Introduction

The 19th century was a time of great action and change in the religious scene in America. Republican ideals and the new sense of freedom offered by America’s vast frontier led to great revivals of religion. Americans questioned the established churches and forged their own religious paths with nothing except personal conscience and the Bible as their guide. Within this context the post Revolutionary War remnants of the established English church remained in America. Many of the parishes left behind stood apart from the evangelical Protestant mainstream that would come to define the 19th century. Others had been touched by the revivals of Edwards, Whitefield, and Wesley’s Methodists and intended to take part in the religious conversation of the first American century.

The Evangelical¹ movement within American Anglicanism is difficult to pin down. The many personalities, regional differences across the nation, and sheer haziness of when an Anglican starts or stops being “evangelical” adds to the confusion. In the mid-1990s three scholars took on the task of understanding the motives and theologies of the Evangelicals of the first century of America’s Anglican church, the Protestant Episcopal Church.² These scholars would address the many personalities of the PEC, the conflicts between church parties, and the successes and failures of a church and it’s diverse theological streams trying to assert and establish themselves in the new, dynamic American Republic.

In reviewing Diana Butler’s Standing Against the Whirlwind, Richard Rankin’s, Ambivalent Churchmen and Evangelical Churchwomen, and Allen Guelzo’s For the Union of Evangelical Christendom³ focus will be given to how each scholar views the Evangelicals’ reaction and adaptability to the evangelical republican mainstream culture of 19th century America and how the Evangelical movement responded and faired in its interactions with the dominant High Church and Tractarian parties within American Anglicanism.

Bishop Charles McIlvaine and the Western Frontier

Introduction

In Standing Against the Whirlwind⁴ Butler provides a view into the development of evangelical Anglicanism by looking at 19th century American frontier evangelicalism through the eyes of Charles Pettit McIlvaine, the second Episcopal bishop of Ohio. For four decades — from 1832 to his death in 1873 —bishop McIlvaine lead the Diocese of Ohio through great Evangelical expansion and established a stable, ordered church on the Western frontier. By limiting her focus to McIlvaine, Butler is able to closely track the American Anglican response in Ohio to the dynamic forces at play across the Republic and the Anglican Communion.

McIlvaine started his ministry as a priest in Philadelphia after which he was quickly called to Christ Church in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. As an outspoken evangelical in the nation’s capital, McIlvaine became popular and served as the chaplain of the US Senate and was later called to be a chaplain at the United States Military Academy at West Point. At West Point McIlvaine ignited a revival amongst the students that brought further national attention to himself and the evangelical movement within the PEC. This attention would lead staunchly Evangelical St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, New York to call him as their priest in 1827. Within the Diocese of New York, McIlvaine found himself in a High Church stronghold; however, his strong leadership of the evangelical movement from that city established him as a leading Evangelical leader. McIlvaine’s strong leadership in a difficult situation would lead to his consecration as the second bishop of Ohio in 1832.⁵

Evangelical Republican Mainstream

Christianity on the Western frontier of Ohio was beset with division and conflict. Christian sects formed continually around all sorts of doctrines and charismatic leaders. These sects argued and debated openly in the public sphere giving little real hope to any sort of practical Christian unity.⁶ Within this atmosphere of chaos and discord, Butler presents PEC Evangelical churchmanship as a, “moderate, third response to America’s revival culture.”⁷ In contrast to the independent, separatist sentiments of new American Protestants and the anti-revival views of the established Anglicans and Congregationalists, Evangelicals would revive the church through “prayer, preaching, the Episcopal liturgy, and Lenten observation.”⁸ Evangelical revivals would be orderly, liturgical, clergy-lead revivals that focused on natural conversion. They would avoid both the enthusiasm of the radical frontier revivalists and the scientific approach of people like Charles Grandison Finney.⁹

The “third response” of the PEC evangelical movement had great success in many parishes across Ohio through the 1840s. The “orderly, decorum, church-oriented evangelicalism” provided by McIlvaine found an audience in those wishing to find stability in the rapidly changing world of the industrial revolution and republican government.¹⁰ The success of the Evangelicals in growing and establishing the once dying PEC gave them, by the 1840s a place on the national church scene and grand hopes of bringing their vision of Christian unity to fruition.¹¹

