Adam Carrington and Miles Smith IV are good friends, former colleagues, fellow adult converts to Anglicanism from other Protestant traditions, and now co-authors. It is their journey into Anglicanism that prompted their newest book, That Blessed Liberty: Episcopal Bishops and the Development of the American Republic 1789-1860. They ask an interesting question: “Could a church whose head had been Britain’s king have utility in a rising republic defined by rebellion against that monarch? The answer is gloriously yes, as illustrated by this story of ten key Protestant Episcopal Church bishops from the Founding until the Civil War.”
Adam Carrington is Associate Professor of History and Political Science at Ashland University and the author of Justice Stephen Field's Cooperative Constitution of Liberty: Liberty in Full. Miles Smith IV is Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College and the author of Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War.
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Nadya Williams: Could you tell us the back story to this book. How did you arrive at this topic? When did you realize that this needs to be a book that you should write?
Adam Carrington: I need to give credit to Miles for the original idea. He graciously approached me to join in on the project. But it came from a point I had also observed. There seems to be an interminable discussion, especially online, about “Anglican identity.” In that conversation, discussants will look to very recent Episcopal Church history—say, the last 40-50 years. They will bring in various periods in the Church of England (Reformation, Carolinian, Tractarian, etc.). But there is a great omission of the early period of the American Protestant Episcopal Church. And that omission seems to result from a general lack of knowledge about that history. The story is a fascinating one in and of itself. It is also a useful one to current discussions about Anglicanism and the broader American Church, so we thought it needed to be told.
Miles Smith IV: The book began after a series of conversations with my then rector, Alan R. Crippen II. To anyone who has been an Anglican communicant for any amount of time, it’s clear that our churchmanship, while rich, has in recent years not been as seriously prosecuted by bishops. It’s hard to take the role of bishop seriously when the bishops themselves don’t seem to take the laity or the church itself seriously.
This hasn’t always been the case, however, and so the book offered an opportunity to discover more about the history of Anglicanism in the United States, and to learn more about the leadership of the Episcopal Church in the first half of the nineteenth century. We chose this period because that is the era of American history that Adam and I both have the most competency in.
Nadya Williams: Who is your target audience for this book, and what do you hope these readers will gain from it?
Adam and Miles: Our target audience certainly includes Anglicans—both clergy and lay—who would like to know more about these early American bishops and the history related to them. We hope our Anglican readers can see the unity that the Protestant Episcopal Church had in most of the period under discussion. In particular, readers will enjoy learning about the basis of that unity in the Formularies, including the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (our confession), the Book of Common Prayer (our liturgy), the Ordinal (our ecclesiology), and the Book of Homilies (our doctrine preached).
But we also hope other readers with an interest in the history of the American Church and in American history before the Civil War will find this book worth their time and money. The bishops whose stories we tell were engaging with issues of revivalism, the interaction of politics and religion, and the proper interaction between churches—in other words, topics that all of American Christianity to some extent considered in the past and continues to consider now.
Nadya Williams: How did you select the ten bishops to consider here? On a related note, do you have any personal favorites among them? Were there others who were candidates for making it into the book but had to be left out for reasons of space?
Adam Carrington: We looked both for coverage and impact. Coverage in the sense that we wanted to showcase bishops that were both High Church and Low Church/Evangelical as well as those who filled different geographical spheres and different roles (missionary, polemical, etc.) during the time. Regarding impact, we wanted to discuss bishops who exerted substantial influence and who left a mark on the Protestant Episcopal Church in particular and on American Christianity more broadly.
I saw aspects in all of the bishops we covered that I respected. My favorite is Bishop Charles P. McIlvaine. Part of that affinity is geographical: He was the Bishop for Ohio, where I grew up and now again live. But also, I found compelling his love for—and defense of—the Protestant Episcopal Church’s Reformation heritage. He loved to defend the sufficiency of Scripture and that salvation is by faith alone, through grace alone, in Christ alone.
We certainly could have discussed more bishops. Samuel Seabury, the first bishop and one consecrated by the Scottish church, was one we considered for inclusion in the book. Alexander Viets Griswold, Bishop in New England from 1811 to 1843, could have been another fine addition to the group we discussed.
