Seventy-three years before the first permanent English colony was founded in Virginia in 1607, Parliament proclaimed King Henry VIII (1509-47) “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England.” This Act of Supremacy (1534) was the first step leading the Anglican Church into the Protestant Reformation. The road was long and troubled because the church retained features of its Catholic tradition (like bishops) while incorporating Protestant ideas and principles into its Book of Common Prayer Puritans in the early 17th century, eager to make the church more thoroughly Protestant, clashed with the authorities of both church and state. The conflict led to civil war (1642-49), the execution of the king, the abolition of bishops and the Book of Common Prayer, and a period of Puritan rule under Oliver Cromwell. The exiled Anglican Church returned with the restored British monarchy in 1660.
This religious and civil turmoil, coinciding with the first phase of English settlement in North America, was mirrored in colonial religious geography. The Anglican Church was established in the Chesapeake area, and the Puritan reformers created their own “Bible Commonwealth” in New England. Although Virginia’s system of parishes, vestries (parish governing boards), and Book of Common Prayer worship established the English pattern, by the 1660s only a handful of clergy served the Virginia church.
The real Anglican growth in North America began toward the end of the 17th century, when Henry Compton, bishop of London (1675-1713), took direction of the fledgling colonial church. On his initiative, instructions to colonial governors included public support for Anglican parishes. In 1689 he compensated for the lack of colonial bishops by appointing James Blair, a minister serving in Virginia, as his commissary (bishop’s representative) to provide a modicum of clerical leadership. By the 1740s the commissary system had become a feature of the Anglican Church in nine colonies. The most pressing problem, however, was the shortage of colonial clergy. In 1701 Compton collaborated with Thomas Bray in setting up the Society eor the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) to recruit and support missionaries and teachers. Providing stipends for missionary clergy and schoolmasters, books for parish libraries, and funds and materials for work among Native Americans and slaves, this innovative quasi-public philanthropy became the major vehicle for the expansion of the Anglican Church throughout the colonies until the American Revolution.
By the time Georgia, the last colony, was founded in the 1730s, the Anglican Church was the religious establishment in all the southern colonies. Except in New York City, it would never gain legal establishment anywhere in the North, but with SPG aid there was vigorous expansion there. Some northern parishes (King’s Chapel, Boston; Christ Church, Philadelphia; Trinity Church, New York) became important centers for growth. New Anglican churches of graceful neoclassical design in imitation of the work of Christopher Wren and James Gibbs in England attracted widening attention, particularly among the urban elite. SPG charity schools opened for slaves, free Aerican Americans, and the poor. In New York City throughout the 18th century, SPG schoolmasters worked with the city’s slave population in the face of fears about the danger of educating slaves. SPG missionaries to Native American tribes in the North and South had only mixed results, although there were notable successes among the New York Mohawk, some of whom became schoolmasters and Anglican lay readers (nonordained leaders of worship).
This northern growth was particularly controversial in New England, where the Puritan founders had built a tightly knit society with its own religious establishment (the Congregational Church). New Englanders looked upon the Anglican Church, with its twin traditions of episcopacy (the system of church leadership by bishops) and prescribed worship by the Book of Common Prayer, as a threat to their way of life. In 1722 the alarm was raised when seven faculty and recent Yale graduates, themselves clergy of Connecticut’s Congregational establishment, declared for episcopacy. Samuel Johnson was among those who went to England for ordination. For decades after his return as an SPG missionary, he planted other Anglican churches in Connecticut and trained a generation of missionary priests to work in New England and the Middle Colonies.
By 1763 the colonial Anglican Church was on firm footing, with parishes, Native American missions, and charity schools in both North and South. It also sponsored two colleges, the College of William And Mary in Virginia (1693) and King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York (1754). One serious problem remained, the absence of colonial bishops to complete its polity. From time to time Anglican leaders had petitioned for a bishop, but in the 1760s they made a concerted effort. Opposition was strong, particularly from New England’s leaders like Boston’s Jonathan Mayhew, who denounced episcopacy as a tool of oppression: “Is it not enough, that they persecuted us out of the Old World? Will they pursue us into the New to convert us here?” When such strong religious emotions combined with rising discontent over unpopular imperial policies in the 1760s, the ground was laid for the American Revolution. The Anglican Church, closely identified with Crown and empire, faced its most difficult challenge in the years ahead.
Further reading: Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984).
—Donald F. M. Gerardi
World History