It is at this point in Evangelical growth that Butler presents a movement that was not able to adequately respond to the critical events of the 19th century. The disunion within the PEC — especially the Evangelical PEC — caused by the national debate on slavery and the Civil War tarnished the movement’s image of evangelical Christian unity. Evangelicals’ own attempts at partnership with the High Church party — sending Evangelical missionaries abroad while High Church missionaries established new parishes across the frontier — set the stage for Evangelical collapse after the Civil War as the first generation of Evangelical leaders passed away with few to follow in their footsteps.¹²

In the end, Butler sees Christian unity within the PEC as something too difficult for the Evangelicals to maintain. Methodists, Baptists, and other Protestants were too agile in their ability to respond to cultural changes. They, unlike Evangelicals within the PEC, did not have to contend with contradictory theologies and ecclesiastical images from their own denomination. Butler’s take is correct, so long as the Evangelicals were the only ones seeking unity in the PEC and the greater world of American Christianity, their “third response” to the revival culture would not have the PEC institutional support it needed to have a widespread, meaningful, and long-lasting impact on American evangelical Christianity.

Church Politics

Prior to the American Revolution the Anglican churches of North America and England were divided into two main church parties; Evangelical and High Church.¹³ The Evangelicals were the party of Whitefield and the Wesleys and focused on a real experience of religion through a “new birth.” Evangelicals supported an impassioned call to all the world for this new life evangelical Christianity provided, to the point that it took precedence over denominational ties. The High Church party focused on the forms of Anglican order and worship seeing the sacraments, episcopal secession of bishops, and the Prayer Book as the central tenants of their faith. For High Church partisans, the Church of England as set forth in the 39 Articles of Religion was uniquely the pure, catholic faith reformed from the errors of the medieval Roman church. In colonial America, the High Church party was distinguished by the distance it held from evangelicalism and revivals — baring Whitefield from preaching in their churches, etc. The Evangelical party was distinguished by its willingness to cooperate with other American evangelicals.¹⁴

In the first three decades of the 19th century, Evangelicals like Bishop McIlvaine forged compromise and cooperation with High Church men and women in the new American PEC. By showing they could give Anglican forms such a baptism, confirmation, episcopal church governance, and Prayer Book worship evangelical meaning, Evangelicals proved to the rest of the PEC that they were denominationally committed. By limiting their involvement in nondenominational mission and tract societies and focusing instead on PEC-exclusive organizations, Evangelicals further showed their commitment to Anglican distinctives over and above generic evangelical Christianity.¹⁵

Just as a lasting union between church parties seemed to be forming in the PEC, a new theological movement from Oxford, England would cause discord in the Anglican Communion in America and abroad.¹⁶ Tractarianism — so called because of its start in several printed theological tracts — saw Anglicanism as third valid and catholic stream of Christianity along side the Roman and Orthodox churches.¹⁷ Tractarians took the views of the High Church party and heightened them by placing the authority of the church outside of the Reformation and Parliament. They also elevated ritual by adding the extravagance and mysticism of the medieval church to their worship. To Tractarians, Anglican forms didn’t just teach good theology, but had merit in and of themselves.

To the disgust of Evangelicals, the High Church men and women in America quickly took to Tractarian views. Tractarianism was highly compatible with existing High Church ecclesiology, increased the distinctiveness of the PEC against other Protestants, and through mystical ritualism absolved the church from having to apply scientific, republican reason to theology. Tractarianism was both a theological and cultural threat to the decades of work Evangelical Anglicans had done in America.

To most Americans, Roman Catholicism was anti-freedom.¹⁸ As Tractarian PEC parishes started looking more and more “Catholic,” evangelical Americans started questioning Evangelicals commitment to mainstream republican ideals. The English were surrounded by remnants of the medieval era and thought nothing of it, but in America medievalism was seen as being at odds with modern reason and taste.¹⁹ The medieval architecture and ritualism of Tractarian parishes gave evangelical American culture yet another reason to mistrust the PEC. In antiestablishment evangelical America, religion had long been the domain of women in the home. Evangelical women in America taught their children from the Bible and maintained the Christian character of their home. Tractarians, by placing greater authority in the church, moved religion out of the home. This was yet another threat to established evangelical mainstream culture.²⁰

In Butler’s analysis, the Tractarian crisis opened one front too many for the Evangelicals. Evangelicals had long pushed back against the mainstream insisting they could both be Anglican and evangelical at the same time. Faced with theological discord within the PEC and public perception issues of the PEC by the greater American evangelical culture the Evangelicals found themselves outnumbered. Bishop McIlvaine tried to stem the tide of Tractarianism in his own diocese — refusing to consecrate churches that took on medieval and Anglo-Catholic architectural forms and preaching against the tracts as he addressed diocesan clergy —, but the appeal was too strong for Anglicans looking for refuge from the turmoil of the 19th century.²¹

