Church History: America once an Episcopalian nation
Friday, April 27, 2007

Statistically no group of Christians held a greater influence over the founding and initial direction of the United States of America than the Episcopal Church. According to the website www.adherents.com, fifty-five percent of the founding fathers were Episcopalian. In addition, Episcopalians comprised thirty-two percent of all Supreme Court Justicesand more than twenty-five percent of all presidents in the past two and a quarter centuries of American history.

The Revolution may have been a “Presbyterian Parson's War,” as King George referred to it, but Episcopalians populated the fledgling nation. This is quite natural: the Episcopal Church was the Anglican Church, the national Church of England. Anglicanism was the official church of five colonies and held sway in most of the others. English appointed governors, military leaders, and land grantees were often required and usually quite happy to maintain membership in the Anglican Church when immigrating to the Colonies. Quite happy, that is, until the Declaration of Independence called for the end of British sovereignty over the colonies. Membership within the Anglican Church calls for submission to the British monarch. National independence led to the reorganization of Colonial Anglicans into the semi-autonomous Episcopal Church.

Comprising just under two-percent of the United States population, it would be easy to write off the Episcopal Church as a church whose power day is past. Yet, it remains a bellwether organization. In 2003, the Episcopal Church consecrated the openly homosexual Gene Robinson as Bishop of the New Hampshire Diocese. This event broke open a torrent that had long been an undercurrent within the Anglican Communion. First, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams issued what amounts to a cease and desist against the Episcopal Church. Then, in their 2006 “Message to the Nation,” the leaders of the Anglican Church of Nigeria made clear their position by declaring their “commitment to the total rejection of the evil of homosexuality which is a perversion of human dignity.” And now, perhaps most telling, is the exodus of conservative Episcopalians to the Reformed Episcopal Church (founded in 1873) and several new Episcopal bodies seeking the blessing and oversight of the British and Nigerian Church. the rest