Founding of the Episcopal Church, Part I

This is the first in a series of six articles containing some background information about the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion that affects Episcopalians in the United States today.  The topic is the founding of the Episcopal Church, and the time period of the story is the 1770s and the 1780s.  The Revolutionary War forced at least a partial cut in ties of the Church of England in the United States with that in England.  The process of thereafter creating a unified Episcopal Church in the new country involved surprisingly great differences in values, differences that at times must have seemed unbridgeable.  It might be tempting to think that the formation of the church government ran parallel to the formation of the civil government, but it did not.  The issues were completely different.  In church organization some people wanted top-down management as in Great Britain, while others wanted bottom-up management as in the theory behind the new United States.  Some wanted high-church ritual, while others wanted low-church ritual.  Some wanted maximum flexibility in the liturgy, while others wanted minimum flexibility.  The six articles describe the process of reconciling these values.  Knowledge of this process and of its success may contain lessons for bridging the current differences within the Episcopal Church and within the Anglican Communion worldwide.  This first article about the founding establishes the setting for the process by describing some of the effects of the Revolutionary War on the Anglican churches in the New World.

The Anglican Church in the American Colonies

The colonists who came from England to the New World brought their religion with them.  Records show a celebration of Holy Communion in Jamestown in the year of its founding, 1607, and by 1632, Virginia had established the Church of England as its state religion, supported by local taxes.  Maryland passed the Act of Toleration in 1649, providing for religious freedom for all Christians, and Anglican churches began to spring up in 1650.  Then in 1692 Maryland established the Church of England as its official church by dividing the colony into 30 Anglican parishes and assessing taxes for the support of Anglican churches and their clergy in each parish.

Adherents to the Church of England tended to move to the middle colonies, from Connecticut through Virginia, while those who felt persecuted

King's Chapel, Boston

as Protestants tended to move to the colonies farther north, particularly to Massachusetts.  In fact, the Puritans in Massachusetts forbade anything connected with the Anglican church until 1686, and only thereafter were Anglican clergymen appointed in that colony.  In 1689, King's Chapel was opened in Boston as an Anglican church.  Meanwhile, Trinity Church Wall Street was consecrated in New York in 1689, and Christ Church in Philadelphia was founded in 1695.  The Anglican churches founded in the colonies north of Maryland in this period and through the late 1700s were set up individually by law with charters establishing them as (private) corporations; no tax money was provided.  Later on, systems were introduced allowing churches and denominations to become corporations through administrative procedures that did not involve individual pieces of legislation.

Carolina was founded as a colony in 1663, and two religious principles were in effect from the start: the Church of England was the established church, and religious dissent was permitted.  Adherents to the Church of England were always in the minority but managed to impose universal taxes starting in 1704 for the support of their own churches.  The reaction to these taxes led to a split of Carolina into a northern and a southern part by 1729 and to a further split carving out Georgia in 1732.  The largest proportion of Anglicans was in South Carolina but was still a minority and still managed to levy its tax.  The Anglicans in North Carolina and Georgia were few enough in number that they did not participate in the founding of the Episcopal Church later.

A year or so after its founding in 1701, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) began to send Anglican missionaries and school teachers to the colonies, especially to the middle colonies and Maryland, and to pay their salaries.  In terms of religious governance, the Church of England in all of the colonies was considered as one "province" under the Bishop of London, who never visited the New World.  That being so, the requirements of apostolic succession made it difficult to generate new clergy; new clergy had to be ordained by an existing bishop, and new bishops had to be consecrated by three existing bishops.  Thus the financial support of the approximately 300 people sent by the SPG during the 1700s played an important role in the viability of the church.  There was no thought in England, however, of sending a bishop to the New World.  Thus people in the New World seeking ordination for themselves had to make the hazardous expensive round trip to England for that purpose.  The absence of bishops affected not just ordination of new priests; it meant that those born in the New World were unlikely to have had Confirmation.  Although some people apparently found the lack of Confirmation to be an impediment to receiving Holy Communion, others did not.

Effects of the Revolutionary War

Christ Church, Philadelphia

The Declaration of Independence changed everything for the Church of England in the New World.  The tax support in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina stopped in short order, and the ownership of church property became a thorny question.  Everywhere the salaries of the missionaries began to dry up.  There were also problems with the liturgy, and these were by no means trivial.  An example will illustrate.  The Continental Congress, which served as the legislative body from 1774 to 1789, from the beginning had invited Jacob Duché (1738-1798), the rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia, to open its sessions with prayer.  Christ Church was located right in the midst of the deliberations concerning independence, and many of the founding fathers were associated with it.  The website of the church boasts that those "who worshiped regularly at Christ Church include George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, Robert Morris, Absalom Jones, Benjamin Rush, John Penn [William Penn's grandson], Francis Hopkinson, and many others."  The liturgy of the Church of England stood in conflict with the intent of the Declaration of Independence:  The service of Evening Prayer, for instance, asked explicitly concerning "our Sovereign Lord King GEORGE" that God among other things "strengthen him that he may vanquish and overcome all his enemies."  Those enemies, of course, now included the United States of America.  Failure to include this prayer in a service could be regarded as treason against Great Britain.

