The first (insert flock here) church in America

November 17, 2011 By

I am, to be blunt, a church-history fan and that affected both my undergraduate and graduate educations as I prepared to seek work on the Godbeat. To get personal about it, this is also the sort of interest that can inspire a Baptist to swim the Bosporus.

Thus, I was pretty excited about that recent New York Times story about a historic find in the ruins of Jamestown. Here’s the lede:

JAMESTOWN – For more than a decade, the marshy island in Virginia where British colonists landed in 1607 has yielded uncounted surprises. And yet William M. Kelso’s voice still brims with excitement as he plants his feet atop a long-buried discovery at the settlement’s heart: what he believes are the nation’s oldest remains of a Protestant church.

The discovery has excited scholars and preservationists, and unearthed a long-hidden dimension of religious life in the first permanent colony.

It may prove to be an attraction for another reason: the church would have been the site of America’s first celebrity wedding, so to speak, where the Indian princess Pocahontas was baptized and married to the settler John Rolfe in 1614. The union temporarily halted warfare with the region’s tribal federation.

Now, I am sure that for most Disney-era readers the key word that jumped out was “Pocahontas.” That’s to be expected.

The word that I focused on, however, was “Protestant.”

As the story notes, there were earlier chapels that, apparently, produced no ruins. Then there are ruins of 16th-century Catholic sanctuaries. Then there are these new and exciting ruins.

The story continues with historical background :

… (The) 2010 discovery and continuing excavation has generated excitement partly due to the size of the 1608 structure — at 64 feet by 24 feet, it was an architectural marvel for its time — and also because of how little has been understood about religion in Jamestown.

Some scholars lament that popular knowledge of colonial-era religion has been flattened into a view of the Virginians as greedy and indolent, while later colonists in Plymouth, Mass., were pious and devout. The distinction is rooted in their origins. While Virginians were largely loyal to the Church of England, the pilgrims in Plymouth repudiated the church and came to America to escape it.

So what’s the point, in terms of accurate church history? Well, are we talking about the ruins of a “Protestant” church or an “Anglican” church?

Them’s fighting words, you see. From its birth, the Church of England has stressed that it offers a Reformed Catholicism, a “via media (middle way)”, between the Reformation and Rome. Anglicans have always insisted, for example, that they retain valid lines of apostolic succession back to the early Catholic and Orthodox faith, thus validating their bishops and priests.

Some Anglicans call themselves Protestants and many, many more do not. Still, many church historians do talk about Catholics, the Orthodox, Anglicans and then “Protestants.” It was certainly news when the Blessed Pope John Paul II weighed in on this issue in Dominus Iesos, with Anglicans coming out on the short end.

The bottom line: The story seems to assume that this was an Anglican sanctuary, which would have been the norm in colonial Virginia (in which the Church of England was the established church). But it only refers to it as a “Protestant” site.

OK, Episcopalians and Anglicans out there. Did anyone else stumble over this lede? It’s a fine story, but there is a level of complexity that appears to have escaped the copy desk.

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Filed Under: Anglicanism, Catholicism, Godbeat, Worship
About TMatt

Terry Mattingly directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes a weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.

  • http://costlygrace.blogspot.com The_Archer_of_the_Forest

    I (an Anglican priest by the way) would be surprised, given that in 1607 fell on the heels of the Elizabethan settlement in England, if the original Colonists referred to here would have been put off by being referred to as Protestants. This was before the Catholic revival in the Oxford Movement of the 1800s. Elizabeth, who had just died some 4 years before, was considered a Protestant queen. Richard Hooker, the premiere Anglican theologian died in 1600, and he was certainly a Protestant. Certainly the Calvinist Puritans where still a major force to be reckoned with in the Church of England. I think Anglican would be more descriptively accurate, but Protestant would fit, given the time frame.

  • http://costlygrace.blogspot.com The_Archer_of_the_Forest

    Even the Episcopal Church had the name Protestant in its official title until very recently (1979).

  • Chris Jones

    Did anyone else stumble over this lede?

    Speaking as a cradle Episcopalian (and Anglo-Catholic into the bargain), no, I didn’t stumble at all. In fact, I think you are making a mountain out of a molehill.

    When I was an Episcopalian (and I haven’t been, lo these thirty years), I didn’t think of myself as a Protestant; but I wasn’t unrealistic enough not to know that the great majority of Episcopalians did think of themselves as such. Anglo-Catholics love to gripe about the word “Protestant” and pretend that theirs is not a Protestant Church. But that is precisely what it is.

    The notion that the Anglican Churches are something other than Protestant is an artifact of the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement and the consequent Catholic revival in the Church of England. Before that, “Catholic” customs such as addressing clergy as “Father,” calling the service of Holy Communion “the Mass” or “the Eucharist,” etc., were unheard of in the Anglican Church. Certainly the Anglicans who, in the seventeenth century (before the Oxford Movement), built the chapel that is the subject of this story would not have bridled at being called “Protestants.”

    I still don’t like to think of myself as a Protestant, but I think that now that I am a Lutheran I am stuck with it.

