Title: Trends in the Study of the History of the Episcopal Church
Abstract: If the history of the Church is of any interest to the larger historical community it is not because of the church's size or grandeur. Since the American Revolution the Church has been a small church and has regularly lost ground as a percentage of the larger society. Its significance, I would suggest, is the paradoxical relationship Episcopalians historically have had to the larger culture. They have simultaneously found themselves positioned at the center and at the same time on the margins of larger culture. Let me unpack this paradox. The place of Episcopalians in the unofficial Protestant establishment of American society, which held sway at least until the middle of the last century, has been long commented upon. Evidence of representation in the office of the presidency (from George Washington to the senior George Bush), in the Congress, and in elite institutions, and the place and prominence of Church buildings in older American cities have been offered by many sociologists and commentators as evidence of their social status. The Church has been seen both as one of the old colonial churches and as a continual conduit of English culture, and both views have historically heightened its prestige. It has exercised disproportional influence on the officers of the American military, for long periods its churchmen occupying the chaplaincies at both West Point and Annapolis. If there was an American establishment (as E. Digby Baltzell reminded us1) Episcopalians have had a place in it. But then there is the other side of the paradox. On many religious questions that have historically united American Protestant Christians, many (albeit not all) Episcopalians have had an angular relation. If, as many argue, Puritanism helped shape American culture, it shaped a culture different from that envisioned by Anglicans. Furthermore, if, as persons such as Nathan Hatch have contended,2 Evangelicalism shaped nineteenth-century American culture, it is also true that Episcopalians were often uneasy about accepting this culture. Indeed, as the increasing number of studies of early Methodism show Methodism's importance in giving shape to American culture, they serve to reinforce the significance that it was Methodism and not its parent Anglicanism that left its mark on the nation, while Episcopalians have found themselves out of step with the larger culture. It is this tension that has fostered a renaissance in historiography over the last two decades. Episcopalians as the consummate insiders or Episcopalians as elite outsiders have inspired a number of studies. One of the first areas to be reimagined was the history of the antebellum period. Since the late nineteenth century (originating perhaps with the historian Charles C. Tiffany ) a standard historical pattern has been set forth to explain this era. The Episcopal revival was regularly dated to 1811 with the consecrations of John Henry Hobart and Alexander V. Griswold, fathers respectively of the high church and low church, or evangelical, traditions. The high church-low church confrontation was seen as the center of the antebellum story. These church parties clashed like Hegelian syntheses and antitheses until reconciled through a synthesis, i.e., a broad church unity reflected often in the figure of William A. Muhlenberg. This model, though having some truth, was by the 1970s showing signs not only of age but of an uncritical parochialism as well. Hence beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s a number of writers began to place this high church-low church debate within the larger context of antebellum cultural and religious life and thought. I should add that these scholars (unlike the earlier generation of denominationally based writers) were all trained in history programs and approached the denominational question from this broader perspective. In Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical Amenca (Yale, 1986) the author (Robert Bruse Mullin) suggested that the high church movement might profitably be understood as an Old School movement, and as such stood at variance to some of the elements of nineteenth-century evangelical culture. …
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
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