Called Out of Darkness Into Marvelous Light

A History of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, 1750-2006

Bonner

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275606
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In the conflicted world that is today's Episcopal Church, the diocese of Pittsburgh stands both as a symbol of dissent and schism to the liberal majority within the American Church and as a beacon of light and hope to conservative Anglicans across the United States. Set in the unlikely surroundings of America's Rust Belt, Pittsburgh's Episcopalians have over the past half century undergone a dramatic reordering of priorities to embrace a novel--though hardly unprecedented--vision of Anglican confessionalism. Called out of Darkness into Marvelous Light traces the development of an Anglican presence in western Pennsylvania from the missionary activity of the late eighteenth century through the triumphs of post-Civil War Anglo-Catholicism and the first stirrings of the Social Gospel, to the unprecedented religious revival of the 1950s. Championed by such men as Bishop Austin Pardue and Samuel Moor Shoemaker, the founder of the Pittsburgh Experiment, a prayer-centered spirituality developed in the Pittsburgh diocese and brought a generation of active evangelicals to the region during the 1960s and 1970s. The founding of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in the mid-1970s consolidated the evangelical presence in the diocese and provoked a commitment to spiritual renewal that sat uneasily with many in the wider Episcopal Church. Grounded in local research, this study seeks to explore the process by which Pittsburgh acquired its present evangelical identity and to reveal the increasingly intricate web of relationships that it now enjoys beyond America's borders.

Part One

Mission to the Frontier, 1750–1881

1

Frontier Days

Pittsburgh’s First Anglicans, 1750–1832

Until the close of the American Revolution in 1780, individuals rather than congregations constituted the Anglican presence in western Pennsylvania. Though William Penn’s “holy experiment” came into being with the signing of the Pennsylvania colony’s royal charter on March 4, 1681, almost a century would pass before the lands west of the Alleghenies were open to white settlement. In the interim, the region’s original inhabitants had first to be dispossessed (through either voluntary land sales or involuntary expulsion) and two great empires had to be driven from the North American continent. These early struggles were far from purely economic in nature, pitting as they did a Protestant maritime empire against the leading Catholic power of the era. With the French trader and soldier came the Catholic missionary, dedicated to the conversion of the native Indian population. Such enthusiasm prompted an analogous Protestant religious response. In 1701, Henry Compton, bishop of London, had founded the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) to provide clergy for the underserved colonies of the British Empire. As British expansion pushed the line of colonial settlement further westward, SPG missionaries found themselves not only concerned with service to lapsed Anglicans, but also engaged in the conversion of the indigenous population to Christianity. By the mid-1750s, men like Thomas Barton of the SPG were striving to bring to the Native American population of the Pennsylvania frontier a vision of Christianity very different from that of their French Catholic rivals.1

This marriage of secular and religious interests (the conversion of Native Americans to Anglicanism had geopolitical as well as religious significance) illustrates the ambiguous relationship that North American Anglicans enjoyed with the nation-state before and after the Revolution of 1776.2 The prevailing interest of the Church of England in the preservation of the social order increasingly placed it at odds with a majority of Americans—inside and outside Pennsylvania—who had come to see the wisdom of Penn’s commitment to religious pluralism. Between 1780 and the War of 1812, Anglicanism in western Pennsylvania gave every evidence of being a spent force, outclassed by the greater energy and enthusiasm of its Presbyterian and Methodist rivals. “I then lost all hope of witnessing any prosperity in our Church in this part of the country,” lamented local priest Joseph Doddridge, as conditions reached their nadir in 1816. “Everything fell into a state of languor. The Vestries were not re-elected; our young people joined other societies.”3

The Earliest Presence, 1750–1780

Prior to the fall of Fort Duquesne to the British in 1758—and the establishment of a permanent military presence in the region—there were only scattered settlements in the region. While the central Pennsylvania frontier witnessed dramatic advances in settlement between 1720 and 1740, the Cumberland Valley proved less a gateway to the west than a conduit for immigrants to Virginia and the Carolinas.4 Consequently, the region’s first white residents were those whose livelihood depended upon trade with the indigenous population. Preeminent among them was George Croghan, a Dublin-born Anglican and a skilled negotiator with an eye to the main chance. It was Croghan who negotiated the Treaty of Logstown (now Ambridge) in 1748, which strengthened the ties between local Indian tribes and the English traders.5 Not all traders were nominal in their religious convictions. In 1750, Christopher Gist was sent as an agent of the Ohio Company (formed in 1747 by a group of Virginia gentleman to acquire land west of the Alleghenies) to conduct a survey of the region. Lodged in an Ohio Indian village on Christmas Day, Gist felt it necessary to offer some form of religious devotion and provided his hosts with a discourse on salvation, faith, and works drawn from his Homilies of the Church of England. That his good intentions had been misinterpreted became clear when several Indians begged him to baptize their children, under the belief that he was in Holy Orders.6