Southern Anglicanism: Class, Gender, and Evangelicalism

Introduction

Where Butler looked to Bishop Charles McIlvaine and the Western frontier of Ohio for her analysis of the evangelical movement within American Anglicanism, Richard Rankin analyzed the movement amongst upper-class men and women in North Carolina. Ambivalent Churchmen and Evangelical Churchwomen²² is a study of the reestablishment of the Anglicanism in North Carolina, the PEC’s initial years in the state as an evangelical Christian movement for upper-class women, and how the PEC evolved as it reacted to the changing culture around it in the 19th century as upper-class men began to take a greater role in the life of the church. Rankin’s work studies class and gender as it attempts to unwind the motives for the reestablishment of the PEC from the brinks of extinction in North Carolina’s upper-class society.

Evangelical Republican Mainstream

Prior to the American Revolution, colonial North Carolina had one of the weakest Anglican establishments in English North America. The Church of England in North Carolina was mostly local; small parishes with little influence outside of their immediate communities.²³ After the revolution, the Church of England had all but collapsed in North Carolina. Churches were left unmaintained and without clergy by their aristocratic parishioners. As North Carolina entered the 19th century, she entered it with an unchurched and deistical upper-class.²⁴

With the turn of the century, evangelical worship began to enter the domain of the urban upper-class as the Methodists ventured from their almost exclusive rural focus into towns.²⁵ In North Carolina evangelical worship was not something the upper-class would have previously seen. It was well outside of their norm and, “seemed to violate the thoughtfulness, deliberation, and self-control expected in genteel religion.”²⁶ Evangelical worship upset societal norms and class structure by mixing people of different classes and races into a common space for worship. It also awoke upper-class North Carolinian society to religion as the tenor of republican society and politics took on evangelical overtones and — most shockingly — as upper-class women started attending Methodist and Presbyterian services and experiencing evangelical “new birth”.²⁷

In response to the evangelical awakening of their communities and changes in American culture, the upper-class would attempt to revive and reestablish their pre-revolution Anglican parishes. Initially this was met with limited success, but eventually a stable PEC was established in North Carolina.²⁸ For Rankin the PEC was successfully reestablished for two reasons. First, upper-class men had gradually “lost” their wives to the Methodists and Presbyterians and needed to reassert control of their families and society.²⁹ Second, upper-class women saw participation in the reestablishment of the PEC as a way to exercise “civilizing” control over their husbands and sons by enforcing evangelical moral norms over them.³⁰

No doubt — as Rankin posits — upper-class men did wish to have involvement in the religious life of their wives and children. Evangelical religion and morals were becoming the norm in America and it is perfectly reasonable for upper-class men to want a voice in that conversation — a voice they would not have in the lower and middle-class evangelical denominations. Under the auspices of the PEC, the upper-class had a platform to support their recreational and social activities — such as dances and drinking — against the new evangelical majority. Having a voice in the new evangelical republican discourse of American is a very sound reason for the upper-class to fund and reorganize the PEC in North Carolina.

On the participation of upper-class women in the reestablishment of the PEC in North Carolina it is interesting that Rankin — as a self-avowed “Protestant Christian”³¹ — mainly sees female involvement as a way to establish moral control over men. Religious belief, outside of simple morality, seems to have been what drove upper-class women to evangelical Christianity. The evangelical faith of upper-class women, was not a faith of works. Morality, though good for society and the peace of their families, would not be the focus of an evangelical women towards her husband, father, and sons. An evangelical women would rejoice at anything that brought the men in her life closer to situations that could bring a “new birth” experience. That — true evangelical belief and desire for the conversion of the unbeliever —, contra Rankin, is the driving force behind female involvement in the PEC.

