The Making of an Eighteenth-Century American Anglican Clergyman

Abstract

A significant aspect of the gradual Americanization of the King’s church in the colonies was the continuous increase in the number of native colonists who entered the ministry after about 1720. This process may be partly attributed to the complex process of anglicization of provincial society that became more pronounced in the years following 1690. Among causes of this cultural influence and movement were the presence of English governing officials in provincial capitals, in particular the active role of royal governors in several colonies on behalf of the church, the effect of English laws of toleration, the fruitfulness of increased trade, essential military cooperation during the various colonial wars, and widespread reading in English letters.¹ Bishop George Berkeley, who had spent the years between 1729 and 1731 in Newport, Rhode Island, observed in an anniversary sermon before the members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in London in 1731/32 that ‘such is the vanity of Man, that no prejudice operates more powerfully than that in favour of fashion — and no fashions are so much followed by our Colonies, as those of the Mother Country, which they adopt in their Modes of living, to their great inconvenience, without allowing for the desparity of circumstance or climate’.² The anglicization process may also be linked to the rising population and the growth of English influences in emerging urban centers. With these forces, shaped partly in London and in the colonies, there was an expansion of the church and a formation of new congregations between the mid-1680s and 1720. Between 1607 and the 1680s the church’s activities had been confined to the two Chesapeake provinces of Virginia and Maryland, a situation that changed dramatically after the founding of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701 and the appointments of a steady stream of missionaries assigned to serve new parishes in the New England, Middle and Southern Colonies.