BEGINNING in the early 1870s, a theology deeply skeptical about many of Christianity’s central claims began to influence the leadership of the Episcopal Church, and then spread throughout it. By the late 1960s it had come to dominate the Church entirely. And over the next two decades, more than a million Episcopalians left the denomination, the membership aged till the average member was in his or her late fifties, the number of missionaries shrank almost to nothing, and the Church became more and more divided over basic questions of doctrine and morality.

However, there was also good news. Renewal movements began to appear in the Episcopal Church during the same period. These groups rejoiced in the historic Christian faith and put their faith into action, and ensured that at least a minority of orthodox believers would resist the Church’s establishment by the late 1990s.

What was this skeptical theology — first called "Broad Church," then "Liberal," and later "Modernist" — and how did it gain such a dominant influence in the 20th century Episcopal Church? How did the orthodox renewal movements respond to this distortion of the Christian faith? And what might happen in the future?

We need to go back to the 1870s to understand the story.

Party strife in the 1870s In the Episcopal Church of 1870, two very determined religious parties were locked in combat.

One was the Evangelical group, heirs of the Reformation and of the great 18th century revivals under George Whitefield in England and America. Evangelical Episcopalians emphasized the primary authority of the Bible, plain and sermon-centered worship, and the need for every Christian to experience conversion and make an adult profession of faith.

The other was the Anglo-Catholic movement, tracing its lineage back to the Caroline Divines in the 17th century, but recently quickened and renewed by the Oxford and Cambridge movements in England. Since about 1840 the Anglo-Catholic movement had been teaching persuasively that baptism inducted a person fully into the Body of Christ, without the need for the dramatic conversion experience Evangelicals valued so highly.

Anglo-Catholics insisted on the necessity of having bishops in the Apostolic Succession and began looking more to Rome than the other Protestant Churches as their closest friend. They had also encouraged Episcopalians to bring back gothic church architecture and the full ceremonial pomp of Christianity before the Reformation.

In the years after 1840, Anglo-Catholic clergy increased in number and began to introduce candles and crosses, stone "altars," liturgical colors, vested choirs, and the like. All this Evangelicals saw as introducing Roman Catholic doctrines, and they responded with bitter attacks on this "popery" and "medievalism."

The Church’s General Conventions rocked with invective and vituperation on both sides. A small group of Evangelicals, including one suffragan bishop, left the denomination in 1873 and formed the Reformed Episcopal Church. A few Anglo-Catholics left for the Catholic Church, while many retreated into a Catholic "ghetto."

This theological strife, so crucial to some, seemed to others in and out of the Church negative and petty and ingrown. It offered an unattractive witness to American society, and the energies Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics devoted to fighting each other were diverted from the mission of the Church, at a time when the needs of society were becoming more and more pressing.

At the same time, the United States was being rocked and unsettled by massive changes. Science and technology were changing the world. Factories and huge cities spread westward from theAtlantic seaboard, which while devouring millions of immigrant laborers in their "dark Satanic mills," offered the hope of a material prosperity of which the world had never dreamed.

Among the educated, the traditional theistic worldview was crumbling rapidly, as evolutionary science seemed to have proved that humanity was constantly and inevitably improving, and the "sciences" of textual criticism and history seemed to have proved that the biblical texts were primitive and contradictory. While many of the educated still held to Christianity, theirs was increasingly a Christianity stripped of its supernatural substance.

So despite the toxic side effects of industrialization, the overwhelming success and prestige of science, mixed with the belief in evolutionary improvement, reassured people that humanity would solve all the present problems, and that the trajectory of the human race led ever upward. Progress was assured, and (though not every one recognized this at the time) assured without God.

Broad Church dominance

Amid the optimistic promises of science and the challenges of industrialization, the party strife in the Episcopal Church looked trivial to many of its own members. It was no wonder that a third party movement seized this opportunity to promote its cause in the Church. From the mid-1870s onward, the "Broad Church" movement (later to be called "Liberal" and then "Modernist") rose to dominance in the Church. They commended their viewpoint as reasonable and tolerant, up to date with the latest advances in science and technology, and more mature than the "narrow and selfish creeds" of the wrangling Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals. They were willing to accept a wide variety of Anglo-Catholic practices, such as gothic architecture and the use of medieval vestments and liturgical colors, and co-opted the Evangelical passions for personal commitment and social justice and their drive to transform society.

But they also promoted a new theology, which was clean contrary to everything the Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals believed about the Christian Story. In all this they established the form that Modernists follow today: a claim to breadth (now called "inclusivity"), an appeal to science (now extended to sociology and other disciplines teaching cultural relativism), and the assertion that we know more and see more deeply than our predecessors, especially those who gave us the Bible and the Creeds, mixed with a respect for the traditional forms of Christian practice.

The Broad Church movement did not arise without long preparation, however. In order to understand the "New Theology," as it was then called, we need to go back a couple of centuries to England in the 1680s.

The roots of modern atheism

In the late 17th century, Europe had been brutalized by religious warfare for over a century. Since the 1560s Protestants had been butchering Roman Catholics, the Catholics had been burning Protestants, and everyone had been drowning Mennonites. No one could bring the warring parties to agree on what God had said in Scripture and Tradition, or indeed who was authorized to make that judgment. It looked as though the Christian Story had gone bankrupt, and had no resources left to address the crisis of authority which was tearing Europe apart.

After a century of religious butchery, a new movement offered to liberate Europe from its bloody cycle of self-destruction. The Scientific Revolution produced a cultural movement called the Enlightenment, which offered Europe a new starting-point. Instead of "In the beginning, God" the Enlightenment proposed a new axiom, namely "In the beginning, Me."

That is to say, the Enlightenment proposed that we reject all inherited authorities like the Bible and the Pope and the Protestant Reformers, and build a view of the universe purely on what human reason could establish. Revelation was too subjective. Religious arguments always seemed to come down to a cacophony of voices all claiming to speak for God, and then resorting toviolence to prove it.

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