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THREE

We Few, We Happy Few

A BIT MORE ABOUT US, THEN, AS PREPARATION FOR WHAT follows: who we are, we Episcopalians, and how we got where we are—wherever that may be.

As the 1950s came and went, there was much to be said for us, that was for sure. Even non-Episcopalians sensed as much. Not that all delighted in contemplation of the Episcopal Church’s vaunted specialness—its reputation for gentility; the richness and roll of the language that Episcopalians used to worship God; masonry churches smelling of history and ritual; social and economic prestige outsized for a membership easily smaller than that of the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans.

The Episcopal Church was the Church of England grafted into the American colonies, pruned and trimmed after the Revolution to suit changed circumstances but rooted still in the English Reformation of the sixteenth century. It was Protestant or Catholic—sometimes Protestant and Catholic—just as a parish (meaning a congregation) or a diocese (meaning a regional collection of parishes) desired.

In the church’s formularies and traditions could be found warrant for biblical proclamation as the high point of Sunday worship, or, alternatively, for the Eucharistic feast of Christ’s body and blood as the preferred emphasis (in which case “Holy Communion,” as the name for the service, sometimes gave way to the Roman Catholic term “Mass”). There were “high” parishes and “low” parishes, terms that pertained to the parish’s preference for preaching or sacramental celebration, sometimes just to a taste or distaste, as the case might be, for ceremonial detail and display. A “broad church” congregation (the term had more purchase in England than in the United States) was likelier to hear a particular Gospel passage construed as reproaching the social order—say, the capitalist environment—as opposed to rebuking the dark sins of heart and mind.

There was a certain messiness to the Episcopal way of life, as contrasted with the greater tidiness lived out in more single-minded bodies. Yet this same messiness rendered the church capable of attracting a broad range of worshippers, those who got past the persistent rumors of Episcopal snobbiness, or who took the sermon in whatever sense they preferred, finding in the Episcopal Church the perfect blend of everything. It was a Christian body with flair no less than commitment, comfortably—now and again, too comfortably—convinced of its sacred calling and plushy seat in the councils of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

Why such a church, nevertheless? Was it that God, some six hundred years ago—well into the Renaissance—conceived for his people in England a special witness which later was carried to the New World chiefly for the benefit of transplanted Englishmen?

The ways of the Almighty are famous for their lack of what could be called utter clarity. It seems clear at least that His Kingdom in England was faring well even as Henry Tudor, the eighth and most notorious of his name, ascended the throne in 1519. A part of popular wisdom is that Henry “founded” the Church of England so that he might divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Though he managed to achieve both marital goals, he founded nothing, ecclesiastically speaking. He merely (though it was not so “mere” a thing to his contemporaries) transferred headship of a thousand-year-old church from the Pope in far-off Rome to himself and his handpicked counselors and courtiers at Whitehall.

During Henry’s lifetime—he died in 1547—the Church of England remained doctrinally and liturgically quite comparable to what it previously had been, with bishops, priests, and sacraments that closely tracked the Catholic understanding. Afterwards came significant Protestant accretions to faith and practice, and in worship the substitution of English (“a tongue understanded of the people”) for Latin. Such miseries and persecutions as Henry inflicted—for instance, expropriation of the monasteries and the execution of loyal and saintly Romanists like Sir Thomas More—had chiefly to do with the royal desire for revenues and for sheep-like obedience on his subjects’ part. What had been the Church in England became the Church of England, the state church, of which to this day the sovereign remains nominal head.

When Englishmen reached the American colonies, less than a century after Henry’s death, they brought with them, logically enough, the Church of England. At Jamestown, in 1607 (the occasion noted in the church’s previously mentioned New York Times ad), a Church of England clergyman celebrated the Holy Communion under an awning, as Captain John Smith described it, made of sail, “til we cut planks, our pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighboring trees.” It was a moment consonant with the evangelical style for which the church has never perhaps received full credit: resolute, unpretentious, not without significant effect.

Not every colony offered the church hospitality. The Puritans of New England wanted religious matters their own way, but the southern colonies, especially Virginia and South Carolina, embraced the church with some warmth, abandoning it only at the time of their Revolution, and then only with affectionate reluctance. Some Americans refused to give up either church or king. Of their number, many fled subsequently to a more welcoming Canada.

