The Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee held an “America at 250” event on Wednesday, September 9, 2026. I was one of ten panelists from various faith traditions, reflecting on the relationship between our faiths and the state. There was a seven-minute time limit. The Full program is linked at the bottom of the post.
The Episcopal Church has a uniquely tangled relationship with the American state. It began as the descendant of the church of the British crown and has evolved to sometimes serve a quasi-chaplaincy in our national life.
In the crown colonies of the South before the Revolution, the Church of England was the officially established church, supported by taxation and the income of church lands. While Anglican polity requires bishops to ordain new ministers - the word “Episcopal” comes from the Greek word for “Bishop,” no Anglican bishops were ever ordained for America during the colonial period, mainly because the obvious model was that of the English Bishop, who was also a lord with a parliamentary seat and lands. Most American colonists, whether eventually a loyalist or revolutionary, didn’t want that.
During the Revolution, many of our clergy fled to Canada because their ordinations in London had included personal oaths of fealty to the King. The Episcopalian you would be most familiar with from this period is the Rev. Samuel Seabury, a loyalist who wrote pamphlets against Alexander Hamilton and is portrayed in a losing rap battle with him in the musical by the same name.
After the Revolution, the remnant of the Church of England in America eventually organized itself along American Constitutional lines and secured a line of bishops, starting with the aforementioned Samuel Seabury, ordained by the bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church, who were surprisingly more than happy to defy the English.
After the revolution, the Episcopal Church, as the remnant of the Church of England in the USA, was suspect for obvious reasons, but transformed itself over the first century of our country. As class became more pronounced in America through the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, the Episcopal Church benefited from the general anglophilia among the new rich. Wheras the old families of New York had been Dutch Reformed, during the Gilded Age, families like the Vanderbilts and Morgans endowed and built Episcopal parishes and cathedrals. This lasted well into the 20th century. In 1959, “A sociological analysis of the leading wedding announcements involving socially prominent families in The New York Times revealed that three-quarters of the weddings taking place in known Protestant churches occurred in Episcopal churches.”[1]
This raised us to a place of prominence in national life that far outweighs our demographics. While we have never been more than around one percent of the population, eleven American presidents, almost a quarter, have been Episcopalians. There are other marks of this prominence. Trinity Church in New York still owns and leases out a good chunk of Manhattan. Bruton Parish sits at the center of Colonial Williamsburg as an Episcopal parish endowed by Nelson Rockefeller and is an anchor point for a historic site that struggles with how it portrays the past. The National Cathedral in Washington DC was given a congressional charter in 1893. President Teddy Roosevelt laid its cornerstone in 1907, and it was completed in a ceremony in 1990 at which President George HW Bush spoke. The cathedral is the closest thing America has to a national chapel - the site of state funerals, prayer vigils, and the best episode of The West Wing.
I learned all this when I joined the church as a teenager in the 80s, and it was taught with a measure of pride. As I have come into leadership in the denomination, I have come to discern its shadow side. While it is true that the Episcopal Church is no longer the default church of the wealthy, we still bear a lot of privilege in our institutions, and as other protestants will tell you, our sometimes snooty attitude, whether intentional or not.
Our history has also brought with it a marked reluctance to get involved in anything that smacks of politics. We are the only mainline denomination that did not officially split during the Civil War. The Planter-class leadership of the Confederacy was overwhelmingly Episcopalian, including Bishop Leonidas Polk, who laid down his crozier to take up the sword as a Confederate General. At the time, church unity mattered more than the issue of slavery - a hard claim for us to stomach today.
Likewise, during the Civil Rights movement, we were loath to speak clearly. The bishop of Alabama was one of the addressees of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It took the death of one of our seminarians, Jonathan Myrick Daniels, to finally pull us into the movement.
I think it’s fair to say that much has changed for us in our relationship with America in the last few decades. As the class-based makeup of the American Protestant Mainline began to dissolve, we became more active on civil rights issues. We have begun to turn some of our historical privilege into empowering the powerless and standing against hate.
The national cathedral is once again a symbol of that changing relationship. In 2018, the remains of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was killed in a hate crime in 1998, were interred in the crypt by Gene Robinson, our first openly gay bishop. The offer had been made to his parents, who had never buried his remains because they were afraid of vandalism and desecration. The end of Robinson’s sermon was “Gently rest in this place. You are safe now. And Matt, welcome home.”
Another moment illustrating this change is the sermon of the Bishop of Washington, Marianne Edgar Budde, at the post-inauguration prayer service on January 21, 2025. This followed a wave of first-day executive orders on immigration and gender recognition, and it echoed concerns our Presiding Bishop had raised in a letter to the church that same day.
The sermon ran about fifteen minutes. The direct address came at the end, framed as a final plea. She invoked Trump’s own inaugural remark about feeling the providential hand of God, then asked him to have mercy on frightened people in the country. She named two groups specifically: gay, lesbian, and transgender children in families across all parties, some of whom she said feared for their lives; and children whose parents feared deportation, along with people fleeing war and persecution.
Reactions split predictably: critics called it a partisan intrusion into a nonpartisan service; defenders called it the ordinary prophetic duty of a Christian bishop in her own cathedral. Both readings turned on the question of what the National Cathedral’s central purpose was, and, by extension, what the relationship between the Episcopal Church and America is.
From the church of the crown to the challengers of a sitting president, we are the sum of our history and more, a denomination struggling with its conception of the past, its worshipping communities of the present, and how we see ourselves as a church conceived within the bounds of the American nation of the future.
[1]: Packard, Vance. The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers That Affect You. New York: David McKay Company, 1959.
