The American Revolution created a rather awkward situation for Anglicans living in the new United States. The Church of England wasn’t simply another Protestant denomination. It was the established church of England, its bishops operated under the authority of the Crown, and its clergy swore allegiance to the British monarch. That arrangement worked reasonably well when the colonies were British. It became considerably more complicated after Americans spent eight years fighting a war against the king.
American Anglicans therefore faced a question that Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists didn’t have to answer in quite the same way: How do you remain Anglican when you no longer want to be English? The answer eventually became The Episcopal Church, an American church that retained Anglican worship, bishops and theology while severing the political connection with England.
Anglicans in Colonial America
Anglicanism had been present in the American colonies almost from the beginning. The Church of England became particularly influential in colonies such as Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, and several colonies supported Anglican churches through taxation. Anglican parishes became an important part of colonial life, particularly in the South, and some of the most prominent families in colonial America belonged to them.
But American Anglicanism had a problem even before the Revolution. There were no Anglican bishops in the colonies, which meant clergy generally had to travel to England to be ordained. That wasn’t exactly convenient in an age when crossing the Atlantic involved considerably more than finding a cheap flight. After independence, the inconvenience became a crisis. American Anglicans wanted to retain bishops, the historic ministry and Anglican worship, but they could no longer operate as an extension of a church constitutionally tied to the British Crown.
Samuel Seabury
Connecticut clergy elected Samuel Seabury to become their bishop in 1783, but there was an immediate problem. English bishops couldn’t consecrate him without requiring the customary oath of allegiance to the Crown. Asking the first bishop of the newly independent American church to swear allegiance to King George III immediately after the American Revolution would have been a little difficult to explain back home.
So Seabury went to Scotland. The Scottish Episcopal Church wasn’t established by the government in the same way as the Church of England, and its bishops could consecrate him without requiring the oath. In 1784, Scottish bishops consecrated Seabury as bishop of Connecticut, making him the first Anglican bishop in the newly independent United States. English law was subsequently changed so additional American bishops could be consecrated in England, giving the new American church enough bishops to maintain its own episcopal succession.
Becoming the Episcopal Church
American Anglicans organized themselves during the 1780s and eventually adopted the name Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. The name tells you quite a bit about how they understood themselves. Protestant identified the church with the Reformation tradition, while Episcopal comes from the Greek word episkopos, meaning bishop or overseer, and describes the church’s form of government.
An Episcopalian, then, is essentially an Anglican in the American tradition whose church is governed by bishops. The new denomination adopted a constitution, established its General Convention and produced an American edition of the Book of Common Prayer in 1789. The Episcopal Church had inherited Anglicanism from England, but it had adapted that tradition to life in a republic without an established national church or monarch at its head.
The Book of Common Prayer
Like the Church of England, the Episcopal Church has been shaped profoundly by the Book of Common Prayer. That’s important because Anglican identity has never depended entirely on a detailed confession of faith in the way some Protestant traditions do. Anglicans have historically been formed at least as much by how they worship as by a systematic list of doctrines.
The Prayer Book contains services for Holy Communion, Morning and Evening Prayer, baptism, confirmation, marriage, funerals, ordination and other parts of Christian life. It also contains creeds, prayers, Psalms and doctrinal material. If you want to understand what Episcopalians believe, you can certainly read theological statements, but sooner or later you need to attend the service. Anglican theology has a habit of showing up in the liturgy.
What Happens in an Episcopal Church?
If your church background is Baptist, Pentecostal or nondenominational, your first Episcopal service may feel considerably more formal than what you’re accustomed to. There will usually be a structured liturgy, Scripture readings follow a lectionary, and the congregation stands, sits and kneels at various points. Clergy wear vestments, the Nicene Creed is commonly recited, and Communion occupies a central place in worship, particularly in parishes where the Eucharist is celebrated every Sunday.
Exactly what the service looks like can vary considerably. A Low Church Episcopal congregation may feel recognizably Protestant and evangelical, while a High Church or Anglo-Catholic parish may have candles, incense, elaborate vestments and ceremonial that leaves a Baptist wondering whether he accidentally walked into a Catholic Mass. Both can be Episcopal, which tells you something about the unusually broad range Anglicanism has historically managed to contain.
