the reference to “body” and “blood” in the Communion service.
At times Guelzo’s language might be loaded. We get the juxtaposition of “classical Protestant dogma” and “gaudy Catholic ritual.” He claims that the Anglo-Catholics, while restoring “much that was fundamental to the entire Church of England” (undefined), plunged the Episcopal Church into “a world of medievalism, canon law, and prelacy” while at the same time allowing “the mind” of the church “to accommodate itself to modernism” more than would the evangelicals. Moreover, the Anglo-Catholics saw “violence” as the only answer to the evangelical challenge. And far more evidence is needed to bolster Guelzo’s claim that the antebellum Episcopal Church was “the odds-on favorite to become America’s almost established church.”
Mixing what appear to be dashes of Durkheim and Marx into what seems essentially a Veblenite analysis, Guelzo sees the ornateness of Anglo-Catholicism riddled with “the culture of capitalist affluence.” The “silver plates and rich brocades” reflect a transition from commercial capitalism, based upon “the older natural-law ethic of production,” to industrial and finance capitalism, with its “industrial consumer culture.” Indeed, Anglo-Catholicism was “a therapy to drive away cultural anomie.” Its passion for Gothic architecture offered “an international capitalist elite just the right juxtaposition of resistance and acceptance it needed to prosper in an uncertain and complex world system.” Possibly we have here some fancy footwork in the realm of ideas. (For a debate over these and other matters, see the lively exchange between Guelzo and historian Thomas C. Reeves in the September 1994 issue of Anglican and Episcopal History.)
Secession and talk of even more secession plagues the Episcopal Church today. Individual defections continue apace. Reeves, for example, who has only recently published a book expressing the hope that the denomination and others might yet be renewed, became a Roman Catholic in 1997. The story told by Butler and Guelzo is a sobering one, revealing the roots of what have seemed to many to be relatively recent troubles.
Justus D. Doenecke is professor of history at New College of the University of South Florida.
Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