Church Politics

At the reestablishment of Anglicanism in North Carolina the first priests called into the state were Evangelicals.³² To the excitement of the many upper-class women who had been converted to evangelical Christianity under the Methodists and Presbyterians, these early priests of the PEC excluded those who had not experienced the “new birth” from communion and offered sermons in the typical evangelical style.³³ Confirmation — an episcopal action of the bishop — took on evangelical emphasis in early North Carolina PEC parishes becoming tightly bound with the notion of “new birth.”³⁴

The dominance of Evangelicals was to be short-lived, however, in North Carolina. The first bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina, Rev. John Stark Ravenscroft, was of the High Church party. Though Bishop Ravenscroft was sympathetic to Evangelical concerns and did nothing to hinder their cause in the diocese, the High Church theology he espoused quickly took hold in North Carolina.³⁵

Rankin sees two reasons why High Church ecclesiology took such quick hold of the Anglican elite of North Carolina. First, in his analysis, men were drawn to High Churchmanship because it gave them the appearance of orthodoxy while they maintained their previous deistic views. In a theological framework where baptism and right relation to the church — attendance to Sunday worship, financial support of the parish, and moderate curtailment of immoral activity — would make one right with God, upper-class men could maintain their heterodox and deistical views about divinity, reason, and truth while still maintaining a Christian image in the new evangelical society of the American Republic.³⁶ Second, Rankin sees upper-class women drawn to the High Church vision because of what it did to improve their marriages.

In the days before the republic, aristocratic men ruled over patriarchal marriages. It was expected that men could have sexual relationships with servants, slaves, and others while wives turned a blind eye. In the home, the husband set the rules and standards of morality and was beyond reproach. Heavy drinking, duals, gambling, and other activities were the norm. High Churchmanship provided a new vision. The husband was still head of the marriage, but he was expected to live morally, see to the Christian upbringing of his family, and treat his wife with respect as a romantic companion. High Church marriages were a “satisfying synthesis of companionate and traditional styles of marriage.”³⁷ The appeal of such a marriage was strong for Evangelical women, to Rankin over time even stronger than the desire to see the “new birth” in their husbands and sons.

By the 1840s High Church morality had completely overcome evangelicalism in North Carolina. The upper-class of North Carolina in the PEC had developed their own social ethic around their own Southern aristocratic values and the morality of evangelical America tempered by traditional Anglicanism.³⁸ Balancing the religious concerns of Evangelical women with the societal needs of aristocratic men adjusting to a new evangelical republican society, Rankin sees that the PEC established an “important subculture outside North Carolina’s evangelical mainstream.”³⁹ The religious evangelical Christian could fully subscribe to their way of life in the PEC and those who were less committed could continue to remain both in the world and committed to an American church.⁴⁰

When the second bishop of North Carolina brought Tractarianism with him in the late 1840s, Rankin believes it was the strong Anglican subculture established in the 1830s and 1840s that prevented the movement from taking hold as it did elsewhere in the PEC. With a strong local culture and the strong English heritage still cherished by the aristocracy, fear of anything that looked like Roman Catholicism ran deep. For women anything that threatened their High Church marriages was out of the question. The climate for Tractarianism to be accepted just did not exist in the PEC in North Carolina.⁴¹

Evangelical Growth, Disillusionment, and Schism

Introduction

Allen Guelzo’s For the Union of Evangelical Christendom⁴² begins as an overview of the establishment of the PEC, progresses through the growth of the Evangelicals prior to the Civil War, and makes a unique contribution by studying an Evangelical contingent that left the PEC in 1873 to found the Reformed Episcopal Church.⁴³ In contrast to Butler and Rankin, Guelzo focuses on the national Evangelical movement rather than its development in one geographic area. Though the later pages of Union do turn towards becoming a denominational history of the REC, Guelzo still gives thorough treatment to how American Evangelical Anglicans dealt with evangelical, republican America and came to understand their place within American Protestantism.

Evangelical Republican Mainstream

For Guelzo, the evangelical movement in American Anglicanism worked in response to the rapid changes in American culture from the very beginning. In the wake of the American Revolution, Rev. William White of Philadelphia saved the PEC from crumbling by establishing the first attempts at a national Anglican church for the United States.⁴⁴ After the Revolutionary War Americans were naturally skeptical of anything English, much less the remnants of the established church with the English monarch as its defender. In response to these sentiments, White suggested that American Anglicans — like their secular compatriots — reject monarchial forms of church governance and instead elect a priest-bishop for America to be consecrated by other priests.⁴⁵

Another priest in Connecticut, Rev. Samuel Seabury, had less republican views for the episcopacy and disagreed with White’s approach. Though a patriot, he saw no reason why secular republican views should have any impact on the apostolic succession of authority in the English church. Bishops were, to Seabury, an essential element of the church as established by Jesus through the apostles. Seabury went to Scotland to be consecrated a bishop by the Scottish Episcopal Church. White, in response to Seabury’s efforts, convinced the Church of England to regain some element of control over the church in America by consecrating him a bishop under their authority. A few months after Seabury, White was consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other English bishops as a bishop for America.⁴⁶

To Guelzo, White’s ordination meant that the PEC never completely resolved the issues of the nature of the episcopacy and the uniqueness of the PEC in contrast to other Protestant churches. This sowed the seed for Evangelicals’ eventual downfall. Even after White’s ordination, Evangelicals would maintain more republican views of the episcopacy, downplaying apostolic succession and avoiding “Catholic” language. Their goal was to make “episcopacy easy and accessible for all Americans.”⁴⁷ These views initially helped Evangelicals function within and partner with America’s dominant evangelical culture.