Accordingly,

Extract from Prayer Book, 1763

as the online Library of Congress exhibition "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic" describes matters,* Duché called a "special vestry meeting on July 4, 1776, to ask whether it was advisable 'for the peace and welfare of the congregation, to shut up the churches or to continue the service, without using the prayers for the Royal Family.'  The vestry decided to keep the church open but replace the prayers for the King with a prayer for Congress."  Duché complied.  He was regarded as an American hero, and on July 9 he was elected chaplain of the Continental Congress.  As the British army approached Philadelphia to occupy it in September 1777, Duché stayed with his church, while his assistant, William White (1748-1836), retreated to Maryland.

Duché was arrested by the British but was released later that same year.  Duché, like all priests in the Church of England, had had to take an Oath of Allegiance to the British king at the time of his ordination.  In his case and in the case of many other priests, he consequently had some sympathy for the loyalist cause; it is just that he wanted some changes in the relationship between Britain and the colonies.  He took it upon himself to write a letter to George Washington, who was wintering at Valley Forge, to tell him of the dire situation in Philadelphia and to advise him to stop the revolution.  An annoyed Washington forwarded the letter to Congress, and Duché became an outcast in the eyes of the patriots.  After the British left Philadelphia in the spring,

Jacob Duché

Duché was "attainted" (convicted legislatively without trial) of high treason by a 1778 Pennsylvania statute; he fled to Britain, implicitly resigning his posts of rector and chaplain.  Bills of attainder were forbidden by the 1789 United States Constitution (Article I, Section 10), and Duché returned in 1792 to live out the last six years of his life in Philadelphia.  To settle the legal question completely, the governor of Pennsylvania granted him a pardon in March 1793.

Duché was succeeded as rector of Christ Church by his former assistant, William White, upon White's return from Maryland in the spring of 1778.  White was exceptional among priests in being sympathetic to the movement for independence, and in fact he was the only priest of the Church of England remaining on duty in Pennsylvania as of 1778.  The vacant position of chaplain to the Continental Congress was filled by two people serving jointly, one of them being William White and the other being a Presbyterian.  White served as one of the chaplains until the Continental Congress disbanded in 1789.

The drop in the number of clergy in Pennsylvania was repeated in other states.  Maryland had 53 Anglican ministers in 1776 but only 15 by 1780.  In Massachusetts during the war, even King's Chapel closed for a period and only two Anglican churches remained open throughout.  By contrast in Virginia, which was not affected by the loss of funds from the SPG and which had produced many patriots who were at least nominally Anglicans (including four of the first five Presidents-to-be), the clergy felt closer to the cause of the patriots; as a consequence, many clergy managed to stay.

Outlook

As the Revolutionary War drew to a close, it was apparent that cutting ties with England politically was forcing at least a partial cut of ties with the Church of England.  At the least, questions of organization and liturgy would have to be addressed, and so would the total absence of bishops.  The process got an early start almost by accident. William Smith (1727-1803), an educator from Philadelphia, moved in 1780 to Chestertown, Maryland, in order to found a school that would later become Washington College.  Since he was an ordained Anglican priest, the vestry of Chester Parish offered him the additional post of parish rector, which he accepted.  On November 9 he convened a meeting at Emmanuel Church in Chestertown of three clergy and twenty-four laymen to petition the Maryland General Assembly to provide some degree of public support of religion, in view of the financial strains confronting the Anglican churches.  For organizational purposes the group resolved that "the Church formerly known in the Province as the Church of England should now be called the Protestant Episcopal Church."  The new name was a natural choice; "Episcopal" referred to the historical system with bishops, and "Protestant" meant that the church was founded in the tradition of the Reformation.  It caught on quickly.  The name "Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America" came into semiofficial use nationally in 1785 but was not adopted officially until 1814.  Creating a name thus took essentially only one meeting.  Creating a unified church would take a decade.

--Tony Knapp
 
 
* http://www.loc.gov/exhibits.religion/rel03.html.

Picture Credits
    1.  Modern view of King's Chapel, Boston: Wikipedia, "King's_Chapel".
    2.  Map of Province of Carolina and its subdivision: Wikipedia, "Province_of_Carolina".
    3.  Christ Church, Philadelphia, from an 1811 painting of the 1727 church: www.oldchristchurch.org/history.
    4.  Page of Evening Prayer service as in a prayer book dated 1763: www.loc.gov/exhibits.religion/rel03.html.
    5.  Jacob Duché, University of Pennsylvania archives: www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/1700s/people/duche_jacob.html.
     6.  William Smith: www.famousamericans.net/williamsmith1, image courtesy of www.evisum.com.
     7.  Emmanuel Church, Chestertown, Chester Parish, Maryland: www.rlk.net/emmanuel.