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Bishops and the American Revolution

Walter Sundberg

* Illustration from the “Political Register,”a London newspaper, in Sept. 1769

In the political cartoon* from 1769, an Anglican Bishop, in fear for his life, is climbing the rigging of a ship docked in Boston harbor. His carriage, crook, and miter have been unceremoniously dumped on board. An angry group of colonials stand demonstrating while two of them push the ship away with poles. They are not an unruly mob. They carry volumes by John Locke and Algernon Sidney, two great theorists of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 that secured the power of Parliament over the monarchy and thus marked the beginning of representative government in early modern Europe. What the colonists in the cartoon represent is the desire for political and religious liberty. Against liberty, the office of bishop stood in the way.

We all learned in school about the political and economic grievances that led to the American Revolution in 1776. The Boston Tea Party of 1774 protesting restrictions placed upon colonials to buy goods is part of our folklore. But perhaps because our public schools shy away from the subject of religion, we fail to appreciate the extent to which the debate over episcopal government was a contributing cause of rebellion. “The apprehensions of episcopacy,” wrote John Adams, “contributed...as much as any other cause to arouse the attention not only of the inquiring mind but the common people.”

The situation was this: During the eighteenth century, the Anglican Church pursued an aggressive policy to control American religious life. From its official establishment in Virginia, it moved out to take political control of religion in Maryland, South Carolina, the City of New York, and then North Carolina and Georgia. From its outpost in New York, the Church’s ambition extended to the northern colonies where the Puritan tradition of Congregationalism held sway.

The strategy Anglicans employed was heavy handed to say the least. Under the principle “No Bishop, no King,” Anglican missionaries denigrated Puritan divines such as Jonathan Edwards and Ezra Stiles, implying disloyalty to the crown. Doctrinally, Anglicans claimed that dissenting clergy were not truly ordained to “the administration of God’s Word and Sacraments” and thus lacked the principles of “true religion.” In the Schism Act passed by Parliament, Anglicans required all teachers to be licensed by a bishop, thus attempting to close all schools run by dissenters (The act was not effectively enforced). They also sought to establish an Anglican episcopate directly in the colonies, not only for the purpose of regularizing their polity, but also so that they could take legal control of the income provided by the taxes meant for religious purposes. This aggressiveness put the dissenting clergy (such as Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc.) on the defensive. It also contributed to the general rebelliousness that marked the New England colonies during the 1760s and 1770s and ultimately led to revolution.

Much of the opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765, for example, revolved around the fear that the money raised would be used to pay for, in the words of Ezra Stiles, “half a dozen bishops on this continent.” Hierarchical control of church life would mean an end to liberty and indeed to the fundamental Protestant principle of sola scriptura. “God be thanked,” Stiles wrote, “we are not embarrassed with subscriptions and oaths to uninspired rules for defining truth, in this land of liberty, where the SCRIPTURES are professedly our only RULE.” One newspaper of the time, the St. James’s Chronicle, spoke of “stamping and episcopizing” as two sides of the same “plan of power.” This the colonists would not accept.

Walter Sundberg is a Professor of Church History at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, and a member of the WordAlone Theological Advisory Board