REFASHIONING PURITAN NEW ENGLAND: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA,c. 1680–c. 1770

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 85-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Success Story ◽  
British North America ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTThe position of the Church of England in colonial New England has usually been seen through the lens of the ‘bishop controversy’ of the 1760s and early 1770s, where Congregational fears of the introduction of a Laudian style bishop to British North America have been viewed as one of the key factors leading to the American Revolution. By contrast, this paper explores some of the successes enjoyed by the Church of England in New England, particularly in the period from the 1730s to the early 1760s, and examines some of the reasons for the Church's growth in these years. It argues that in some respects the Church in New England was in fact becoming rather more popular, more indigenous and more integrated into New England life than both eighteenth-century Congregationalists or modern historians have wanted to believe, and that the Church was making headway both in the Puritan heartlands, and in the newer centres of population growth. Up until the early 1760s, the progress of the Church of England in New England was beginning to look like a success story rather than one with in-built failure.

Lord Howick and Colonial Church Establishment

1974 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Burroughs
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Dissent ◽  
Special Position ◽  
British North America ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Church ◽  
Civil Government ◽  
Colonial Church

Because the Church of England traditionally formed part of the British constitution, Englishmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often discussed the importance of extending the Established Church to settlements overseas. Yet nothing constructive was done in North America before the Revolution to complete the constitution of the colonial Church or reinforce its special position as the partner of the civil government. There were no bishops in America, and the remote bishop of London was left to supervise as best he could an institution that enjoyed few privileges and displayed an inveterate tendency towards independence. After the American Revolution, however, imperial administrators and colonial churchmen appreciated the need to buttress and reinvigorate the Church of England in British North America. In official circles at least, the loss of the Thirteen Colonies was attributed to the growth of a democratic spirit which a debilitated Church had been powerless to check. British administrators consequently agreed that the dangerous development of republicanism and religious dissent might be thwarted in the remaining colonies by strengthening the position of the Church as the ally of government in the task of preserving colonial loyalty.

Pietism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen C. Guelzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
State University ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Evangelicalism ◽  
The Church

‘Pietism’ refers to a Protestant reform movement, arising in the late 1600s in Lutheran Germany, which turned away from contests over theological and dogmatic identity in Protestant confessionalism and urged renewed attention to questions of personal piety and devotion. As such, it has only the most tenuous historical connections to the Christocentric piety of the devotio moderna or the northern humanist piety of Erasmus or Zwingli. It found its first major voice in P.J. Spener and A.H. Francke, and established its principal centres of influence at the state university at Halle in 1691 and the Moravian community at Herrnhut in 1722. Pietism found followers and allies in the European Reformed churches, in the Church of England (especially through the example of John and Charles Wesley and through the Moravian exile community in England), and in Britain’s English-speaking colonies. In the colonies, pietism not only found Lutheran and Reformed colonial hosts, but also saw in New England Puritanism a movement of similar aspirations. Pietism’s impact on the spirituality of western Europe and America was clearly felt in the eighteenth-century Protestant Awakenings, and continues to have an influence in the shape of Anglo-American evangelicalism.

Mitre Without Sceptre: An Eighteenth Century Ecclesiastical Revilution

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-371
Author(s):  
Frederick V. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Parent Body ◽  
The State ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Religious Body ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Church

The American revolution caused the Anglican churches in America to separate from their parent body: the Church of England. This threw the Episcopalians upon their own resources to rebuild their church. In the process of reorganization, the former Anglicans accomplished an ecclesiastical revolution in respect to episcopacy. For the first time since the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Episcopalians in America made a bishop of a major religious body the elected official of a convention of clergy and laymen. In the second place, the office of bishop in a major denomination was completely separated from the state for the first time since Emperor Constantine officially recognized Christianity in 313 A.D.

The Church of England, 1714–1783

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Violence ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Church

This chapter surveys the history of the Church of England between the Hanoverian succession and the American Revolution. The religio-political questions that bedevilled the English nation during the 1530s remained live ones during the eighteenth century. What sort of Church should the Church of England be? What should the relation of Church to state be? What should constitute the Church’s doctrinal orthodoxy? Whom should the Church comprehend? What were the bounds of toleration? These questions had not been solved at the Glorious Revolution, so that the story of the eighteenth-century Church of England is the concluding chapter in the story of England’s long Reformation. What ultimately brought that particular story to a close was not Enlightenment secularism but the changes catalysed by war and the fear of relapse into seventeenth-century-like religious violence.

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

North America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James B. Bell
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Early America ◽  
Charles I ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
The Church

In step with the gradually unfolding imperial policies of the successive governments of King Charles I and later monarchs, the Church of England was extended to the northern part of the Western hemisphere between 1662 and 1829. Under the supervision of the Board of Trade and Plantations until 1701, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts from that year, decade after decade an increasing number of men of differing origins and places of collegiate education in Britain came to serve missions of the Church in early America. The ranks included natives of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies, who were supported by the SPG or the legislatures of the provinces in which the Church was established. Development was shaped by imperial policies and administration over 160 years amid rising populations, changing political situations, and the consequences of war and diplomacy.

Edmund Burke, Dissent and Church and State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church ◽  
At Home

This chapter examines Edmund Burke’s attitude towards Protestant dissenters, particularly the more radical or rational ones who were prominent in the late eighteenth century, as a way of understanding his changing attitude towards the Church of England and state. The Dissenters who attracted Burke’s attention were those who were interested in extending the terms of toleration both for ministers and for their laity. Initially Burke supported their aspirations, but from about 1780 things began to change. The catalyst for Burke’s emergence as leader of those who feared that revolution abroad might become a distemper at home was Richard Price’s Discourse on Love of Our Country. The chapter analyses how Burke moved from advocating toleration for Dissenters to become a staunch defender of establishment as to have ‘un-Whigged’ himself. It also considers the debate on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as well as Burke’s attitude towards Church–state relations.

Parliament and Church Reform: Off and On the Agenda

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

This chapter examines the interactions between politics inside and outside of the British Parliament as well as the issue of Church reform. Attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century. During the intervening period, Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches along with various acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The chapter establishes the complex route by which challenges to and changes within the Church of England translated into a concern to act among parliamentary elites.

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