Throughout the 19th century Evangelical Anglicans presented themselves in America simply as the original evangelical church and heirs of the Reformation.⁴⁸ Evangelical priests preached from Presbyterian and Methodist pulpits and had no issue working within nondenominational missionary and tract societies. This, to Guelzo, planted the seeds of their undoing. Partnering and worshiping with other evangelicals bred mistrust from non-Evangelical elements within the PEC.⁴⁹ As the 19th drew on, non-Evangelicals reacted to the drastic changes in American religious culture by removing themselves from the conversation and holding to the mystery of the medieval church and the traditions and order of centuries of English Christianity.⁵⁰ Over time, Evangelical Anglicans were seen as a curiosity by many in the PEC and by others as a threat to the new-found solace the rituals of Anglo-Catholicism brought against the American evangelical republican mainstream.

By the 1870s PEC Evangelicals had become a threat to their own church’s response to dominant evangelical culture of the mainstream. Though the goal of the Evangelicals had always been to experience evangelical revival within the PEC without the schisms experienced by the Baptists and Methodist, decades of conflict between the High Church and Evangelical visions for the PEC lead some Evangelicals to a very American solution; secession. As the Southern states had eventually seen no resolution to the tensions in the nation a decade earlier, many Evangelicals saw no way forward for their movement within the PEC. In 1873 under the leadership of Evangelical Bishop of Kentucky, George David Cummins, a half-dozen clergy and several congregations undertook open schism from the PEC to form the REC.⁵¹

Church Politics

The Evangelicals of American Anglicanism had always seen themselves as just one of many valid Christian churches in America.⁵² Evangelicals adapted to the norms of the new American Republic and were ready to mold and redefine their Anglican identity to the new situation. Well-known Evangelicals like William Augustus Muhlenburg saw Anglicanism in its proper form as a sort of universal evangelical Catholicism for America. He and others like him were ready to open the PEC to a broader audience by allowing ordained people of other traditions — without Anglican ordination by a bishop within apostolic succession — into the PEC so long as they held to the 39 Articles of Religion, the creeds, and the Prayer Book.⁵³

Guelzo glosses over the High Church party of the PEC and the compromises required for them to remain in unity with Evangelicals during the early years of the PEC. Instead, he pays greatest attention to the Tractarians who would supersede High Churchmen and break the decades-old unity of the PEC — at least with the more radical Evangelical elements sympathetic to the founding of the REC. Guelzo tracks the Tractarian movement as a reaction to the English Parliament’s meddling with church order and structure in Ireland. Initially it was a movement focused on patristic theology, but quickly moved to medieval ritual.⁵⁴ In Guelzo’s estimation Tractarianism was a response to the industrial revolution as it harkened back to more stable times of hierarchy and order for the aristocracy — the PEC’s core constituency. It also relieved parishioners doubts about divinity and truth in the fast-paced modern world by moving beyond reason to the beauty of medieval ritual.⁵⁵

At the radical fringes of both movements, Evangelicalism and Tractarianism were as compatible as water and oil. High Churchmen and Tractarians wanted to elevate to role of bishops and the sacraments in daily church life and in Anglican theology. Evangelicals focused less on Anglican distinctives and sought partnership and union with other evangelical Christians. So long as the two parties remained united in the PEC they kept each other in check.

