Of the 1300+ churches I have photographed over the last 11 years, 137 are, or were, Episcopal, about 10 per cent of the total. At least 75 per cent of those are Gothic or Gothic Revival buildings, which ought not come as a surprise to anyone—about 1840 the Episcopal Church in this state embraced the medieval English parish church as the model of what a proper Anglican church ought to look like. What might be surprising is that of the (at least) 102 surviving churches built in this state between the Revolutionary period and the end of the Federal period (roughly 1770-1830) only two were erected by Episcopal congregations, and both were essentially extensive renovations of long-established churches in Newark (Trinity) and Trenton (St. Michael's). Moreover, there were at least 212 churches of all denominations founded during this period, only 3 of which were Episcopal (one in Warren County and two in Gloucester). Clearly, as far as the Anglican Confession was concerned those 60 years were a spiritual desert. That prompts the question—why?
     
The easy and largely correct answer is that the close identification of the Church of England with the Tories during the Revolution resulted in a strong antipathy towards the Episcopal Church. During the war in patriot-controlled areas, Anglican pulpits had been abandoned, their priests in many cases forced to flee. Even the nascent Methodists, whose leader John Wesley spoke out strongly against American independence, had to maintain a low profile, and all but Asbury had been recalled to England. Asbury had gone into hiding in Maryland during the war. At the end of the war, most Anglican priests returned to England, Canada, or other parts of the empire. The few left had to pick up the pieces, and here most residents were deeply suspicious, even resentful.
     
Between 1784 and 1789 the Church of England was reconstituted as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. All formal ties with the Crown were broken, and the Church of England refused to consecrate any bishops in the American church. Gradually, services resumed in many of those churches, but many struggled with low membership and support for years. But that does not fully explain why it took another 40 years before new Episcopal churches were organized or erected. There had to be something more going on.
     
Although the Church of England was never the established church here as it was in Virginia and the Carolinas, it was the church of the establishment, or at least of most of the privileged classes. In colonial times, the Church of England saw itself as a part of the social and political order, not merely a religious sect. The stratification of society had been a given—even in Puritan New England, the Puritans had attempted to establish the same social stratification as in England, which is a significant part of the backstory in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Lower class adulteresses were supposed to be stoned to death, not simply made to wear an embroidered A on their clothing; Hester was of the minor gentility—she even remembered a coat-of-arms on her family home.
     
Anglican and Puritan regarded the social structure not as the result of random economic forces or a political contract among subjects, but as a system planned and sanctified by God. The Great Chain of Being thingy, as one of the Republican presidential candidates might have put it. Parliament included lords spiritual (bishops) as well as lords temporal, and the king was the head of the Church of England. The Revolution upset all that, and not simply because the Anglican church sided with the Crown. The Revolution eliminated the sense of a fixed social and political order—deference due to men of position, education, and wealth was no longer (or to a much lesser extent) given. That is a central theme of Gordon Wood's superb book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
     
The re-establishment of the Protestant Episcopal Church here brought about several fundamental changes that seemed to reflect the new social fabric. Its structure was distinctly different from that of England in that laity were given equal status with clergy in one General Convention. What was perhaps more difficult for old-line priests to accept was that the church that had once been a significant part of the government now was simply one religious sect among many. And the many were proliferating like rabbits. The Cane Ridge Camp Meeting of 1801 in Kentucky was indicative of the religious ferment the country was experiencing, and new prophets emerged almost overnight. Some quickly faded, but the Seventh Day Adventists, the Disciples of Christ, the Shakers, and of course the Mormons were all products of those times.
     
In this religious stew the Episcopal Church struggled to find a place. The leadership was, for the most part, educated and cultured—not the sort that were likely to howl and scream damnation at a tent revival. But they needed something to set their church apart. It appears to my reading that they settled on three elements: (1) The Apostolic succession—an Episcopal priest in a small community in New Jersey could trace his authority back to the apostles themselves. That might have some weight in a society where people were searching to find their place in a new economic, political and social order. (2) In the face of a revivalistic Protestantism in the early stages of the Second Great Awakening, it appears to me that they began to emphasize symbol and sacrament, ritual and mystery. That, too, might appeal to some in the face of the Deism that seemed to pervade not only the halls of Congress but also the conversation of apprentices in the cities. [See Moneygripe's Apprentice, a personal narrative of a genteel minister's son who begins as a cabinetmaker's apprentice because his father cannot afford to send him to college, in Reviews for a more extended discussion] (3) And to reinforce that, they also turned to a distinctive architecture of the past—what we now term Gothic Revival.

Before the Revolution, Anglican churches exhibited a variety of styles, not materially different from what Presbyterians and Baptists had been erecting. Most had to be subsidized by the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) , and so many were like the small stone chapel in Alexandria (Hunterdon-right) and the mission in Log Gaol (Warren). Among the most prestigious of them, Christ Church in Shrewsbury, was a smallish, but charming wooden-frame structure of no particular architectural merit (until the projecting tower was added later). In the early 1830s, when the church began building again, there was no central direction—battlemented castles, unadorned meetinghouses, Greek Revival temples and primitive Gothic churches all were suitable to a vestry and priesthood that would have had few direct memories of Anglican architectural traditions.

That changed in the 1840s. Under a strong bishop, George Washington Doane, the Episcopal Church in this state fixed on elements of the Gothic that were particularly congruent with their need to distinguish themselves from the other churches—the articulated chancel, a rood screen, narrow lancet windows with deeply-stained glass, aisles for the processions that were a part of their liturgy—none of these architectural elements had been found in American churches before. The ornateness of the open trusses, the ironwork of door hinges, pinnacles, crockets and buttresses were all foreign elements that intrigued people. And, by the way, offered the emerging affluent in urban centers an opportunity to display their wealth and refined taste.

The Episcopal Church had commonly employed architects, or perhaps they have just done a better job of noting that an architect had been engaged—beginning in the 1840s, there are relatively few Episcopal churches where we don't have the name of an architect, and for many of their early churches we have the name of the architect and/or builder. [That's Richard Upjohn's Trinity Church in Woodbridge at the left, built in 1860.] That is in marked contrast to all the other denominations, where, until the last decades of the century when it was fashionable to have an architect-designed edifice, we rarely find the architect's name in the accounts of the church's history.

The result is that the Episcopal Church survived, perhaps even flourished—40 new Episcopal churches were erected in the state in the 1850s and 60s, and even more in the last three decades of the century. But it never achieved the growth of the Methodists or the Baptists, or even the Presbyterians in the northern half of the state, and even today, there are few Episcopal churches in South Jersey. It would be rash of me to speculate about this, other than to note that congregations that rejected the strenuous organizational efforts of circuits and revivals, a priesthood that insisted on a physical separation from the laity in their church design, and stuck with pew rents to support extravagant Gothic Revival buildings simply did not translate into church growth in the middle and later part of the 19th century.

New Book: A Brief History of the Religious Architecture of New Jersey 1703-1900 has recently been published and is available at Amazon. It is loaded with full-color illustrations representing the significant architectural designs in the state. It is authoritative but not scholarly in style, and was written for the average reader with an interest in the old meetinghouses, churches and synagogues of the state. Here's a direct link to its page on Amazon. You can find out more about it at the Wooden Nail Press website.

Steeple Envy is the title of my current work in process—the history of the churchscape of Morris County, and I expect it will be available during the third quarter of 2011, probably to be issued together with the work on Essex County, tentatively titled A Mighty Architectural Shout. Together the two total more than 800 pages, and the research is going more slowly than anticipated, mainly because I'm finishing the books on Burlington, Cumberland and Salem.