Between 1785 and 1788 two major Protestant groups—parishioners in the Church of England and Presbyterians—confronted the political changes that occurred because of the founding of the American republic in the preceding decade and the promulgation of the United States’ constitution in 1788. Presbyterians in the 21st Century are debating the meaning of the revisions to Westminster, which, if not revolutionary, were certainly substantive enough to remake what at least some Presbyterians believed about the magistrate entirely. Kevin DeYoung noted that “there is no doubt that Witherspoon’s public words and public actions represent a significant shift in the way many Protestants (at least in America) viewed the role of the civil magistrate.” There was not “a straight line of continuity from the Westminster Assembly to the New England Puritans to the American Founders.” The Presbyterian revisions were “a far cry from the opinion of the Westminster divines that the civil magistrate should suppress blasphemy and heresy.” American Presbyterians of 1788 “believed that the task of reforming the character of the people belonged to the church, and that the duty of the magistrate, therefore, was to secure the rights of conscience—equally and impartially—so that the church can freely exercise its own discipline and discipleship.”
The political theology of Episcopalians was paradoxically less wedded to the political theories of American revolutionaries and more attached to the specific relationship between the church and the magistrate. When Samuel Seabury was elected bishop by Connecticut, his break with the King was predicated on a preexisting theocratic understanding of political theology that continued even after he was consecrated by Scottish bishops for the new republic. Episcopalians changed more who, and less what, they believed constituted the relationship between the church and the magistrate. This belied the changes of Article 37 made by the Episcopal Church in 1801. A full-throated annunciation of the King’s relationship to the church was turned in to a simple affirmation of what constituted a broad affirmation of the Magisterial Reformers’ understanding of church and state:
“The Power of the Civil Magistrate extendeth to all men, as well Clergy as Laity, in all things temporal; but hath no authority in things purely spiritual.
And we hold it to be the duty of all men who are professors of the Gospel, to pay respectful obedience to the Civil Authority, regularly and legitimately constituted.”
There were, in the Episcopal economy of religion, things sacred and purely spiritual—the sacraments, and ordination—and things both secular and spiritual; Anglicans still call vestry, for example, the secular officers of the church. Politics was also secular and secular, in the sense that the sacrament of baptism, among other things, ushered men and women in to both the sacred association of the church and the secular political order. Episcopalians accepted the disentanglement of church and state in the American republic, but they did not renegotiate their political theology to the extent that Presbyterians did.
Throughout the 19th Century, Episcopalians made it clear that they accepted disestablishment, but would not, and could not, accept the terms of liberalism writ large, even as they accommodated various aspects of it. New England-born Bishop Nathaniel Bowen of South Carolina told seminarians that he knew that “in contemplating the Christian ministry for your calling,” they had questions about “condition in reference to the governments under which we live.” Bowen conceded they had a right to ask about political theology, even as the believed it was of secondary importance. “The question is not here to be touched, whether in its provisions, where religion is concerned, the constitution of the United States has been settled in the best and wisest manner that it could have been, as to an interest universally admitted to be vitally important to the civil state; nor whether in reference to that interest, the silence of the constitutions, in particular of the States, best consists with sound and wholesome policy.” Bowen believed that Episcopalians would have to do something Presbyterians seemed clinically unable to do: agree to disagree.
“It is enough for us to avail ourselves of the freedom of action to which we are left, for the advancement of that interest, according to our impression of the principles of which it consists; and rejoice in any degree and manner in which we may see it minister to the happiness and welfare of our country. The question, indeed, of the wisdom and benefit of civil legislation, in reference to religion, to any extent further than that which gives protection to its operations, and security to its institutions, is one on which the wisest and most experienced in human [6/7] affairs, may be expected very widely to differ; nor are we, perhaps, yet in possession of any results of legislation on the subject, sufficient for the satisfactory determination of the mind, given the most anxiously and laboriously to its investigation.”
Presbyterians’ unwillingness to allow for disagreement stemmed from the fact they had always wedded their understanding of political theology to the political order of the day, whatever it was. Ideally, this mean that the what of church and state could change, without implying contradiction between the different versions of the Confession. North American Anglicans responded differently. The who of church and state inevitably changed; the what never did.