Miles Smith IV: I wanted to get a representative sample of different types of Anglican churchmanship from various geographies. You have in the volume Southern High churchmen and Low churchmen, and Northern High churchmen and Low churchmen. Most of them were among the most prominent bishops in the era. There are a few prominent individuals we have left out—for instance, people have asked why we didn’t include the Bishop of Louisiana who turned Confederate general, Leonidas Polk. But prominent bishops we left out, like Polk, typically were famous for things other than their episcopal service.
The bishops we selected were certainly involved in culture, politics, and society, but all of them saw the episcopacy as their primary mission. We also tried to find bishops who represented important points of connection to the broader life of the nation. The book begins with William White, who grew up in the colonial era, and ends with William Meade, whose episcopacy in Virginia lasted into the second year of the American Civil War.
Nadya Williams: What is something surprising or unexpected that you learned during the process of working on this book?
Adam Carrington: Our thesis from the start was that a general doctrinal consensus existed in the Protestant Episcopal Church. At least, we were sure that a general consensus existed until the Tractarians/Oxford Movement began to exert influence in the States. But I found the extent of that consensus deeper and broader than I’d understood or expected. Differences—and notable ones—existed and we don’t shy away from those. However, this period really did show a coherent understanding of what we now would call Anglicanism. This point even extended to worship “styles.” High Church and Low Church had plenty of overlap in what bishops thought appropriate and not appropriate. Part of the surprise, too, is how “Low” even the “High” would be considered by today’s standards.
One funny story I learned concerned Bishop John Henry Hopkins, the first bishop for Vermont. He met his future wife when finding her and her family stuck in the mud on the roadside! He helped them in their distress and the romance went on from there. I don’t know if I’d call that love at first sight, though!
Miles Smith IV: Like Adam, what surprised me most in studying the Episcopal bishops of the Early Republic was that they did not differ as much as I had been led to believe. There were certainly major areas of disagreement in the era, but for the most part, the Episcopal church was a healthy institution run with sobriety by its bishops. High Churchmen and Low Churchmen in the era, for example, would not have looked very different in worship, and High Church worship and Low Church worship itself would have largely looked the same. I was also surprised at just how small—by numbers—the Episcopal church was in the era. The major growth of the denomination took place in the Gilded Age. Most of the major churches that we associate with Episcopalians—the National Cathedral and St. John the Divine—were built between 1880 and 1930.
Nadya Williams: You both maintain a busy agenda of writing, teaching, and active service for the church. What is next for each of you in these varied realms? What are the big questions that fascinate you in your reading, thinking, and writing?
Adam Carrington: I’m helping with the start of a “Faith and Society” minor at Ashland University that will give students a chance to think about the fundamental questions of justice, truth, the source of law, and the structuring of societies through the lens of Scripture and Church history. On the scholarship side, I also do work on separation of powers in American politics. But, related to ideas in this present book, I have a couple of other ideas in the works. One project is a study of the view of the Church and ministry in the Evangelical wing of the nineteenth-century Protestant Episcopal Church. Another, also related, concerns looking from a political science angle at how the Protestant Episcopal Church understood political thought. I know Miles is working on some similar things on that front, and I hope my work will complement his.
Those projects stem from a desire to build on current efforts to see the Protestant church in general and the Anglican church in particular better equipped to thoughtfully fulfill its God-given mission here and now.
Miles Smith IV: I’ve got a couple book manuscripts in the works. With regards to Anglicanism, I’d like to write a history of the Episcopal Church’s relationship with the US military. I touch on that briefly in my upcoming book on the American idea of the Christian soldier—coming from Davenant Press in time for America’s 250th birthday next year. There is something about Anglicanism that has always been seen as conducive to martial pursuits. Anglicans for example, unlike Presbyterians and Roman Catholics, did not see ordination as something that negated the ability of a priest or bishop to bear arms. Given the prominence of ordained Episcopalians in US wars, especially the Civil War, it’s always been an area of interest.