Catholic and Protestant
The Episcopal Church inherited Anglicanism’s peculiar ability to look Catholic and Protestant at the same time. Episcopalians affirm the ancient creeds and retain bishops, priests and deacons. They practice infant baptism, celebrate the Eucharist sacramentally and maintain a liturgical form of worship that reaches back through centuries of Christian tradition.
At the same time, the church emerged from the Protestant Reformation. Scripture occupies a foundational place in its historic formularies, the Thirty-Nine Articles remain among its historical documents, and Anglican theology rejects papal supremacy. Episcopalians don’t recognize the pope as the head of their church. They have enough bishops of their own.
Bishops and Church Government
The Episcopal Church is governed through a combination of bishops, clergy and lay representatives. The basic geographical unit is the diocese, which is overseen by a bishop, while congregations within the diocese are generally called parishes or missions and are normally led by priests. At the national level, the principal governing body is the General Convention, which ordinarily meets every three years and includes the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies.
The church also has a Presiding Bishop, who serves as its chief pastor and primate, but there is no Episcopal pope. Episcopal government may be hierarchical compared with Baptist congregationalism, but authority is distributed among bishops, conventions, dioceses, clergy and laity in ways that can become fairly complicated. Apparently Anglicans decided church government should resemble their theology: orderly, historic and just complicated enough to require an explanation.
Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics
The Episcopal Church has historically contained several theological traditions. Evangelical Episcopalians emphasize biblical preaching, personal conversion, the Reformation and salvation through Christ. Their worship may still be liturgical, but their theology and spirituality can resemble other evangelical Protestants.
Anglo-Catholics, on the other hand, emphasize the sacraments, apostolic succession, historic liturgy and the continuity of Anglicanism with the ancient catholic church. Their services may include incense, elaborate vestments and devotional practices that would have made some of the Protestant Reformers nervous. Between those poles are plenty of Episcopalians who don’t fit neatly into either category. This breadth has always been one of Anglicanism’s strengths and one of its problems: a large tent can hold a lot of people, but it can also contain some impressive arguments.
The Episcopal Church and American Society
For much of American history, the Episcopal Church exercised an influence far greater than its numerical size might suggest. A remarkable number of presidents, politicians, judges, business leaders and prominent families belonged to Episcopal churches. George Washington came from the Anglican tradition, and numerous other American leaders were Episcopalians. This contributed to the popular image of Episcopalianism as the church of America’s social establishment.
There was even an old joke about the Episcopal Church being “the Republican Party at prayer.” History hasn’t been especially kind to that description. The denomination’s political and theological profile changed considerably during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and American Republicans aren’t exactly known today for crowding Episcopal churches on Sunday morning. Still, the expression tells us something about the church’s former position in American culture. It was never America’s largest denomination, but for a long time it was one of its most socially influential.
Women in Ministry
One of the major transformations in modern Episcopalianism involved the ordination of women. The denomination officially approved women for the priesthood in 1976, following several controversial ordinations that had already taken place. Women subsequently became bishops as well, and in 2006 Katharine Jefferts Schori became Presiding Bishop, the first woman to serve as primate of a church in the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Supporters saw women’s ordination as recognition that the Holy Spirit calls women as well as men to ordained ministry. Opponents believed the historic offices of priest and bishop were restricted to men and argued that the church had abandoned both Scripture and longstanding Christian tradition. The disagreement didn’t disappear simply because the denomination voted, and some clergy and congregations eventually left. More importantly, it established a pattern for a much larger argument over biblical interpretation and church authority that would emerge a generation later.
Gene Robinson and a Worldwide Controversy
In 2003, the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire elected Gene Robinson as its bishop. Robinson was openly gay and living in a same-sex relationship, and his consecration became a turning point not only for the Episcopal Church but for the entire Anglican Communion. Supporters regarded his election as an important step toward the full inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians in church life, while traditionalists regarded it as a direct rejection of biblical sexual ethics and historic Christian teaching.
The dispute quickly became international. Many Anglican leaders in Africa, Asia and elsewhere strongly opposed the Episcopal Church’s direction, relationships between provinces became strained, and conservative American Anglicans increasingly sought relationships and oversight from bishops outside the United States. What had begun as a dispute within an American denomination became a worldwide argument over Scripture, sexuality and the limits of autonomy within the Anglican Communion.
Same-Sex Marriage
The conflict intensified as the Episcopal Church moved toward recognition of same-sex relationships. In 2015, its General Convention changed its marriage rites to accommodate same-sex couples. Supporters regarded the change as a development in the church’s understanding of marriage and equality, while opponents believed the denomination had redefined an institution established by God as the union of a man and a woman.
