Historians consider narratives of resistance and resilience as part of a special issue of Anglican & Episcopal History (AEH) for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

AEH editor-in-chief Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook writes that, “Ongoing debates over the role and scope of history amid this year’s semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary of the Declaration of Independence raise questions about who controls national narratives and how they intersect with religious history.” The June issue of AEH attempts to “complexify more dominant narratives of national and Episcopal history.”

Readers can find six peer-reviewed academic studies along with fourteen book reviews, an exhibit review, and a church review in the June issue.

The academic studies in the summer issue of Anglican & Episcopal History are:

A Dance of Destiny: 250 Years of Sovereignty and Survival by Bishop Steven Charleston

“If you want to understand the significance of the United States sesquicentennial from a Native American point of view, then you need to understand the powwow,” according to Charleston.

The retired bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska writes that, “In Native America, dance does more than tell a story. It changes reality. Dance is an agency of the sacred, a generator of spiritual energy and healing. People do not come to watch a dance, but to be transformed by it.”

Charleston’s essay points to ways the powwow on Turtle Island (North America) expropriates the American flag from being a symbol of death and translates it to become a symbol of life making it a symbol of freedom and equality for all people.

Charleston is an elder citizen of the Choctaw Nation. He is a well-known advocate for environmental justice and Indigenous rights.

Two studies are framed using Henry Wadsworth Longfellows’ 1860 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

“Negro Belonging To”: Monstrous Intimacies in the Eighteenth-Century Records of Boston’s Old North Church by Jaime D. Crumley

“History has long lauded Old North [Church] for its contribution to the American Revolution. However, the church’s early history is rife with contradictions. Old North is simultaneously a monument to American freedom and a testament to the dark work of slavery,” according to Jaime D. Crumley.

Her study examines three baptisms: Gidney Clark’s at St. Michael’s Parish in Barbados as well as Prince and Cato at Old North Church in Boston.

Crumley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic, Gender, and Disability Studies at the University of Utah. During the 2022-2023 academic year, she was the Research Fellow at Old North Illuminated, the nonprofit that interprets and preserves the history of Boston’s Old North Church.

Shining Lights on Complexity and Contradiction at the Old North Church, Boston: a Reappraisal for America’s Semiquincentennial by Matthew Peter Caldwell

“Old North is a church within a museum and a museum within a church, with all the attendant complexities of historic preservation, governance, and balance of religious and secular activity,” according to its vicar Matthew Peter Caldwell.

Old North has long held an outsized role in U.S. history. During the 1776 bicentennial celebrations President Gerald Ford spoke there. Old North also hosted Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in July 1976.

Caldwell writes that “Old North is for many a place of pilgrimage and a symbol of freedom” while recounting ways research by historian Jared Ross Hardesty in 2018 “led to deeper reflection of the church’s active engagement and complicity in the economy of enslavement.”

In addition to being vicar of Old North Church in Boston, Caldwell holds a Ph.D. in Anglican history and theology from the Toronto School of Theology.

Despite the Declaration: White Episcopal Support for Slavery and Black Episcopal Resistance in Early Republic New Jersey by Jolyon G.R. Purszinski

“During the Revolutionary War, Anglicans in New Jersey were split on whether to remain loyal to the Crown, but after the war, both white and Black Episcopalians generally embraced the language of the Declaration of Independence with patriotic zeal,” according to Jolyon G.R. Purszinski. He finds that, “Where they split was over whether ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ should be the deserved possessions of ‘all men’ or if the ‘all men’ who were ‘created equal’ were, in fact, ‘white’ men only.”

Purszinski identifies a complex historiography in which the heritage of the U.S. Declaration of Independence was “one that both white and Black New Jersey Episcopalians claimed as their own: white Episcopalians usually as their exclusive possession, but Black Episcopalians as a part of a broadly catholic vision of what could and should be. It is the result of the insistence and persistence of Black Episcopalians over the course of 250 years that broader acceptance of the full truth of the Declaration has begun to be embraced in the Episcopal Church: that ‘all’ people are ‘created equal’ and are ‘endowed by their Creator with . . . inalienable rights.’”

