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In its early years, the Episcopal Church wielded disproportionate social influence within the United States—because its members included so many politically well-connected families. This was true among the founding fathers, and it is still true today.

However, it was also often perceived by members of such "evangelical" denominations as the Baptists and Methodists—both of which arose out of Anglicanism—as compromised in theology. At first theologically Puritan (that is, Calvinist), American Anglicanism became increasingly Arminian through the eighteenth century (that is, it emphasized the human role in redemption, opposing the Calvinist emphasis on predestination).

Its Arminianism alone did not tarnish the Episcopal Church in the eyes of many evangelicals, who were moving along a similar trajectory. But the American Episcopalians were also following another curve. From the beginning, Anglicans had worked to avoid the kind of religious strife that marred sixteenth-century England (think Bloody Mary) and Europe of its adolescence (think Wars of Religion). It prided itself on being "broad"—accommodating a wide variety of views within its "big tent."

Anglicans believe they represent a "via media"—a middle way between sola scriptura Protestantism and tradition-heavy Catholicism. They find their religious authority in a sort of three-legged stool of Scripture, tradition, and reason.

Anglicanism's knack for ecclesiological compromise (that is, compromise in the realm of church politics as well as theology) is associated most famously with Elizabeth I , who held together a nation strained to the breaking point by the strife already mentioned. But the Anglican Church opened its doors not only to a range of theological positions, but also to the influences of the larger culture and learning of the European world.

Twentieth-century ethicist and theologian H. Richard Niebuhr characterized this style as "Christ over culture"—a sense that the best of the arts, sciences, and other branches of human knowledge and achievement could be enjoyed and promoted liberally by Christians, with a secure confidence that God Himself had animated these achievements (whether their human originators had professed Christ or not). Of course, Anglicans, along with Catholics who share the same view, would hasten to add that none of these areas of human enterprise can be "complete" without the redemptive influence of Christ.

Given all of these tendencies, we can see why British and American Anglicans gravitated in the eighteenth century to more "reasonable" versions of their faith—including the deist vision of the Watchmaker God. (In such an intentionally broad and accommodating church, the desire naturally arises in our own time to open the ministry to as wide a group of people as possible—hence the current strife over homosexual ordination.)

Also keeping early Anglicans from sharing many of their Christian compatriots' evangelical fervor was the distracting power of wealth and social influence. Indeed, early American Anglicanism seems, for some of its adherents, to have amounted to a sort of counter in the social game—a token of status to be enjoyed, moderately, with others of one's class, as long as it didn't interfere with equally enjoyable pastimes such as horse-racing, dancing, and drinking.

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47