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Ambivalent Churchmen and Evangelical Churchwomen: The Religion of the Episcopal Elite in North Carolina, 1800-1860

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In the present age where doctoral dissertations are expected to be publishable as books, the subject matter needs to be interesting, requiring compelling characters, a conflict needing resolution (involving heroes and villains), and a fair amount of drama to carry the narrative. An interesting title and potentially scandalous jacket cover helps too. Richard Rankin's Ambivalent Churchmen and Evangelical Churchwomen: The Religion of the Episcopal Elite in North Carolina, 1800-1860 - has all of these traits.
The first characters to be profiled are the "ambivalent churchmen." These southern "gentlemen" are characterized as being wealthy, educated, slaveholders who enjoyed the "genteel code of conduct" ("personal integrity, honesty, charity, physical bravery, risk-taking, and hospitality", but also card playing, cursing, drinking, dancing, and dueling). Though many of them were baptized (though non-communing) members of the Episcopal Church and likely would have claimed orthodox Anglicanism, in reality they tended to lean more towards a naturalist, deist expression of Enlightenment religion. Such an arrangement allowed them to enjoy the trappings of genteel culture while still being loosely - or at least ambivalently - connected with the church of their motherland.
Next, Rankin profiles the wives of the aforementioned men. These women also enjoyed the trappings of the genteel class, and valued "beauty, sociability, and polite accomplishment." Like their husbands, they were baptized members of the Episcopal Church and practiced a sort of naturalist, deist permutation of Anglican orthodoxy. Given this social structure that did not place the church at the center of one's lifestyle and priority list, as well as the fact that North Carolina already had the weakest Episcopal Church presence of all the colonies, by the end of the 18th century, the Episcopal Church in North Carolina was almost extinct. Such is the context for the drama for Rankin's dissertation.
Enter the antagonists - evangelical Methodist ministers - who settled down in Eastern North Carolina towns such as Wilmington, Newburn, Edenton, and Fayetteville, causing a shake-up in the community. These ministers were young, energetic, and dynamic - particularly when it came to preaching. This arrival caused a crisis not only in the sleepy local Episcopal Churches, but in the homes of its members as well. The dynamic of the home lives of these genteel Episcopalians was one of patriarchal control. Evangelical preaching and teaching called for, among many things, a more sensitive, nurturing marriage relationship, and certainly condemned the extra-marital affairs that oftentimes were a part of the genteel men's lifestyle. Rankin claims that the genteel women were drawn to these dynamic, attractive young Methodist preachers, and began attending their churches and Bible classes. This caused unrest in the women's homes, as their controlling husbands didn't take well to the uncultured, undignified form of evangelical worship, as well as the empowerment that their wives were experiencing from this type of Christianity. So by the early 1800s, the Episcopal churches and the Episcopal households in Eastern North Carolina were in a crisis.
As mentioned above, every good story needs a hero (or two), and this story is no different. Rankin's heroes are Episcopal bishops of North Carolina John S. Ravenscroft and Levi S. Ives. Ravenscroft's and Ives' Hobartian high churchmanship provided the perfect compromise between evangelical Protestantism (and low church evangelical Episcopalianism, which had emerged on the scene as well) practiced by the genteel churchwomen and the deist, naturalist, Enlightenment-influenced "Anglican orthodoxy" practiced by the genteel churchmen. "...Episcopal ladies may have reached the conclusion that it was better to join the Episcopal Church, where there was some hope of influencing their men to seek religion, than to align themselves with a denomination that completely alienated their men from Christianity." (p. 87) The draw for their men was that high churchmanship didn't have the excesses of lively, extemporaneous preaching and prayer, and it's understanding of piety had more to do with loyal churchmanship and less to do moral behavior. High churchmanship included a suspicion and rejection of ecumenical Bible Societies, revivals, and companionate marriages, as well as an emphasis on hierarchy, patriarchy, decency, and order. By 1830, the surge of the Episcopal Church was fully under way, as the women who previously had abandoned their church homes for the Methodist (and sometimes Presbyterian) churches, began to place the sacramentalism of the Episcopal Church tradition over and above the emotionalism evangelical churches. This surge became more and more visible by the 1850s, as the Episcopal Churches being built were impressive, Gothic revival buildings that showed very clearly that Hobartian high churchmanship movement had prevailed over low church evangelicalism.
Just when the reader thinks that the high church heroes have saved the day, another villain enters the picture for some last-minute drama. This villain was actually not a person, but rather the tractarian/Oxford movement in the Church of England. This movement was very attractive to Bishop Ives, and he took to the continued emphasis on high church polity, worship, and architecture coupled with a new emphasis on moral piety. But once Ives realized that he didn't have the backing from influential, genteel Episcopalians, he eventually rejected the tractarian movement and stuck with Hobartian high churchmanship. Disaster averted, homeostasis retained.
Rankin's story of the Episcopal Church in North Carolina from 1800-1860 has all the elements of an entertaining drama. He does an excellent job of setting up the crisis that developed between elite Episcopalian men and women when the evangelical Methodist ministers arrived in their towns. This history is a terrific example of how the classic "via media" (middle way) of Anglicanism prevailed in North Carolina. The via media in this case was Hobartian high churchmanship - brought to the dying Diocese North Carolina by Bishop John S. Ravenscroft, and continued by Bishop Levi S. Ives. High church Episcopalianism appealed aesthetically to the elite class, and while the lack of emphasis on moral piety attracted the men, the sacramentalism replaced evangelical preaching and teaching for the women. While evangelical Methodist ministers caused a stir early on in the 19th century, by 1860 it was clear that emotional and moral piety couldn't sustain itself among the genteel class in North Carolina. Again, Rankin does an effective job of clarifying the distinctions and intricacies of Christianity among the elite in 19th century Eastern North Carolina.
The foundation upon which Rankin builds his thesis is as much about sociology as it is theology or ecclesiology. This tactic can be risky because he has to base his argument largely upon letters sent between members of the elite class. Thus, by reading particular letters from particular people, Rankin develops a bit of a caricature of the elite North Carolinian man and woman. At times, these caricatures are likely accurate, but at times these caricatures seem to do a lot of the work for Rankin, after all, as the saying goes, "stereotypes save time." When one depicts an entire group of women as being as impressionable as Rankin has done, he runs the risk of appearing to be like the men to whom these women were married. Rankin also loses a bit of credibility with the reader by continually referring to Episcopal priests as "ministers" and to Christ Church, Newbern as "Christ's Church." Such errors lead the reader to believe that Rankin isn't as knowledgeable about some aspects of the Episcopal Church as one would hope. Apart from some of these careless caricatures and errors, Rankin does an excellent job of telling the story of a particular people in a particular context. The story was already there for him, but as any good historian should do, Rankin retells the story in a way that brings it alive for readers today, and as such, readers can begin to discern how this story pertains to the current day.