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The fast-growing liberal-conservative rift within the Episcopal Church has dominated the headlines of late, along with the rancorous exchanges between liberal Episcopalians and conservatives in world Anglicanism. But who are the Episcopalians? And why does their Church-of-England tradition matter in America?

To understand Episcopalianism, you need to know that it arose from the Church of England, or Anglicanism. Remember? —that's the church that divided from Roman Catholicism when Henry VIII needed a quickie divorce. OK, but what are they like? How do they worship? What do they believe?

First impressions of this worldwide communion only confuse: Some Anglicans are into "smells and bells"—the whole panoply of high-church worship. Others do without the trappings. Some take their Bibles with a higher-critical grain of salt and focus on social rather than personal modes of ministry. Others are warmly evangelical, kind of like John Wesley and his Methodists (and there were always Anglican members and ministers who were just as evangelical as the Methodists—stay tuned for our Spring 2004 issue on John Newton, the writer of "Amazing Grace"). Apparently, there's a lot of latitude within this world church.

We'll see in a moment how this latitude is rooted in Anglicanism's early history, and how it shaped the Anglican Church in America.

But the question still nags: Why did Anglicans in America insist on calling themselves "Episcopal"? Why didn't they just answer to "the Anglican church in America"—you know, like "the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)" or "the Church of Ireland—A Province of the Anglican Communion"?

The textbook answer is easily told: Anglicanism entered America as the established (that is, government-mandated and -supported) church of several colonies, including Virginia (where it was established in the early 1600s), then the lower four counties of New York (1693), North Carolina (1701), Maryland (1702), South Carolina (1706), and Georgia (1758).

From the beginning, however, Anglicanism struggled to maintain anything other than titular power as the official church of these colonies. Why? Because of its character as the English national church. Even through the 1760s and 1770s, America lacked its own bishops, so would-be priests had to travel across the Atlantic to receive ordination. As a result, Anglican priests were too few to serve the vast, wild areas of the colonies claimed by their church.

Also working against American Anglicanism's success as an "English" church was the significant number of American Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and others who remembered with no particular fondness the Anglican Church's repressive treatment of their congregations back in England.

And despite the apparent fact that nearly half of Anglican clergy in the revolutionary period supported the patriot cause, their whole church inevitably bore the stigma of loyalism. This is easy to understand: when the head of your church is the king against whose (perceivedly) unjust rule you are fighting and spilling your sons' and brothers' blood, your patriot neighbors are going to raise an eyebrow—at the very least.

It was this stigma that finally led to the name change, from Anglican ("England-church") to Episcopal ("bishop-church"). The title "Protestant Episcopal Church" was born at an American Anglican convention in 1780. By 1789 the name had stuck, and it remained until 1967, after which "Protestant" was (generally) deleted.

Since that time, although it is governed by bishops and officially in fellowship with the mother church in England, this American church does not operate as part of a transatlantic hierarchy, as does the Roman Catholic Church. Its kinship remains on the level of faith and worship.

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47