Purszinski is a lecturer in the departments of History and Religion at Princeton University and the Reparations Commission historian for the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey.

St. Anna’s: the Influence of the Episcopal Church on the Poarch Band of Creek Indians Community in Alabama

“The history of St. Anna’s Episcopal Church and the Poarch Band of Creek Indians is not a simple story of missionary benevolence or cultural imposition, though it contains elements of both,” writes Kelly Fayard.

“What stands out across these accounts is how consistently elders refused both the missionaries’ paternalism and their own victimhood,” according to Fayard. “They acknowledged poverty plainly while insisting on the richness of their relational lives. They credited the Episcopal Church with real, material help—schools, healthcare, records that enabled federal recognition – while correcting the record on what missionaries had gotten wrong. This is a sophisticated historical consciousness, not nostalgia.”

Fayard is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Denver and a member of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians.

Decolonizing the Holy Land: Anglican Missionaries and Jewish Immigration into Mandatory Palestine, 1917-1948 by Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr.

Shattuck traces the influence and reactions of Anglican missionaries in Palestine to the increasing influence of Zionism and the arrival of Jewish migrants between 1917 and 1948.

His study points to changing views across time as he writes “...Anglican opposition to the Zionist movement begins during the latter stages of World War I with British missionaries in Jerusalem celebrating the capture of the city by Allied military forces under the command of General Edmund Allenby.”

Shattuck also chronicles Anglican missionary disappointment with the Balfour Declaration. He notes that, “As soon as it was made public, the statement was instantly greeted with consternation by Anglican missionaries, who began to worry about its impact on their activities in Palestine.”

One prominent figure in this opposition was Bishop Rennie MacInnes. Shattuck describes him “as bishop of the state church of the imperial power that held sway over Palestine” who was “clearly the most prominent of the Western Christian critics of Zionism in the 1920s.”

Shattuck concludes that “despite the laudable intent of the missionaries in seeking proactively to shield Palestinians from the immense suffering and dislocation that Zionism ultimately brought upon them, their continual use of anti-Judaic, supersessionist arguments, laced with antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, still represents a troubling legacy for which Anglicans and Episcopalians (as well as other Christian denominations) did not begin to atone officially until the mid-1960s.”

Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr. is a historian and retired Episcopal priest who has written extensively on American Protestant involvement in socio-political events.

Narratives of Resistance and Resilience: Reflections on Anglican and Episcopal History for the Semiquincentennial by Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook

The paradox of Christianity – particularly Anglican and Episcopal Christianity – as a source of both liberation and oppression is the focus of the final essay by AEH editor-in-chief Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook.

“Empire, colonialism, and Christianity form the basis of White supremacy – the belief that White people are inherently superior to people of color – has operated for at least the last 500 years and is a pervasive part of the legacy of Anglican settler colonialism,” according to Kujawa-Holbrook. “Throughout Christian history, religion has been a source of liberation for some and a source of oppression against others. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, gender oppression, classism, religious oppression, language oppression, and other forms of oppression were and are still promulgated through Christian discourse.”

She challenges adoption of the “single narrative worldview of ‘secular’ histories” that suggest there is “one true historical narrative of Anglican and Episcopal history, and that this dominant narrative is the only way to tell our ‘unbiased’ story.” She points to ways Anglican and Episcopal historians have been actively dispelling this myth for at least two generations. She points to African American Episcopal and Afro-Anglican histories, Anglican and Episcopal women’s histories, Indigenous histories, Asian and Asian American Anglican histories, Latinx Anglican and Episcopal histories, LGBTQi1 histories, and increasingly, postcolonial and decolonial analyses as examples.

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These studies along with exhibit and book reviews are available in the latest issue of Anglican & Episcopal History. AEH is the peer-reviewed journal of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church. It is published quarterly. For subscription information visit hsec.us/membership.