The end of the Revolution found the church in disarray and distress. Many of its clergy and laity had allied themselves with the crown; a number of these fled to Canada at war’s end. Some who remained became objects of suspicion, as if membership in what had been the English church implied vestigial loyalty to England itself. Still, the remnant persisted, as remnants often will. Indeed, a noted Virginia Episcopalian, George Washington, would become the infant nation’s first president.

Different local jurisdictions began referring to themselves as “the Protestant Episcopal Church,” a convenient way of distinguishing themselves from the English church without puritanically renouncing the headship of bishops—episcopi. In fact, the “Episcopal” name was more pledge than reality. There were at the time no American bishops at all. Three Scottish bishops finally supplied this deficiency in 1784, consecrating the American Samuel Seabury for trans-Atlantic service. The Church of England consecrated two more Americans in 1786. Three years later, the new church’s first General Convention drew up its own constitution and published its own Book of Common Prayer, shorn of prayers for the king but otherwise little altered in tone or language from the mother country’s liturgy.

The new church was basically a confederation of dioceses, geographical units headed by bishops. Its prospects cannot have seemed especially sunny. With just one of every four hundred Americans claiming Episcopal affiliation, some energetic missionary work was clearly indicated. Some—indeed, much—energetic missionary work duly took place. A popular canard concerning Episcopalians has their missionaries arriving in frontier locations only after the railroads got there first. Stereotypes are notoriously hard to put down, but there is no historical warrant for the gibe that Episcopalians, as a body, were luxuriously indifferent to the hard calling of the missionary.

Great missionary bishops like Daniel Tuttle in the far West, Leonidas Polk in the South, and Alexander Garrett in Texas subjected themselves to inconveniences and dangers of every sort as they carried the Gospel to the rawest frontier settlements and outposts. When Helena, Montana, caught fire in 1869, Tuttle captained the firefighters—along with Gentle Joe, a gambler, and Bitter Root Bill, a “desperado.” Polk, a West Point graduate and future Confederate general, whose notable North Carolina and Tennessee family included President James K. Polk, likened himself to a pioneer as he evangelized first Texas, then Louisiana.

Garrett came somewhat later than the others, but his quiet exploits have impressed me since, years ago, I first read his diaries. Whenever the frontier beckoned, which was regularly, he would hitch horse to buggy, bid his family goodbye, and journey forth from Dallas, on meager trails and sometimes through ferocious thunderstorms. Not infrequently he slept under the stars and celebrated Holy Communion on saloon tables. It was all by way of fulfilling the Episcopal calling. Still another great missionary bishop, Jackson Kemper, put the matter thus: “Possessing as we fully believe all those characteristics which distinguished the primitive [Church]:—A scriptural Liturgy—evangelical doctrines—and the apostolic succession—having the form of godliness and the power thereof—may it not be our duty to convert the world . . . !”

If Episcopalians were less outwardly fervent than, say, Methodists, it was largely because Episcopalianism, so to call it, was always a less fervent form of religious expression than others. Dignity and formality are among its enduring hallmarks; also a certain quietude, a particular dignity and self-restraint. It strikes me that one way of describing Episcopalians is as People Who Do Things in a Certain Way—the more so if those certain ways bear the imprint of ancient or just slightly mildewed practice. The Episcopal Church is a place for self-expression, but never in excess. Please.

The church in colonial times had marked itself out as the religious preserve of, to use an exceedingly broad and deceptive term, gentlemen. Gentlemen, as opposed to what? Peasants? Serfs? Not in the least. The church flung wide its doors. What many experienced on entering was, in purely democratic terms, not wholly inviting. First, a hushed and well-ordered worship space; then ceremony—words prayed from a book; music of a certain dignified solemnity; clergy arrayed in distinctly undemocratic-looking (and certainly foreign-appearing) garments that covered most of the body.

Yet the Episcopal Church’s identification with property, education, and social position has some connection to reality. It was not unknown among Methodists in the 1950s (for such I was then) to pass among themselves, not hostile but less than well-pleased, remarks about the grandeur that Episcopalians supposedly imputed to themselves. An Episcopalian was known (quite aside from personal attributes, which often were delightful) for two things: enjoying a nip or two or three on social, and even non-social, occasions, and possessing means larger than most Methodists possessed.

