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Ok, you activated an "urquan has too many theological opinions for his own good" moment, but I remember a research project I did for my historiography class in college on Anglicanism in America that gave me a decent answer to this question.
My original question was asking about how American Anglicans on the eve of the Revolution dealt with the idea of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of their Church: the British Monarch. Perhaps this was a silly question to ask, but I seriously wondered how you could deal with the cognitive dissonance of belonging to a church whose governor -- not "head", that's what Henry VIII called himself before someone told Elizabeth that calling yourself "head of the Church" sounds like usurping Jesus Christ -- was the very King you were calling a tyrant. I was aware that many of the Founding Fathers were Anglicans, so this seemed like a fruitful area of study.
I focused my research on Anglicans in Virginia (where several of the Anglican Founders were from) in the 1700s, to narrow in on that question.
And I found that, not only was the exact question "how did the Anglican Founders deal with the cognitive dissonance of rebelling against the Supreme Governor of the Church of England" had never been posed in the historical community, but that actually the subject of intense debate among scholars was the much more alarming question, Did Anglicans in Virginia actually care about their religion at all?
I recall one researcher, who wrote an entire monograph about a specific Anglican lady who had a Bible and a journal where she wrote devotional texts about God. And the researcher treated this like she'd found the Holy Grail -- look, everyone, I found an Anglican woman who seems like she had a heartfelt faith in God! It was a revelation. Stop the presses! We have to rewrite the textbooks! Maybe at least one Anglican in Virginia actually did believe in God!
That underscored to me how serious the rot was in the Anglican Church in America, even back then; it really did seem like Anglicans saw the church as a social club, and took or left portions of their faith as it served their other interests. Actually taking religion seriously just wasn't something in the vocabulary of most Anglicans at the time. That was something for those weird revivalists or those Wesleyans with their method.
Having met some Episcopalians, I really do feel like I can take their approach to faith and just push it back a few hundred years, and get a good sense of the scorn or bewilderment with which their WASP ancestors would have viewed intense religious devotion. Or worse,
expelledbasing your morals on an unchanging read of the Scriptures instead of just doing what's high-status.Relevant to the subject of morals, and to the larger topic at hand -- about racism -- many American Anglicans at the time were slaveholders and it was very common for churches to be racially segregated, or for blacks not to be allowed in the church at all. So there's a bit to the Episcopal Church's posture that really is a "we know we were the epicenter of this, we're really sorry."
As far as I was able to discern, in this very limited research project (that included little to no primary source work), the only effect that the American Revolution had on the American Anglican Church was that they changed their name to "The Episcopal Church," to get rid of the whole "Anglo" thing. ("We promise we're good patriots!") Or wait, was it the Protestant Episcopal Church at that time? I think the "Protestant" got nixed at one point because it sounded too much like having a solid theological opinion.
It's also true that a huge number of Loyalists were Anglicans, and so I'm sure if I devoted myself to a more serious investigation of the time period I could find evidence of Anglicans' religious affiliation influencing their views on the American Revolution. Many of these people fled to Canada as it became clear the patriots were winning, so a true telling of the story of Anglicanism in North America (not to be confused with the "Anglican Church in North America", a modern body, that split from Canterbury over gay marriage and is essentially a missionary project of African Anglicans, because as much as Episcopalians like to talk about their tight links to Africa, the Africans think they're apostate for their strong support of SSM) would have to talk about Canada too.
I'm pretty mean to Episcopalians, but really, I guess I'm just as bewildered about them as they would be about me, God bless them.
If you really want to get me started on things that are interesting about Anglicanism, ask me about the Oxford Movement or the "Anglican Continuum." That's where the story becomes fascinating, in both the way that a plane crash and a mathematical equation are fascinating. But you have to find the Anglicans who barely want to be Anglicans before I start getting really interested. (The ACNA people I mentioned above are continuing Anglicans, they're trying to be more Anglican than the Anglicans, and some of them ordain women. Confessional Protestantism in America has had two big waves of schism, once in the 60s-70s over women's ordination and now in the past 10-15 years over gay marriage, and I'm sure at this point all the Catholics and Orthodox in the audience are going "man am I glad we have The Tradition.")
All that to say -- I think Anglicans ~300 years ago had all the seeds of their present situation already planted, in British America more than in Britain. Anglicanism to me has always seemed like the Church of the Compromise rather than a church with a strong set of beliefs, and the American Anglican Church was so eager to compromise with the prevailing winds that they changed their name to obscure their origins. There's an old quip of Oscar Wilde that seems apropos: "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do."
In that sense I don't see their collapse into social liberalism as particularly surprising, in the way that I find the descent of mainstream Presbyterianism and Methodism (which, to be sure, was an Anglican revival movement at first, though it's always had a more independent nature in America) surprising, given the history of those churches in firm confession and rigorous devotion. But I'm sure that's another story for another time, one that you're no doubt more well-equipped to tell than I am.
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