In the popular imagination, at least, the American Revolution has become synonymous with anti-monarchism. Left- and right-wingers seek to drape their ideological causes in patriotic slogans and images that could be taken wholesale from Thomas Paine’s radical democratic pamphlet Common Sense. According to this conventional wisdom, the American Republic was founded to become a kind of Anti-England, rejecting the Mother Country’s monarchic institutions and supposedly decadent culture.
Of late, though, a number of dissenting scholars have challenged this simplistic view of the Revolution. Eric Nelson, for example, argued in The Royalist Revolution that a certain kind of monarchism was an essential element of the American founding and laid the groundwork for the institution of the presidency. Richard Alan Ryerson’s magisterial John Adams’s Republic explores, in part, the ways the second president’s constitutional thought incorporated monarchic insights from ancient and modern politics to counterbalance aristocratic or oligarchic tendencies. It is by no means true that the Founders all rejected their British heritage; indeed, many considered the empire as a model of a good regime to imitate in certain ways as they built their own.
The latest contribution to this growing literature is Adam Carrington and Miles Smith IV’s brisk new book, That Blessed Liberty: Episcopal Bishops and the Development of the American Republic, 1789–1860. Through 10 short biographies of the prelates who sought to rebuild the Protestant Episcopal Church in the wake of the Revolution, the authors illustrate how these churchmen and their followers endowed our regime with a certain conservative wisdom that sustained it through turbulent early years. The distinctly Anglican contribution to the life of the American Republic is a vision of ordered liberty we desperately must recover today.
Despite its relatively narrow focus, Carrington and Smith’s volume ought to interest those outside the Anglican tradition. As debates about “Christian nationalism” and other forms of religious authoritarianism engross contemporary discourse about the place of faith in public life, looking back at the history of American religion, especially in the years immediately after the founding, can better inform our responses to various proposals. Beyond understanding our national principles, though, That Blessed Liberty can also help Christians understand how to navigate life in republican or liberal regimes more broadly.
Anglicans in the Early Republic initially struggled to do just that—and their example has much to teach those with discontents today. Although by no means shared by all Americans, the revolution inspired a virulent Anglophobia that led to the decline of the episcopalian church body formerly associated with the Church of England. Many questioned the loyalty of bishops, fearing that they still felt an allegiance to the king and Parliament the Republic had cast off. But faithful Anglicans understood they could not adopt a reactionary program to restore the old colonial order. “The Constitution and American independence,” the authors write, “were by 1789 an accomplished fact, and Anglican churchmen would have to work within the laws of the United States if they wanted to heal their increasingly moribund church.”
One of the most important tasks for the bishops of the new Protestant Episcopal Church, then, was its “Americanization.” They had to take a tradition inextricably bound up with the British monarchy and adapt it to a new republican reality. Carrington and Smith particularly highlight the work of three visionary bishops in this regard: William White, John Henry Hobart, and George Washington Doane. Many of the changes began with liturgy; the Episcopalians had to envision a new kind of common prayer for a republican regime. They also embraced a missionary spirit that led to evangelizing marginalized communities in the Early Republic, such as Native American tribes, and embracing certain kinds of social reform.
It helped, of course, that these early bishops hewed closely to orthodoxy. Although the Episcopal Church always had “High Church” and “Calvinistic” factions—and later a Tractarian element—it remained squarely within America’s Protestant mainstream throughout the 19th century. These bishops were not attempting to introduce new theological principles, Carrington and Smith argue, but rather work out the meaning of the historic faith (including commitments to a particular model of church government) in new circumstances. Although North American Anglicanism has never been a mass movement by any means, its broad appeal throughout time can be found in its fundamental orthodoxy.
This commitment to orthodoxy set the bishops at odds with both revivalism and Roman Catholicism on the frontier. They set out, especially in the Old Northwest, to stand fast against the strange fire of the Second Great Awakening’s religious mania for the sake of the historic faith. The bishops feared that the “democratization of American religion had bred religious disorder dangerous to the souls of Americans and their society.” They therefore built not only parishes but also schools and universities to inspire a more intelligent piety, the orthodoxy of which would be guarded zealously by their episcopal institutions. Meanwhile, they envisioned their efforts to outpace the Roman Catholic Church as a distinctly civilizational mission; by spreading Protestant orthodoxy, they could also further republican principles and oppose interference by foreign empires.
Despite this hostility to religious bodies they considered heterodox, all the American bishops of the 19th century were disestablishmentarians. Still, as Carrington and Smith assert, they did not want to banish Christianity from the public square—rather, they believed that as prelates they “had a duty to not only speak to the civil order, but do so regularly.” For them, Church served as the conscience of Republic. As such, they did not seek to “democratize the Episcopal Church, but instead brought the Episcopal Church to the democratic frontier and created an enduring and uniquely American expression of High Church Anglicanism in what became the American Midwest.”
One of the things that distinguishes Carrington and Smith’s bishops from latter-day postliberals and religious nationalists is their ability to think constitutionally. Rather than grasping after power to try to force the Republic to live according to their particular vision of virtue, they sought to build a series of institutions within the existing regime that could supply it with a greater sense of meaning rooted in faith. This is not a neutral or merely procedural liberalism, but rather participation in a wider public deliberation about the nature of the good life. Episcopal bishops, put another way, practiced the virtues of “reflection and choice” that Publius famously described in Federalist No. 1. They achieved so much over the course of the 19th century precisely because they understood that society is constituted by so much more than political power.
In many respects, Carrington and Smith’s efforts to recover the Protestant Episcopal Church’s historic political theology resemble conservative luminary Russell Kirk’s own attempts in one of his final books to articulate America’s British Culture. While the Michigander acknowledged that the majority of Americans did not descend directly from the English-speaking peoples, he maintained that “the principal features of the culture within which they have their being are British in origin.” From the common law to the unofficial national language, our traditions largely encompass a philosophical notion of freedom first developed on the British Isles. Kirk believed that such a “culture is in perennial need of renewal” and that it cannot “survive and prosper merely by being taken for granted; active defense always is required, and imaginative growth, too.”
By recovering the almost-lost stories of these bishops of the Early Republic, Carrington and Smith have done much to, borrowing a phrase from Kirk, “brighten the cultural corner where we find ourselves.” Not only can That Blessed Liberty provide historical resources to help the North American Anglicans of today, but it also gives churchmen of all denominations a better sense of what it means to be faithful in a distinctly republican context. This is a vital contribution to the history of American religion, and its authors deserve much praise for their pious efforts.
