Phillips Brooks was undeniably one of the most popular preachers
of
Gilded Age America. Sydney Ahlstrom described Brooks and the
liberal Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher as ‘in a class by
themselves, envied and emulated the country over’. Unlike Beecher,
however, the rector of Trinity Church, Boston, subsequently Episcopal
bishop of Massachusetts, has attracted remarkably little scholarly
attention. His few biographers have rarely attempted to place his
thought or career in their social or intellectual contexts. With one
recent notable exception, little of scholarly value has been written
about Brooks. The older biographies have tended to portray him as
initially rooted in the evangelical tradition, even though he subsequently
became a leader of the emergent Broad Church party. Alexander V. G.
Allen concludes, for example, that by the close of his seminary
training, Brooks ‘freely accepted the leading truths which are known
as
Evangelical’. E. Clowes Chorley asserts simply that ‘Brooks
never drifted
from the heart of Evangelical religion’. Allen and others stress
the
evangelical origins of Brooks's thought in order to argue for the
continuity
between the evangelical and liberal streams within American Anglicanism.
This portrayal of Brooks as a churchman who somehow retained the
essence of an early evangelicalism while later embracing his Church's
liberal future has served what Allen Guelzo has aptly called the ‘myth
of
synthesis’ in Episcopal historiography. Such an interpretation does
not
view Evangelicals as being forced out of the Church in the 1870s but posits
a benign creative synthesis that enabled the Church to transcend the
aberrant party battles of the mid century.
Gender and Race in Ministry Leadership: Experiences of Black Clergywomen
