Church of England

Examples of Church of England in the following topics:

• The Revolution and Churches

  • The American Revolution inflicted deeper wounds on the Church of England in America than on any other denomination.
  • As a result, Church of England priests swore allegiance to the British crown at their ordination.
  • In 1776, these enemies were American soldiers, as well as friends and neighbors of American parishioners of the Church of England.
  • Patriotic American members of the Church of England, loathing to discard so fundamental a component of their faith as The Book of Common Prayer, revised it to conform to the political realities of the time.
  • The Anglican Communion was created, allowing a separated Episcopal Church of the United States that would still be in communion with the Church of England.

• Puritanism

  • Within the Church of England, those who wanted to remove traces of pre-Reformation Catholicism came to be called "Puritans".
  • At the end of Elizabeth's reign, the Church of England was firmly in place, but within it were the seeds of future conflict.
  • King James I of England made some efforts to reconcile the Puritan clergy in England, who had been alienated by the conservatism blocking reform in the Church of England.
  • The first Puritans of New England disapproved of Christmas celebrations, as did some other Protestant churches of the time.
  • Assess the cultural influence of Puritanism and how it affected the Church of England

• The Anglican Class

  • The Church of England controlled Virginian society and government during the colonial era.
  • The Church of England was legally established; the bishop of London made it a favorite missionary target and sent in 22 clergyman by 1624.
  • When the elected assembly, the House of Burgesses, was established in 1619, it enacted religious laws that made Virginia a bastion of Anglicanism.
  • However, the stress on private devotion weakened the need for a bishop or a large institutional church of the sort Blair wanted.
  • Baptists, German Lutherans, and Presbyterians funded their own ministers and favored disestablishment of the Anglican Church.

• Colonies in Crisis

  • The events of the Glorious Revolution in England had tumultuous repercussions for British colonies in America.
  • They arrested dominion officials as a protest against the rule of Sir Edmund Andros, the governor of the Dominion of New England.
  • Andros, commissioned governor of New England in 1686, had earned the enmity of the local populace by enforcing the restrictive Navigation Acts, denying the validity of existing land titles, restricting town meetings, and appointing unpopular regular officers to lead colonial militia, among other actions that were part of an attempt to bring the colonies under the closer control of the crown.
  • Furthermore, he had infuriated Puritans in Boston by promoting the Church of England, which was disliked by many Nonconformist New England colonists.
  • Members of the Church of England, believed by Puritans to sympathize with the administration of the dominion, were also taken into custody by the rebels.

• Plymouth

  • In England, reform-minded men and women had been calling for greater changes to the English national church since the 1580s.
  • These reformers, who followed the teachings of John Calvin and other Protestant reformers, were called Puritans because of their insistence on “purifying” the Church of England of what they believed to be un-scriptural, especially Catholic elements that lingered in its institutions and practices.
  • Unwilling to conform to the Church of England, many Puritans sought refuge in the New World.
  • Yet those who emigrated to the Americas were not united; some called for a complete break with the Church of England, while others remained committed to reforming the national church.
  • Unlike other Puritans, they insisted on a complete separation from the Church of England and had first migrated to the Dutch Republic seeking religious freedom.

• Religion in Early New England

  • These people, called separatists, wanted to create their own church separate from the Church of England.
  • Those who wanted to purify the Church of England were known as Puritans.
  • The first Puritans of New England disapproved of Christmas celebrations, as did some other Protestant churches of the time.
  • John Wesley was a cleric for the Church of England, and he and his brother led groups of Christians throughout England, Ireland, and Scotland.
  • Methodism started out as a society and follower of the Church of England but was not a church itself.

• The Glorious Revolution in America

  • The Glorious Revolution led to the dissolution of the Dominion of New England and the establishment of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
  • King Charles II of England began taking steps in the early 1680s to reorganize the New England colonies.
  • He disregarded local representation, denied the validity of existing land titles in Massachusetts (which had been dependent on the old charter), restricted town meetings, and actively promoted the Church of England in largely Puritan regions.
  • He alienated otherwise supportive Tories with his attempts to relax penal laws and faced opposition from the Anglican church hierarchy when he issued the Declaration of Indulgence.
  • Analyze the impact of political developments in England on the American colonies

• Colonial Cities

  • Many early colonial cities were seaports, mostly in New England, in which religion and trade was a center of their cultural life.
  • In New England, the Puritans created self-governing communities of religious congregations of farmers, or yeomen, and their families.
  • The Congregational Church, the church that the Puritans founded, was not automatically joined by all New England residents because of Puritan beliefs that God singled out specific people for salvation.
  • Instead, membership was limited to those who could convincingly "test" before members of the church that they had been saved.
  • They were known as "the elect" or "Saints" and made up less than 40% of the population of New England.

• Unitarianism and Universalism

  • As early as the middle of the 18th century, a number of clergymen in New England preached what was essentially Unitarianism.
  • The most prominent of these men was Jonathan Mayhew (1720–1766), pastor of the West Church in Boston, who preached the strict unity of God, the subordinate nature of Christ, and salvation by character.
  • From 1725 to 1825, Unitarianism gained ground in New England and other areas.
  • In 1800, Joseph Stevens Buckminster became minister of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, where his sermons and literary activities helped shape the subsequent growth of Unitarianism in New England.
  • John Murray, who is called the "Father of American Universalism," was a central figure in the founding of the Universalist Church of America in 1793.

• Mill Towns and Company Towns

  • The town, entirely company-owned, provided housing, markets, a library, churches, and entertainment for the 6,000 company employees and an equal number of dependents.
  • In 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court required Pullman to dissolve their ownership of the town.
  • At their peak there were more than 2,500 company towns, housing 3% of the US population.
  • Beginning with technological information smuggled out of England by Francis Cabot Lowell, large mills were established in New England in the early- to mid-19th century.
  • "In the nineteenth century, saws and axes made in New England cleared the forests of Ohio; New England ploughs broke the prairie sod, New England scales weighed wheat and meat in Texas; New England serge clothed businessmen in San Francisco; New England cutlery skinned hides to be tanned in Milwaukee and sliced apples to be dried in Missouri; New England whale oil lit lamps across the continent; New England blankets warmed children by night and New England textbooks preached at them by day; New England guns armed the troops; and New England dies, lathes, looms, forges, presses and screwdrivers outfitted factories far and wide. " - Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, 1969