By then, the disagreement wasn’t merely about one bishop or one issue. Underneath the arguments about sexuality was a much larger disagreement over biblical authority and how Christian doctrine develops. One side believed the church could reconsider traditional interpretations in light of a deeper understanding of human sexuality and Christian inclusion. The other believed Scripture had already established boundaries the church had no authority to change. Those competing understandings eventually helped reshape Anglicanism in North America.
The Anglican Realignment
Conservative Episcopalians didn’t all respond in the same way. Some remained within the Episcopal Church and continue trying to maintain traditional Anglican theology from inside the denomination. Others concluded that remaining was no longer possible and left, sometimes taking large portions of their congregations with them.
Some departing congregations and clergy established relationships with Anglican provinces elsewhere in the world, particularly conservative provinces in Africa and the Global South. Property disputes followed because when a congregation votes to leave a denomination, the question of who owns the church building can suddenly make a theological disagreement extremely expensive. Several conservative Anglican bodies eventually came together in 2009 to form the Anglican Church in North America, or ACNA. We’ll deal with ACNA separately, because it has become a significant Anglican body in its own right, but its existence makes little sense apart from the conflicts that preceded it in the Episcopal Church.
Is the Episcopal Church Still Anglican?
The Episcopal Church remains a province of the worldwide Anglican Communion and retains bishops, liturgy, the Prayer Book tradition and its historic Anglican identity. Its critics argue that it has departed substantially from historic Anglican and Christian teaching, particularly regarding Scripture and sexuality. Episcopal leaders and supporters generally respond that Anglicanism has always included theological development and diversity and that the church’s current positions reflect its understanding of the gospel and human dignity.
Those aren’t small disagreements, and there is no worldwide Anglican authority capable of resolving them in the way a pope theoretically could within Roman Catholicism. The result is an Anglican Communion in which churches remain historically connected while sometimes disagreeing profoundly about what Christianity itself requires. The Episcopal Church sits near the center of that controversy because decisions made in an American denomination ended up forcing Anglicans around the world to decide what being in communion with one another actually means.
Membership Decline
The Episcopal Church has experienced substantial membership decline over the past several decades. Some of that reflects broader changes affecting older mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. American religious participation has changed dramatically, denominational loyalty has weakened, younger generations are less attached to institutional Christianity, and many historic churches face aging memberships.
Theological conflict has also played a role. Congregations have left, individual members have moved to other churches, and controversies over sexuality and biblical authority have consumed enormous amounts of denominational energy. It would be too simple to blame the decline entirely on liberal theology, just as it would be too simple to pretend decades of theological conflict had nothing to do with it. Churches rarely shrink for only one reason.
More Than the Controversies
Modern controversies can make it easy to reduce the Episcopal Church to denominational politics, and that would be a mistake. Walk into an Episcopal parish on Sunday morning and the service isn’t likely to begin with Gene Robinson, General Convention or the latest dispute within the Anglican Communion. Scripture is read, ancient creeds are confessed, prayers are offered, and Christians gather around the Communion table using words shaped by centuries of Anglican worship.
That’s worth remembering because denominations are always more complicated on the ground than they appear in theological arguments. The Episcopal Church contains progressives, conservatives, Anglo-Catholics, traditionalists, evangelicals and plenty of ordinary Christians who couldn’t explain the latest Anglican controversy if you offered them a free copy of the Book of Common Prayer. They know the prayers, they know the people sitting around them, and they know this is their church.
From England to America
The Episcopal Church began because American Anglicans needed to answer a practical question created by the Revolution: Could Anglican Christianity survive without the Church of England? The answer turned out to be yes. American Anglicans retained bishops without the king, the Prayer Book without Parliament and Anglican worship without belonging to an established national church. In doing so, they demonstrated something that would eventually become essential to the worldwide Anglican Communion. Anglicanism didn’t have to be English.
But independence created another question that took much longer to surface. If Anglican churches around the world govern themselves, what happens when they begin moving in very different theological directions? For most of American Episcopal history, that question could remain largely theoretical. It isn’t theoretical anymore.
The Episcopal Church chose one direction, while a significant group of American Anglicans chose another. Understanding why they did that brings us to the next chapter in the story: the Anglican Church in North America.