The Church of England in Colonial America

The Church of England arrived in America with the Jamestown settlers of 1607 and was the first Protestant religious group to establish a permanent presence in North America. It was eventually established in all of the Southern colonies—Virginia (1619), North Carolina (1701), Maryland (1702), South Carolina (1706), and Georgia (1758)—and the four lower counties of New York (1693).

Its chief strongholds were Virginia and Maryland, which together contained 80 percent of colonial Anglicans by 1700. But oceanic separation from England and the pattern of widely scattered settlement along the region’s rivers restricted its growth, for its parish system proved ill suited to the new conditions. The parishes established by the Virginia and Maryland legislatures were thousands of miles from the ruling bishop of London and tended to be excessively large, difficult to traverse, and continually short of clergy. Anglicans in those colonies therefore altered the traditional system by lodging control of day-to-day parish affairs with elected trustees called vestries.

Often neglected by the mother church overseas, the colonial church suffered a chronic lack of resources. Many parishes lacked meetinghouses, parish houses, and glebes (land owned by the parish). English clergy avoided colonial service, and those who did serve in the colonies were often poor in quality and subject to the authority of the vestries. The expensive and dangerous ocean crossing required for ordination, meanwhile, discouraged would-be American-born clergy. Moreover, Anglicanism’s doctrinal latitude allowed many of the laity to shed their Protestant beliefs and church commitments amid the 18th-century Enlightenment. The weak Anglican establishment that resulted was ill equipped to compete effectively with the Baptists and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians that settled the Southern backcountry during the 18th century.

To be sure, Anglicanism was the second-largest colonial denomination in 1700, encompassing more than a hundred churches from Massachusetts to South Carolina. After the 1701 founding in Maryland of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), which provided a crucial transoceanic link to England, it enjoyed even greater strength and institutional presence. The SPG financed the construction of church buildings and sponsored more than 300 colonial missionaries—especially in Puritan New England—by the end of the American Revolution. It was less successful among Indians and slaves than among whites, but key conversions among Pennsylvania Quakers and Connecticut Congregationalists generated substantial growth in those colonies.

Still, the church remained weak, and events of the 18th century weakened it further. Southerners fired by the Great Awakening’s antiestablishment message—especially those in the backcountry—were inclined to mistrust Anglican tepidity toward revivalism and its perceived association with the tidewater gentry. Anglicans themselves divided into prorevival and antirevival parties beginning in the 1760s. The onset of the American Revolution increased suspicions of Anglicanism nationwide, for Anglican clergy were suspected of loyalism, and the SPG’s push for an American bishop in the 1760s added a religious dimension to American fears of British imperial power. The migration of Anglican clergy who were in fact loyalist aggravated the church’s institutional anemia, as did its disestablishment in America in the 1780s at the hands of dissenting Rationalists, Baptists, and Presbyterians.

The Church of England survived in the geographic and political isolation of the new United States, but only after an agreement by English bishops to consecrate American bishops paved the way for ordinations west of the Atlantic, and only after it changed its name to the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.