Guelzo in documenting a small group of radical Evangelicals who left the PEC shows what unchecked Anglican Evangelicalism looked like. He presents radical Evangelicalism in two great controversies of the early REC. First, in the controversies around the building of a thoroughly Evangelical prayer book for the REC⁵⁶ and second, in the church’s controversy around the proper vestments of Evangelical clergy.⁵⁷

As the new REC is formed debate quickly settles around longstanding Evangelical issues with the PEC Prayer Book. Initially, debate centers only around the objectionable mention of baptismal regeneration and whether all instances of the words priest — too Catholic sounding — should be replaced with minister or presbyter. However, in a matter of only a few years of independence from the greater Anglican movement, historical Anglican distinctives like the 39 Articles of Religion are up for revision, historic Christian creeds are edited and some even proposed to be removed.⁵⁸ In a similar manner, all but the plainest vestments — even traditional Anglican vestments worn since the Reformation — are seen as suspect of non-Evangelical views in the first years of the REC.⁵⁹

Guelzo shows through his documenting of the early years of the REC that the controversies long experienced by Evangelicals in the PEC were not without merit. The High Church and Tractarian elements of American Anglicanism acted as guard rails to keep Evangelicals from succumbing fully to American evangelicalism and becoming just another Christian sect. The Evangelical movement within Anglicanism was not another Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian revivalist movement, but part of a greater Christian tradition with roots at the founding of Christianity amongst the English people.⁶⁰ Unchecked and outside the grater Anglican, Guelzo proves that is it easy for Evangelicals to lose their way.

Conclusion

Twenty years have passed since Butler, Rankin, and Guelzo undertook their studies of Evangelical Anglicans in 19th century America. In that time a great realignment not seen since the travails of that century have occurred within Anglicanism in North America. Once again evangelical theology, traditional High Churchmanship, and Anglo-Catholicism are the topics of discussion among Anglicans. Once again schism has occurred and what it means to be Anglican is under debate. This is the context for this review.

Butler clearly understands theology and the Anglican mindset. In her study she easily tracks the beginning of the Evangelical movement within the PEC through to its apex and slow demise under the pressures of evangelical republicanism and Tractarianism. By focusing on Bishop McIlvaine she follows all the great moments and movers of 19th century Anglicanism as it relates to the Evangelicals without getting lost in side discussions among obscure personalities. Butler articulates an Evangelical Anglican identity that holds the PEC as a distinct, Biblical, and apostolic church that — because of its American context — simply can’t afford to distance itself from evangelicals in other communions.⁶¹ What Butler lacks is a clear study into explaining why the Evangelicals were so able to adapt and compromise with other evangelicals and the traditional High Churchmen of their own church, but could not find a successful way forward with the Tractarians.

Rankin takes on the traditional constituency of the PEC — aristocratic whites — to understand how class and gender came to mold Evangelical Anglicanism in North Carolina. Rankin is strong on his conclusions around gender relations and how upper-class society reacted to the new evangelical republican mainstream culture of America. He falters, however, when it comes to understanding religious motivations outside of a rational academic perspective. To Rankin, upper-class North Carolinians can have social, economic, political, etc. motivations behind their actions, but true religious experience and understanding is never given an equal footing. Many forces were at play in the formation of the uniquely Southern Anglican ethic developed in North Carolina, more attention to religious motivations is needed.

Guelzo, like Butler, tracks the Evangelicals from their early years in the PEC through their slow demise in post Civil War America. Guelzo, however, does not stop at Evangelical demise in the PEC, but follows a small group of Evangelical schismatics and their attempt to establish a purely evangelical Anglican church. Though Guelzo’s unique contribution to the study of 19th century Anglicanism is much appreciated, switching to a denominational history of the REC during the later part of the study leaves lose threads. The Evangelical movement was far from dead in the PEC during the schism. Evangelical luminaries such as Muhlenburg would remain in the PEC until death. PEC Evangelical reactions to the REC are missing from this otherwise great analysis. Without this perspective, it is difficult to gage the radicalness of the REC against the mainstream Evangelical movement in the PEC and the greater Anglican Communion.

Butler, Rankin, and Guelzo together speak for a movement of evangelicals within the Anglican tradition who tried to adapt and find their identity within the quick and dynamic changes of the 19th century. Though no single analysis was perfect, together the picture is clearer. All that now awaits are future scholars to track the Evangelical Anglican movement as it moved underground in the 20th century to experience a shocking reemergence in the 21st.

Bibliography

Butler, Diana Hochstedt. Standing against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America. Religion in America Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Guelzo, Allen C. For the Union of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of the Reformed Episcopalians. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989.

Kidd, Thomas S. George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

Porterfield, Amanda. Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. [Place of publication not identified]: Univ Of Chicago Press, 2015.

Rankin, Richard. Ambivalent Churchmen and Evangelical Churchwomen: The Religion of the Episcopal Elite in North Carolina, 1800-1860. Columbia, S.C: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.