The Church Militant: Loyalism, the Church of England, and the American Revolution

FAIN: FT-278965-21

Peter William Walker
University of Wyoming (Laramie, WY 82071-2000)

Write three chapters of a history of Loyalist Anglicans during the American Revolution.

This project is about religious modernity and its discontents. It focuses on Anglicans in colonial New England and the Mid-Atlantic, a community notable for their overwhelming and forceful Loyalism during the American Revolution. This project treats their Loyalism as one aspect of a larger counterrevolutionary project comprising a series of novel political, intellectual, theological, and spiritual orientations. These Anglican Loyalists should be seen, not as stubbornly anachronistic reactionaries, but as key observers of and participants in religious modernity. They were occupied by the question of how to be religious in a modern, democratic society, a question which in the present moment is more important than ever. This project thus traces contemporary debates about religion and the public square back to the nation's founding, and is intended as a contribution to the public discussion occasioned by the Revolution's upcoming anniversary.