In this there was much exaggeration, as in all characterizations of large human groupings. Certainly some social resentment was on display. The Episcopalians were good enough people. On the other hand, what made them such superior Christians, as Methodists, in peevish moods, sometimes put it? What was so wonderful about a book of written prayers, which happened to be essentially the same book from which John Wesley had adapted the Methodist Communion service?

Peter Taylor limned the perplexity in a short story, set in the middle of the twentieth century: “What a different breed [Episcopalians] had been from their Methodist and Presbyterian contemporaries. They danced and they played cards, of course, and they drank whiskey, and they did just about whatever they wanted on Sunday. . . . There were no graven images in the old church, but the Episcopalians had talked about the church as though it were the temple in Jerusalem itself. That was what their neighbors resented. Yes, they always spoke of it as ‘the Church,’ as though there were no other church in town.”

Whether by accident, intention, or an odd conjunction of both factors, the Episcopal Church oozed specialness. Here was not just any church. Here was one that presented, as Episcopalians saw it, a beguiling blend of all that was best in Christianity—orthodox doctrine; sacramental devotion balanced by devotion to Scripture; intellectual attainment; scholarship; architectural richness; liturgical know-how; good manners; good taste—and, with it all, intellectual spaciousness; willingness if not necessarily to believe a new story, or a new account, at least to hear, as a judge from his bench might hear an arresting new theory of contract law.

Where was the harm in hearing, after all? Some new insight might emerge, some new way of understanding old problems and challenges. In the Episcopal Church no book could be presumed closed. Narrowness of outlook was frowned upon. Narrowness implied both sterility and finality, neither one acceptable to Christians. The globe on which we lived was ever spinning, ever dying, ever renewing itself. A good way to become irrelevant—except possibly for tourist purposes, such as the Old Order Amish served, with their beards and buggies—was to pretend that whatever needed to be known was known. But who was likely to listen long as you argued to this effect?

A distinguished, certainly orthodox, twentieth-century archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, spoke for many when he noted: “Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit we are given fresh understandings and fresh articulation of what has been revealed originally in all kinds of hidden seeds.” Anglicans—Episcopalians—waited expectantly for those seeds to germinate. Meanwhile, tall brass processional crosses led the way to the Altar, where all such questions could be laid with pious expectancy. All would in due course be revealed. The church abided that moment.

It was never, of course, as good as all that. Of no institution, no human grouping or coalition whatever, anywhere, may it be said that ideals and practice are as one. That is not the way of the world. I leave the reader to point out, if he likes, any notable exceptions to that assertion. Unless we are to tarry, I need to mention those special ways in which the Episcopal Church fell short of that specialness to which Episcopal theorists sometimes pretended.

There was first the whole elite aura of the church, its social as well as ecclesiastical propriety. If the Episcopal Church was never really the Church of the Rich, still it welcomed a very large number of the rich, people who endowed it with their own way of looking at life. Clarence Day, Sr., of Life with Father fame, had in the Gilded Age embraced the Episcopal Church as “a church [so Day Jr. wrote] managed like a department of a gentleman’s Government. He liked such a church’s strong Tory flavor, and its recognition of castes. He liked its “deference to sound, able persons who knew how to run things, and its confidence in their integrity and right point of view.”

The Vanderbilts, Astors, and Whitneys were among those sound, able persons, as was Franklin Delano Roosevelt—as was John Pierpont Morgan, who, according to Kit and Frederica Konolige, saw the Episcopal Church as “another agency for the improvement of America and the American aristocracy.” By the 1950s, reported Vance Packard, corporation executives were ten times as likely as other Americans to identify themselves as Episcopalians; furthermore, three-quarters of social weddings reported in the New York Times took place in Episcopal churches.

What of it, aside from the potential for class snobbery and reactionary defense of privilege? The question is plausible: little more than that. Superficial acquaintance with nineteenth-century novels could give the impression of a moat between rich and poor, dug and maintained by the rich for their exclusive benefit, impassable except in tales where the factory owner’s son weds the daughter of the head housekeeper or some such. It would be more to the point to note how impermanent is “class” identity in America, given the constant migration upwards and downwards between various classes—the general direction nonetheless being upward—with so-called social lines marked as often by automobiles as by attitudes.