In 1752, the Marquis Duquesne, governor of New France, launched a series of military incursions intended to exert French control over the Ohio River and its tributaries. French troops drove a small garrison of Virginia militia from the future site of Pittsburgh in 1754 and began the erection of a military installation to control the river forks (Fort Duquesne arguably represents the first instance of an established religious presence in the area, for there was a chaplain attached to the fort from 1754 to 1756).7 Military expeditions against Fort Duquesne led by George Washington in 1754 and Edward Braddock in 1755 both ended in failure.8 Not until the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, when the removal of the French presence in the Ohio Valley acquired a strategic significance, was the British government prepared to commit resources to such an undertaking. An expedition under the command of Brigadier General John Forbes in 1758 prepared the way for invasion of the Pennsylvania backcountry by building new lines of communication. Not only did this central trade route ease future migration from eastern Pennsylvania, it also ensured better lines of supply for the British forces. On November 24, the French commandant, viewing his position as untenable, burned Fort Duquesne and withdrew his troops. Two days later, army chaplain Charles Beatty led a service of thanksgiving for Forbes’s victory.9

Chaplain Beatty, a member of the Presbyterian Church, represented southwestern Pennsylvania’s dominant religious culture until at least the 1860s. The soldiers to whom he ministered, however, had taken oaths of loyalty to a nation that repudiated the theology of the Presbyterian divines. Cortlandt Whitehead, Pittsburgh’s second Episcopal bishop, spoke to this Anglican worldview at the 1898 ceremony of commemoration of John Forbes’s life. “We hail him as the leader by whom God established for this country and for our Anglo-Saxon race so very much of good which only later years have made manifest,” Whitehead explained. “We revere his name as forever associated by God’s providence with the onward march of liberty and civilization in this western land. We honor him for his loyalty to his flag, for his endurance of pain and hardship, for his bravery in the face of obstacles natural, barbarous and inimical, all of which qualities we are the better able to understand and commend because of what our eyes have seen and all the American people have learned to value, in the conduct of our own soldiers and sailors during the exciting month of our recent war with Spain.”10

By linking Britain’s imperial past with the new “imperial” destiny of President William McKinley’s United States, Bishop Whitehead once again demonstrated the bifurcated identity that the Episcopal Church inherited from its colonial parent. Though obliged to live down the imperial connection during the early nineteenth century, Episcopal self-understanding continued to be informed by an enduring bond with the Church of England. For decades, its missionary efforts would be shaped, first and foremost, by its desire to draw British immigrants into its ranks. Where other Protestant denominations with British roots—Methodist, Presbyterian, and even Congregationalist—quickly shed their ancestral ties, the “British” ethos of the Episcopal Church endured.

There are no definitive records concerning the religious identity of the settlers who began to arrive in western Pennsylvania in the 1750s, but something can be said of the diverse influences that shaped those Anglicans who were numbered among them. For the sizable body who hailed from Maryland and Virginia—particularly the latter—Anglicanism constituted one of the bedrocks of the social order. The commonwealth had instituted a religious establishment in the mid-seventeenth century that gave to the elected vestries the power to collect church levies and—after 1642—to elect the parish minister. Virginia vestries were civil as well as ecclesiastical bodies whose members exercised roles in local government and the colonial assembly, while churchwardens were officers of the county court who administered relief and supervised road maintenance. The power of the increasingly oligarchic vestries was only furthered by the activities of the bishop of London’s commissary, James Blair, who believed in the notion of a “moderate” episcopacy on the Scottish Episcopal model a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Mission to the Frontier, 1750–1881
• Part Two: Mission to America, 1882–1943
• Part Three: Mission to the World, 1944–2006
• Conclusion
• Bibliography