Reviewed by Lauren F. Winner | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2

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Reviewed by Lauren F. Winner | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

A War of Religion: Dissenters, Anglicans, and the American Revolution. By James B. Bell. Studies in Modern History. Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 345 pages. $74.95 (cloth).
Reviewed by Lauren F. Winner, Duke University
In his 2004 study The Imperial Origins of the King's Church in Early America, James B. Bell emphasized the ways the Church of England connected the North American colonies to the metropole. Now, in A War of Religion, Bell shows that non-Anglican colonists were suspicious of the Anglican Church precisely because of those connections. Specifically, Bell examines the extent to which non-Anglicans—especially, but not exclusively, New England Congregationalists—viewed the Anglican Church as an institution through which the English monarchy might trample the colonists' rights, both their religious rights and their political rights (insofar as the two can be separated). Acknowledging his debt to J. C. D. Clark, Bell wants to argue not merely that controversy swarmed around the Anglican Church but that these controversies contributed directly to the American Revolution.¹	1
Bell ably charts the heated debates over various Anglican practices and policies. The story begins with the 1686 arrival of Sir Edmund Andros in Boston and the establishment of King's Chapel, the first Anglican church in New England. The opening of King's Chapel incensed New England divines, who saw it as a direct assault on all that Massachusetts stood for. They took up their pens to lambaste Anglican practice. In tracts such as Increase Mather's A Brief Discourse Concerning the Unlawfulness of the Common Prayer Worship (1686), New England clergy, echoing English Puritan critiques, mocked Anglican liturgy as formulaic and unbiblical and worried that the opening of an Anglican church in Boston was just the beginning of an imperial plan to undo evserything Massachusetts's Puritan founders had achieved.	2
Congregationalist critiques of Anglican liturgical practice continued, but the two controversies in which Bell is most interested surrounded the establishment of an American episcopate and missionaries from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). The battle for and against an American bishop will be familiar to many readers. More novel is Bell's account of the vigorous debate about the SPG. Founded in 1701, the SPG sent Anglican clergy to the colonies. Bell finds that the SPG had a visible impact on all the non-Chesapeake colonies within five years. Non-Anglican Christians were immediately suspicious. Why were the SPG missionaries there? Were they the harbinger of "imperial policies intended to undermine the strength and membership of independent congregations" (32)? Taken together, the SPG missionaries and the possibility of a bishop "represented," in the minds of Congregationalist leaders, "a conspiracy by the English government to undermine the established church in Massachusetts and proselytise its members" (80). In the 1760s and 1770s, the function of these concerns changed. They morphed from primarily ecclesial debates into a synecdoche for larger political concerns. In particular, Bell credits John Adams with putting "the Episcopal subject" (212) in the mix with other patriots' criticisms of English policy. Adams, says Bell, argued that the potential establishment of an episcopal office would lead to encroachments not just on religious liberties but on political liberties as well.	3
Whether or not Bell clinches his case that "the Anglican church ... was one of the causes of the American Revolution" (221, emphasis mine), he does intriguingly show the numerous ways in which contemporaries understood ecclesial politics to be inseparably intertwined with revolutionary struggles. British authorities blamed the Revolution in part on an insufficiently robust Anglican establishment: "Another capital Error in Our Colony system was the neglect to interweave a religious Establishment with the Civil Polity," wrote William Knox, an undersecretary of state for American affairs, in 1778 or 1779. "Every Man being thus allowed to be his own Pope, he becomes disposed to wish to be his own King" (192). Colonial Anglican clergy of a loyalist bent noted the enthusiasm of non-Anglican Protestants for the Revolution and concluded that, in the words of Charles Inglis of New York City's Trinity Church, the "controversy has been fomented by Presbyterian preachers, with a view to the extirpation of the Church of England from the colonies" (153).	. . .

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