Anglicans

Sources

Early Arrivals. Anglicans were first centered primarily in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia. They were included in the diocese of the bishop of London, who paid them little attention in the seventeenth century. Because their clergy had to be ordained by bishops, all of whom resided in England, the provincials depended on whatever ministers would come to the colonies. Few of them wanted to exchange their comfortable parishes at home for the ill-paid appointments, dependent status, and primitive conditions of the southern colonies. Here the laity controlled the church, elected their ministers, and refused to offer them a permanent appointment. Congregations employed the preachers year by year so that they could maintain control. Most of

the clergy who came were the dregs who were unable to find a parish in England. Few offered religious instruction, discipline, or even a moral example to their parishioners. If a minister struck a spiritual cord in individuals, they remained private in their piety and coexisted with their more apathetic neighbors within a formalistic church.

Church and Society. The Church of England was important in Chesapeake life but in a way different from that of the Puritan church in New England or the Quaker meetings in the middle colonies. In the South it served to reinforce the power of the gentry class, who served as the vestrymen of the parish. These men handled all church finances, determined who was to receive public assistance, investigated complaints against the minister, and generally conducted the day-to-day business of the parish. The vestry position was the first rung on the ladder of political power that individual members of the gentry climbed on their way to colonywide offices. Taxpayers were assessed a fixed rate to pay for the minister and the parish activities. Often the tax was figured in tobacco, which almost everyone grew and which the ministers could sell for their support.

Worship. Church services provided the communal rituals that bound these scattered peoples together. The services consisted of prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, reading of the Scriptures, and a sermon; communion was served four times a year. Anyone who had been confirmed as a church member and seemed to be of sound moral character could participate in the Lord’s Supper. Sermons stressed the desirability of deference to social superiors and the moral order of the hierarchical society. Services provided an opportunity for all to gather to exchange news and conduct business before the service began. Once the lower classes had settled down for worship in the church, the gentry paraded in to take their choice pews; sometimes they did not enter at all.

Blair. The arrival of Reverend James Blair in 1689 marked the beginning of the sustained growth of the Anglican Church. He was the Commissary, or personal representative, of the bishop of London, who supervised the colonial church. This energetic and capable man was determined to centralize all church authority and administration into his hands and use it to promote religion and mold the clergy into true spiritual leaders. The gentry in the vestry resisted his centralization efforts, but he did improve the conduct of the existing clergy and attracted more educated ministers to the colonies. As a result of his efforts Maryland established Anglicanism in 1702, as did South Carolina in 1706, creating ten new parishes in the process and encouraging the Charleston elite to erect the elegant St. Philip’s Church.

S.P.G. Blair’s efforts received support in 1701 when Reverend Thomas Bray established the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.) specifically to reverse the embarrassment that the colonial Anglican Church had become to the mother church. The Society provided partial support to ministers in existing parishes and fully funded itinerant missionaries whom it sent to organize congregations and evangelize among Native Americans and slaves. The quality of Anglican ministers improved markedly under this centralized direction, and they spread throughout the colonies, bringing Anglicanism into new areas and reinforcing congregations already in existence. Missionaries brought the message to the southern Yamasee and northern Iroquois with mixed success. However, they made steady progress in converting and baptizing slaves. In New England the S.P.G. expended much of its energy in trying to weaken the dominance of the Congregational Church. The middle colonies provided an exceptionally fertile ground with their large population of recent immigrants who were hungry for religious services conducted by any Protestant minister. When the former Quaker George Keith returned to the colonies as a missionary, many of his former supporters joined him in the Anglican Church. With the full power of the Church of England behind the S.P.G., the missionaries felt secure in emphasizing piety, disciplining immoral laymen, and reporting any ministerial laxity to their superiors in London. In short they began to reinstitute the organization and structure that they had known in England. They were most successful in the urban centers where the wealthy elite was attracted to the broad and liberal rationalism, the dignified worship, and the lenient church discipline that characterized Anglicanism.

Great Defection. At first the missionaries in New England were viewed as outsiders: Englishmen sent to foist the hated Church of England on unwary colonists. This view, however, changed after Timothy Cutler, rector of Yale College, concluded the commencement exercises of 1722 with an Anglican prayer and then led three of the most promising graduates into the Anglican fold. They sailed for England to be ordained and returned to lead churches in the cities. They suffered local harassment and did not enjoy the social status and governmental support of their Congregational colleagues, but their commitment was firm. They were overjoyed at the increase in membership that resulted from the Great Awakening, when those who were tired of emotional excesses sought refuge in the rational theology and orderly worship services of the Anglicans.

Sources

Jon Butler, Power, Authority, and the Origins of American Denominational Order: The English Churches in the Delaware Valley, 1680–1730 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978);

Dell Upton, Things Holy and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987);

John F. Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984).