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Although the religious convictions and practices of many presidents have been ignored, Washington’s have been closely scrutinized and endlessly debated. Some authors have portrayed the Virginian as the epitome of piety, while others have depicted him as the patron saint of skepticism. Washington was a life-long Episcopalian, but the fact that he said almost nothing publicly or privately about the precise nature of his beliefs has evoked competing claims that he was a devout Christian, a Unitarian, a “warm deist”, and a “theistic rationalist”. One point, however, is not debatable: Washington strongly believed that providence played a major role in helping the United States win the Revolutionary War and function successfully as a republic. Arguably no president has stressed the role of providence in the nation’s history more than Washington. His religious convictions are clearly evident in the pivotal role he played in helping establish religious liberty and toleration as key principles of the new nation. As president, Washington was the first major spokesperson and practitioner of American civil religion, and after his death he became a principal figure in its development.

After 1815 the intense partisanship of the preceding twenty years largely abated and an Era of Good Feelings dawned. This more placid environment fostered a recrudescence of patriotism among Congregational clergymen, who reimagined an important role for the United States in the providential renovation of the world. The disappearance of a common political foe also meant that Unitarian and orthodox Congregationalists were now free to go their separate ways ideologically. The Unitarians retained a hierarchical outlook and defended the traditional Massachusetts establishment until its end in 1833, while the orthodox relied on Christian voters and the revived and mobilized church to promote societal godliness. The new disestablishment position of the orthodox Congregationalists created a convergence of interests with such old dissenting groups as the Baptists and Episcopalians, which led to the coalescence of an evangelical coalition that increasingly predominated in regional and even national culture by the late 1820s.

This chapter analyses the ways in which this influential devotional work by a Scottish Episcopalian minister and professor of divinity was edited and adapted for different denominations and communities during a period of over 150 years. The manuscript has not previously been described. The principal editions were by the latitudinarian Gilbert Burnet, the Scottish Episcopalian Patrick Cockburn, the Scottish moderate Presbyterian William Wishart, the Arminian Methodist John Wesley, the American Episcopalian William Smith, the Baptist Unitarian Joshua Toulmin, and the Church of Ireland bishop John Jebb. Scougal’s book was transformed from an originally private letter to a female friend into a public means of educating new generations of readers, clerical and lay, male and female, rich and poor, and of combating what its editors from their very different perspectives perceived to be their contemporaries’ false representations of religion.

Like English Catholics, the Episcopalians of Scotland suffered a denial of basic religious freedom for most of the 18th century. Like them also, they upheld a form of church order, a liturgy, and a system of belief that commended them to High Churchmen of Horsley's viewpoint. But there were significant differences in the character of the two denominations, and from these sprang dissimilarities in their external relations. The Episcopals sustained a dramatic contraction under laws that were tightened against them in the middle years of the century. Roman Catholics advanced slowly from long-standing disabilities. The abolition of episcopacy in Scotland at the Glorious Revolution, and its subsequent replacement by the Presbyterian church system, was the work of an active minority, reluctantly supported by the Crown. A second difference is that Scottish Episcopalianism was a Protestant communion, severed from the Church of England by no theologically incongruous or politically dangerous notions of supranational papal authority.

During the Restoration in the 1660s, the Episcopal government and the prayer book were reinstated, along with Sheldon's, Cosin's and other leading Laudians' return to power. Evidently, the world they were used to, which is the 1630s, was very different from the world they found themselves in after the Restoration. Interference in church affairs served as payment for debt for the shelter and employment that was offered to episcopalian clergy, and also as the price for the alliances formed between the church and Anglican MPs in the parliament. Laudian ideals have unmistakably aided in reshaping the newly restored church through the recreation and re-establishment of sacred space and the reception of the sacrament of holy communion through railed altars. This chapter provides a more in depth discussion about the Restoration, specifically on the railed altars.

Chapter forty-five is a detailed examination of Hodge’s views on the Church universal. As denominations competed for members and new religious traditions arose on the American landscape, a wide array of Protestants turned their attention to defining the true nation of Christ’s earthly Church and who its members might be. Hodge believed that form did not so much define the Church as did people who were filled with the Holy Spirit. He also spoke against infant damnation and in favor of the use of liturgies in church services.

This chapter discusses the three established churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, and the respective conditions between the years 1801 and 1828. It reveals that the churches were a semi-confessional Protestant State, and were considered the religious authority at that time. Parishes were the fundamental unit of both ecclesiastical and civil government. The churches of England and Ireland were Episcopalian in nature, while Scotland was Presbyterian. The chapter explains how the three churches responded to dissent and the formation of new dissent churches. It also discusses the formation of church parties and the controversies that arose from them.

