One of the enduring struggles in the history of Episcopalians has been their simultaneous instinct to rejoice in their church’s Englishness and to escape from the stigma of having been an established church in the colonial period, to insist on their genuinely American credentials. The leading bishop in the early Republic, John Henry Hobart of New York, fairly trumpeted his church’s republican and apostolic claims; an English admirer observed, ‘Oh, it was funny to see honest democracy and sincere episcopacy fast yoked in the man’s mind, and perpetually struggling for his heart.’
This is a tension which Episcopalians have never resolved. Their church has continued to be associated with a privileged elite. ‘Up and down the East Coast and across the mission fields of the westward expansion, Episcopalianism appealed to the educated, the upwardly mobile, and the aesthetically sensitive’ (pp. 2-3). For such a constituency, Englishness was an asset, the establishment tradition the source of an honourable ethos of leadership and service to the nation. As Bishop Stephen Bayne remarked, ‘It is perhaps needless to point out that this quality of national responsibility is bred into all of us who are even the remotest children of the Church of England’ (p. 13). In Privilege and Prophecy Robert Tobin offers a meticulously researched and brilliantly engaging account of Episcopalians’ most determined assault on this legacy. A post-war generation of privileged but idealistic and principled leaders placed their church in the vanguard of progressive social reform, determined to do the right thing even at the cost of the prestige, prosperity, and unity of their church.
It is impossible not to admire the sacrificial generosity with which the clergy and laity of this generation (many of them fresh out of the armed services and determined, after so much destruction, to rebuild and reform for good) dedicated themselves to the service of the urban poor and the civil rights movement. The dust jacket of the volume features the mug shots of six Episcopal priests, black and white men all in suits and full clerical collars, arraigned as criminals by the Jackson, Mississippi, Police Department for ‘breaching the peace’ as part of an inter-racial prayer pilgrimage. Jonathan Daniels was an ordinand from New England who went to Alabama to join in the marches for integration and stayed behind to ‘overcome [his] self-righteousness’ (p. 126), registering black voters, tutoring children, and helping integrate the local church. He died a martyr, putting himself between the gun of a local deputy and a teenage black activist, Ruby Sales.
As much as Tobin honours the integrity, determination and sacrificial spirit of the activists, he is also acutely alive to the tensions inherent in clergy from such privileged backgrounds claiming the mantle of prophets, oblivious to the irony of their position of not being outside the corridors of power, but within the establishment. A case in point was Francis B. Sayre, Dean of Washington National Cathedral from 1951 to 1978. He was born in the White House, the grandson of President Woodrow Wilson. A close friend of President John F. Kennedy, he earned the nickname ‘Chaplain to the New Frontier’ thanks to his power base in the liberal establishment. He saw the cathedral’s pulpit as one where truth could be spoken to power and patriotism could be ‘both honoured and critiqued’ (p. 99). Despite his determination to be a prophet, he nevertheless spoke from a position of both privilege and power.
During the 1960s, as public arguments over civil rights and then the Vietnam War turned increasingly violent, the leadership of the Episcopal Church became more and more identified with extreme liberalism, much to the dismay of a majority of the laity, who remained largely white, suburban and Republican-voting. Membership and contributions, as in all mainline Protestant churches, began to haemorrhage. But even as church funds were funnelled directly to support the urban black poor, black Episcopal clergy were sidelined, being deemed (by the privileged white elite) insufficiently ‘attuned to the “poverty-stricken ghetto class”’. ‘Empowerment was to be a top-down affair’ (p. 166). Within a decade, the Episcopal Church’s leadership had moved from equating Christianity with the norms of the middle class to those of the secular progressives, identifying the essence of the Gospel with the ethics of personal liberation.
Although the Episcopal Church long ago forfeited any meaningful influence over the wealthy and powerful, it retains ‘an inflated sense of its own importance’ (p. 248) and the urge to reshape American society is a lingering shadow of its old establishment ideal. ‘If they could no longer be leaders of the culture, then they must become its chief critics. In this way, irrelevance was to be embraced as a mark of integrity, the natural condition of the morally superior’ (p. 249).
To readers in the Church of England, Tobin poses a resounding challenge to those tempted to follow in the footsteps of the Episcopal Church, now ‘a denomination at cross purposes with itself’ (p. 251). Without their common commitment to every community in the land, Anglicans would quickly lose any sense of coherence and disintegrate into a sectarian future defined by various competing tribes.
