That Blessed Liberty: Episcopal Bishops and the Development of the American Republic 1789-1860. By Miles Smith IV and Adam Carrington. South Bend, IN: Prolego Press, 2025. 179 pp. $22 (hardcover).
In the ongoing search for Anglican identity, contemporary American Anglicans have understandably looked to the historic Church of England for guidance. However, Miles Smith IV and Adam Carrington suggest that, like their forebears, American Anglicans rely overmuch on “the Old World” as a source for Anglican faith and practice, indulging a taste for “exotic forms of tradition,” “escapist religious traditionalism,” and “anti-American traditionalism that [rejects] the constitutional settlement” (xvi–xvii). Smith and Carrington thus propose that American Anglicans look more to their own history for inspiration on Anglican identity:
This work is not a comprehensive history of the formation of the Protestant Episcopal Church [PEC] in the Early Republic United States, nor is it an encyclopedic record of the lives of the Church’s prelates. Instead, it is meant to provide helpful biographical vignettes of churchmen who exercised noteworthy influence on culture, politics, religion, and society in the United States between the founding of the American republic at the end of the Eighteenth century, and the Civil War. (xxi)
The book covers this historical period because, in the authors’ view, it represents an achievement of unity worth emulating:
While there has never been an era of absolute unity within the Episcopal Church or North American Anglicanism broadly, the first half of the Nineteenth Century saw meaningful cooperation between High Churchmen and evangelicals to perpetuate a unified conception of Anglican churchmanship in the young American republic. (xxii)
Such unity was based on the Thirty-nine Articles—understood to be Reformed, albeit not necessarily Calvinist (xviii)—in conjunction with the Homilies, the Prayer Book, and the Ordinal (148). The lives and accomplishments of the ten bishops narrated herein serve to illustrate this broad unity, practically realized in the growth and expansion of the early Protestant Episcopal Church. Both of the authors are Professors of History at their respective institutions (Smith at Hillsdale College and Carrington at Ashland University), and accordingly, this collection of biographical sketches is a work of history first and foremost rather than an extended abstract argument. The lessons to be learned from this work therefore stem from the history Smith and Carrington present to us.
On that note, while this book was written partly in reaction against the tendency toward Anglican “exoticism” and “anti-American traditionalism,” the authors never spell out which beliefs and attitudes that are characteristic of this tendency they find troublesome. It is possible that what they have in view are American Anglicans who decry the American Revolution (and by extension America itself) as illegitimate. Or perhaps the authors wish to take aim at the notion that Anglicanism must be the established church of a given nation, as it is in England, in order to flourish. The question is germane because the unified Anglican identity they point to as a source of inspiration—one that is firmly Protestant and episcopalian—was once upheld by the Church of England just as strongly as it was in the early Protestant Episcopal Church. In short, it is not clear how, precisely, American-sourced Anglican identity ought to differ from or contrast with English-sourced Anglican identity, in the eyes of the authors. There are possible implications scattered throughout the work, but they never say anything explicit.
All this notwithstanding, the authors do well in holding up for our consideration the broad consensus of the early Protestant Episcopal Church, again, founded on the Articles, Homilies, Prayer Book, and Ordinal. Moreover, although they do not address the topic, it is worth noting that another plank of the early PEC’s broad consensus was the belief that women could not be ordained. If contemporary self-identified Anglicans cannot agree among themselves on the above, the prospect of a unified American Anglican faith and practice remains dim. Even so, what this book adeptly illustrates is that such unity among American Anglicans was not simply possible, but for many years a reality, and therefore it is something we can reasonably aspire to ourselves. Here, as in many other respects, history lights our path forward, and Smith and Carrington have done good work in reacquainting us with this particular lantern.
