In November 1963, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy, the dean of Washington National Cathedral delivered a call to national penitence. Such an adjuration from the ‘Chaplain to the New Frontier’ – as Francis Sayre was popularly known – attested to the lingering vitality of the ‘establishmentarian’ mindset of the Episcopal Church. During Sayre's deanship (spanning almost three decades), however, his denomination would be relegated to just one amongst many representatives of the shrinking Protestant mainline. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, characterised as it has been by numerous demands for institutional repentance – not least on the part of the Churches – Robert Tobin's account of how the privileged sons of the American Protestant ascendancy foreswore their inheritance during the ‘long 1960s’ is all too timely. Even though most of his subjects are White, middle-class and – notwithstanding a concluding chapter on the ordination of women – male, Tobin offers new insights into the life-worlds of those who re-made North American Anglicanism at the height of the Cold War. His subject matter necessarily dictates a focus less upon the South (for which Gardiner Shattuck's Episcopalians and race remains a key text) than upon those urban ministries in both the North and the Midwest where the progressive theology that would define North American Anglicanism in the last quarter of the twentieth century was birthed. Central to Tobin's argument is his contention that the change of theological direction antedated the intensified debate over Black civil rights. It was the wartime experience of military chaplaincy, he argues, that first brought home to privileged Episcopalians the gulf that yawned between them and their working-class contemporaries (mirroring the epiphanies of an earlier generation of Church of England clergy during the First World War), and which sowed the seeds of the post-war ‘industrial mission’ with its emphasis on the universality of human worth. Amidst extensive discussion of various diocesan initiatives, particular note should be taken of his description of Parishfield, a programme that fostered lay leadership in the suburbs of Detroit and whose sacramental life, ecumenical character and commitment to ‘frontier evangelism’ informed a style of ministry that was extra-parochial in character and increasingly disengaged from the traditional authority structures of the Church. The primacy accorded the sacramental community at Parishfield supports Tobin's broader argument that the clerical practitioners of the ‘new’ Anglicanism were – at least initially – products of an Anglo-Catholic milieu that celebrated the Church of England slum priests of the late nineteenth century and the Roman Catholic worker priests of the twentieth. Their implicit (and in some instances explicit) rejection of hierarchical authority would pose a challenge to what had hitherto been the bedrock of Anglican identity, namely the episcopate. While the presiding bishops of the civil rights era, Arthur Lichtenberger and John Hines, were far from oblivious to the fact that the Episcopal Church faced a moment of ‘crisis’ (to invoke the language of neoorthodoxy), their ability to fashion a response was constrained as much by the dissonant voices of the ‘prophets’ as the critical reaction of many rank-and-file Episcopalians, particularly from the South, who favoured a more gradualist approach. The fracturing of the collegiality of the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops so evident in the 1966 censure of the episcopal maverick James Pike revealed the extent to which institutional Anglicanism was already at odds with Anglican prophetic witness. Compounding such institutional dissonance was Hines's flagship General Convention Special Program (GCSP), which in the late 1960s sought to put into practice a more sacrificial form of Anglican self-identification with the ‘base ecclesial communities’ of the inner cities. In practice, GCSP's strategies for empowering the powerless also bypassed the Black middle-class clergy who had endured decades of second-class status within the national Church. The growing divide between such activists as GCSP director Leon Modeste – a Black Episcopalian who favoured the funding of secular groups over inner-city congregations – and older members of the Union of Black Clergy and Laymen of the Episcopal Church demonstrated that antipathy to progressive social justice was not the preserve of such White moderates as John Allin (bishop of Mississippi and Hines's unexpected successor as presiding bishop in 1974). A particularly vivid illustration of how GCSP programmes promoted a separatist mentality at all costs is the case of a parish daycare centre in Tacoma, Washington, which was denied a GCSP grant because White Episcopalians had helped to organise it, even though its board president and its teachers were Black, and 90 percent of its pupils were African American (p. 177). Nor did all Black Episcopalians revel in the Black nationalism increasingly embraced by White progressive clergy. Indeed, Pauli Murray – an early African American pioneer for the ordination of women – took to task the White clergy of St Marks Church-in-the Bowery, New York, for seeking to promote a Black caucus within the parish. ‘Justice, equality and fraternity are the values which bind us all who believe in them’, she insisted, ‘and you are my “soul brother” to the extent that we share those values. A Black person who does not share them is not my soul brother’ (p. 188). By focusing as he does upon rank-and-file clergy in a variety of settings, Tobin offers a compelling explanation for why the Episcopal commitment to prophetic witness in the 1950s and 1960s ultimately privileged personal catharsis over the development of a post-industrial paradigm for ‘life together’ (Dietrich Bonhoeffer's writings, it should be noted, were well-received in communities like Parishfield). By the 1970s, ‘it was no longer obvious what specifically Christian demands were being placed on adherents’ (p. 248). The gospel of radical inclusion, however sincerely it might have been professed, was increasingly at odds with the idea of the sacramental community that had characterised the era of industrial mission and would ultimately leave the Episcopal Church as fractured as the world it sought to reconcile.
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