A History of the Episcopal Church Schism in South Carolina

Caldwell

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498244671
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In 2012, the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina declared its independence from the Episcopal Church. It was the fifth of the 111 dioceses of the Church to do so since 2007. A History of the Episcopal Church Schism in South Carolina is the sweeping story of how one diocese moved from the mainstream of the Episcopal Church to separate from the church. It examines the underlying issues, the immediate causes, and the initiating events as well as the nature and results of the schism. The book traces the escalating conflict between the diocese and the church that led up to the schism. It also examines the legal war between the two post-schism dioceses, the majority in the independent Diocese of South Carolina and the minority in the Episcopal Church in South Carolina. This is the first scholarly history of a diocesan schism from the Episcopal Church. It is extensively researched from original and secondary sources and documented in over 2,000 notes citing nearly 900 works. This story stands as a cautionary tale of what happens in a major Christian denomination when majority and minority factions increasingly differentiate themselves and what impact that can have for both parties.

1

South Carolina and the Episcopal Church before 2003

A new Colony

There is a familiar old quip about South Carolinians of long ago: They are like the Chinese. They eat rice, worship their ancestors, and speak in a foreign tongue. Beyond the superficial humor of this old witticism, there is a truth of two separate powerful strands indelibly woven throughout South Carolina history: attachment to tradition and a sense of separateness from the larger group. These traits are not necessarily complimentary or even compatible. At first glance, they may even seem contradictory. How can one revere the past and rebel against it? The colony of South Carolina was attached to the mother country then made revolution against her. The state of South Carolina helped create the United States then led the rebellion to break it up. The Episcopalians in South Carolina helped establish and guide their national church then voted to separate from it. In South Carolina, tradition and separateness were not contradictory because they were both overlain with a heavy coat of localism. Thus, tradition became what was longstanding within South Carolina and separateness became how South Carolinians saw themselves as different from others “from off” at any given moment. To old Carolinians, the world was divided into two parts, Carolina and “off.”

The strength of the threads of tradition and separateness waxed and waned in South Carolina history. When both waxed together they produced dramatic, sometimes catastrophic, results. The convergence of the two gave South Carolina its experience in the American Revolution, John Calhoun’s statesmanship, the Civil War, Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond’s politics, and the Episcopal Church schism of 2012. The schism occurred on October 15, 2012. Two days later, the Rt. Rev. Mark Joseph Lawrence, bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina, informed the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, that the diocese had disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church. It is this last item that must get our attention now. Our purpose here is to address these questions: What were the causes and origins of the Episcopal Church schism of 2012 in South Carolina? What was its nature? And, what effects did it have on South Carolina, the Episcopal Church and the world beyond?

The theme of the competing threads of tradition and separateness can be seen clearly and dramatically beginning in the early colonial period of South Carolina. The vast colony of Carolina, the land between Virginia and Spanish Florida, was created in 1663 by a cash-strapped King Charles II, mainly to pay back in land eight men who had been instrumental in placing him on the throne in 1660. The challenge was to turn a native-populated wilderness into a profitable commercial colony. That meant, first of all, to bring in population. As the proprietors handed out land grants, settlers began arriving by boatloads to the promising but dangerous land. By 1680, a permanent port city had been started, Charles Town, that became not only the point of arrival but also the heart of the new land.

The population of colonial South Carolina was remarkably diverse.1 It was an English colony, but in many ways, was strikingly different than old England. Early settlers came from many different places speaking many different languages. Right away, the whites began enslaving thousands of indigenous peoples. As the labor supply failed to keep up with demand, landowners bought more and more slaves from the West Indies and Africa for their labor-intensive plantations and farms being carved out all along the fertile waterways of the Carolina Low Country. Nearly half of all the slaves coming to the thirteen colonies/states came through Charleston, or Sullivan’s Island in Charleston harbor to be specific. Indeed, before the American Revolution, South Carolina was the only one of the thirteen colonies where slaves outnumbered white people.2

Religious variety mirrored the social diversity of the colony. While the Church of England, also called the Anglican church, was the choice of most of the early landed and merchant elite, it was far from being the majority religion of the population and even farther from being the only religion. Of the four thousand colonists in 1700, fewer than half were Anglicans.3 Presbyterian churches abounded. There were also sizeable groups of Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Quakers, and French Protestants. There also grew a relatively large Jewish community drawn by the atmosphere of religious tolerance. The only people who were not given freedom to worship as they pleased were the Roman Catholics.

The structure of the Anglican church in the colonies was quite different than that of England. There were no bishops in America. The Bishop of London technically oversaw the church in the colonies, but he never ventured to America. The bishop sent commissaries as his representatives to South Carolina, but these could not function as bishops. The Anglican church in colonial South Carolina developed a distinctly parochial and independent nature as a quasi-congregational church. At least part of this phenomenon stemmed from the gradual union of the French Huguenot and English gentry. Early on, most Huguenots adhered to the Anglican church bringing with them their more austere continental Calvinism. Huguenot-English family alliances became the backbone of the South Carolina colonial society. To this day, French names abound among the prominent Carolina families.4

The Anglican faction in the political structure of the colony struggled to make itself, and its Church, the dominant power in South Carolina. The Anglicans in the Commons House passed the Establishment Act of 1704, replaced by a milder Act in 1706, that established the Church of England in South Carolina until 1778. Supported by the state, the Anglican church settled down into a sort of comfortable home of most of the propertied elites who valued it perhaps more for its political than its religious importance. As historian Charles Bolton observed: “Anglican laymen in the South fashioned the established churches to suit their own needs and remained in control of them. Most of the Anglican clergy came to accept this situation, and they used traditional doctrines to support social and political authority within the colonies rather than on behalf of the English government.”5 Primarily through the vestry system, the Anglican church in colonial South Carolina remained a locally oriented institution.

Economically, South Carolina boomed in the eighteenth century. Indeed, it became the richest of the thirteen colonies and in some ways the one that England favored the most.6 However, in spite of close commercial ties with England, South Carolina remained a world apart from the mother country, literally and figuratively. When crises occurred, the British government and usually the British nav...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: South Carolina and the Episcopal Church before 2003
• Chapter 2: The Crisis of 2003 in the Episcopal Church and its Immediate Aftermath
• Chapter 3: The Diocese of South Carolina in the Early Lawrence Years, 2008–2009
• Chapter 4: Storm Clouds, 2010–2011
• Chapter 5: The Crisis of 2012
• Chapter 6: Two Dioceses, 2013 and After
• Chapter 7: Conclusion