This chapter presents a discussion on popular resistance, religion and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. In the early eighteenth century, Scotland saw noteworthy advances in the publicity of its national affairs, with pamphlets and mass petitions accompanying strident debates on the Anglo-Scottish union not just in Parliament but the General Assembly and the Convention of Royal Burghs. Popular political engagement depended on data provided by pamphlets, newspapers, letters and oral exchanges between Edinburgh and provincial communities. Unionists were aware of the dangers of English power in union, but saw advantages for Scotland with appropriate safeguards. Some Scots rejected the Presbyterian-Episcopalian conflicts and saw incorporation as the only way to preserve protestantism in Europe. The unity of Presbyterians and Jacobites was queered by their loyalties to divergent forms of church government and the monarchies that supported these churches.

In this chapter, an Episcopalian priest shares what she has learned about sexual diversity and the church through her experiences of growing up as a lesbian Christian woman and, later, of ministering as an ordained priest. Invoking the ancient links between Christian prayer, belief, and practice, she proposes that participating in the liturgical language of the Revised Book of Common Prayer has drawn LGBTQ Episcopalians and their fellow congregants to see better and to embrace more fully their dignity and worth in God’s eyes and thus in their own eyes as well. She acknowledges continuing struggles for the full recognition and participation of LGBTQ Christians in her own church as well as in the Roman Catholic Church. But she sees positive resources for moving forward in Catholics’ and Episcopalians’ shared commitment to honoring the truth as it is disclosed in human realities and as that truth is manifested and encountered in liturgy, especially in the community’s celebration of the Eucharist.

This chapter discusses the religious and political background preceding the Anglo-Scottish union. It explores two key constitutional documents which provided the foundation of the Revolution Settlement of 1689–90: The Claim of Right and the Articles of Grievances. It notes that these documents represented a Scottish desire for constitutional and ecclesiastional reform. It reports that the estates abolished Episcopalian church government on 22 July 1689 taking their lead from the Claim of Right. It further reports that William introduced changes to the electoral process, following discussion with Scottish political elites, resulting in increased Presbyterian participation and electoral success, particularly in the burghs. It notes that the surest way of breaking down ancient religious, cultural, and linguistic barriers that existed between Highland and Lowland, and of bringing the Highland into mainstream Scottish life, as well as counteracting the influence of Jacobitism, was to convert the Highland to reformed Presbyterianism.

This chapter discusses the politics of blasphemy. The issue of the Episcopal clergy was complicated by relations with England, whose Anglican religious establishment viewed the Scots Episcopal clergy as co-religionists who ought at least to be tolerated, and preferably employed as well, north of the border. The ongoing hard-core Presbyterian refusal to make concessions to Episcopalians was answered by Englishmen of High Church inclinations with a refusal to countenance Protestant dissent in England. Church courts were told to take action against offenders and urge magistrates to enforce relevant Acts of Parliament. The same was to hold for anyone who ‘shall deny God or any of the persons of the blessed Trinity and obstinately continew therin’. The state of alert would inspire ministers and magistrates to go out and find a couple of deists to placate an obviously angry God. Thomas Aikenhead would be the least fortunate of them.

Founded in 1875 originally as the Jane Bohlen School for Girls in Wuchang, Hubei Province, St. Hilda’s would become known as a Christian “oasis” in Central China. Behind the school’s compound walls, St. Hilda’s created a space where new gender roles and expectations for Christian women could be nurtured through the fusion of the social gospel with the dramatic historical events of the period. St. Hilda’s illuminates the liberating qualities of a faith-based education, the impact of a complex and communal adaptation of Christianity, and the power of interpersonal encounter for both teachers and students.

This chapter analyses responses to James VII’s Scottish indulgences of 1687, which granted freedom of worship to the great majority of the population. The king’s initiative was a radical break from earlier royal policies – pursued with vigour until the mid-1680s – which used penal laws to enforce religious uniformity. The chapter begins by summarising the previous policy of uniformity, and the terms of the indulgences. Its main focus is then on the responses of the religious groups that gained freedom – Catholics, Quakers and mainstream presbyterians – as well as the attitudes towards the indulgences of the Cameronians, a small group of presbyterian extremists excluded from toleration.

This chapter is about denominations in the South that once supported slavery and segregation. Now all have made apologies for past sins and injustices and continue to eradicate racial prejudice within their ranks. How did this happen? It took the combined efforts of many ministers and lay people---not all are mentioned: Baptists, Finlator, Gilmore, Holmes, Jordan, Maston, McClain, Seymour, Shannon, Stallings, Turner, Valentine; Methodists, Blanchard, Brabham, Butts, Cunningham, Ed King, Haugabook, Rhett Jackson, Reese, Schroerlucke, Selah, Sellers, Eben Taylor, Turnipseed (Methodists were also challenged to merge black and white Conferences that had been separate since 1939); Episcopalians Gray, Hines, Marmion, Morris, Stuart; Presbyterians, Calhoun, Edwards, Miller, Moffett, Rice, Smylie, Randolph Taylor, Thompson, Tucker, Yeuell; Disciples of Christ, Cartwright, Hulan; Churches of Christ, Chalk, Floyd, Fred Gray, Money, Price; Lutherans, Anderson, Davis, Ellwanger, Herzfeld, Homrighausen, Voigt Included is a review of the Delta Ministry and more about Will Campbell.