  • JWB

    What’s the source for the claim that a majority of Anglicans worldwide today do not self-identify as Protestants? More to the point, what’s your source for the implied claim that members of the Church of England coming to Jamestown four centuries ago did not self-identify as Protestants? My own sense of the history (subject of course to correction by those who know more) is that modern Anglican discomfort with the P-word primarily began with the Oxford movement over two centuries after Jamestown and took a while to spread outside of factional Anglo-Catholicism. It’s only been four or five decades since the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. started rebranding itself by consistently dropping the P-word. A 1907 article from the Homilectic Review (available on Google Books) says: “As the lineal descendant of the church established by the English at Jamestown in 1607, Bruton [the ECUSA parish in Williamsburg] represents the first successful attempt to plant on American soil a Protestant place of worship.”

  • Alan

    Here is one particular Anglican who calls herself a protestant:

    Queen Elizabeth II, who on 2 June 1953 took an oath, amongst other things, to “maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law”.

  • Hector

    Chris Jones,

    I don’t know what the majority of Anglicans today consider themselves Protestant. Personally I identify with the Anglo-Catholic wing and don’t concider myself Protestant, and certainly there are a number of demographically healthy provinces in the developing world, such as the West Indies, South Africa and Melanesia, which tend towards the A/C end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, you’re probably right that in the 16th century, Anglicans did generally concider themselves Protestant. Certainly the Thirty-Nine Articles are very strongly Protestant in their view on purgatory, the deuterocanonical books, and the Eucharist, and I’m told that 16th century Anglicans tended not to even much believe in private confession (which is going beyond even Luther).

  • Passing By

    “Power, control — that’s what it’s about,” she said.

    The rights that we enjoy today had their roots here…

    It being The New York Times, I suppose the little political dialogue at the end was obligatory, but strikes me as a shallow intrusion into an article about archeology. Do a sidebar, maybe, with a real discussion rather than soundbites.

    As to ”Protestant”, it’s pretty much a moot point until we have a definition of ”Catholic”.

  • Julia

    I think it was as a result of the Oxford Movement that the English started calling Papists “Roman” Catholic.

  • Mark Baddeley

    I agree with those who have said that the idea that the Church of England is not protestant is a more recent development. I remember sitting in the respected church historian Diarmaid McCulloch’s lectures on the Elizabethan Settlement and he argued convincingly that it was nonsense to see the settlement as anything other than uncompromisingly anti-catholic (and he doesn’t present as overly sympathetic to classical protestant doctrine himself). If you read something like John Jewel’s Apology of the Church of England, the work designed to defend the reforms that established the Elizabethan church, you’d be hard pushed to say how it was halfway between Catholic and Protestant. It was *ahem* unapologetically protestant.

    It might be fairer to say that it always saw itself as halfway between Rome and Geneva. But that distinction was not primarily about doctrine – the thirty nine articles are strongly Reformed, and if memory serves, Calvin’s Institutes were common reading among ordinands. Both the Puritans and their institutional opponents (like Whitgift) in the late 16th Century were theologically Calvinist. The distinction was more to do with church structure and liturgy – the Church of England kept the episcopal and liturgical structure of the medieval church, but reformed its theology. Hence the Prayer Book, the three-fold order of clergy, and the continuation of cathedrals.

    So I think the report was correct on this point.

  • Mike

    I’m a lifelong Episcopalian and I thought the lead was fine. I’ve always considered our denomination as Protestant. And I certainly can’t fault the reporter for using the term Protestant. That’s surely what the archeologist called it.

  • tmatt

    Three points:

    * The post uses the classic church history language — Reformed Catholicism.

    * Has there ever been a time when Canterbury did not proclaim apostolic succession?

    * Why did the Anglican hierarchy react so negatively to Rome denying the validity of Anglican orders?

    Also, the problem in the story is that not using the term Anglican confuses these ruins from those that might be found in the Protestant colonies, as opposed to Virginia, which was an established Anglican colony.

  • Hector

    Re: I agree with those who have said that the idea that the Church of England is not protestant is a more recent development.

    True. It’s important to bear in mind the distinction between saying ‘the Anglican Communion is a Protestant body today’, and ‘the Anglican Communion was a Protestant body in the 16th century’. I’d argue with the first, but I think the second is unarguable.

    At some level, of course, this raises an interesting question of how we define ‘Protestant’. Some would use the ecclesiological definition ‘does not acknowledge the authority of Rome or the Orthodox patriarchs’, while others would use a more doctrinal definition, ‘intellectual and doctrinal followers of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, or other Reformers.’ When seeing a news story about Protestant it’s always interesting to see what definition they’re implicitly using.

  • Mark Baddeley

    Hi tmatt,

    * Has there ever been a time when Canterbury did not proclaim apostolic succession?

    You’re testing my memory now, but I’m fairly sure that apostolic succession was not part of Canterbury’s position in the sixteenth century. Different individuals might have had different takes on whether apostolic succession had occurred, but the Church of England did not believe that apostolic succession constituted the church (any church) as a true church. Like protestants generally, they would list the marks of the true church in terms of doctrine and practice, not continuation of office. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have been able to see themselves in communion with the other Protestants on the continent, and they certainly did see themselves that way. I think the Wiki article has it right when it says that it was aiming to be a via media between Lutheranism and Calvinism – i.e. a middle ground within Protestantism.

    Given Jewel’s role in drafting the Apology, his own position on this can (arguably) be seen as normative as anyone’s during the period, and this blog post heregives a good bunch of extracts showing that the idea is reasonably incompatible with Jewel’s thought.

    * Why did the Anglican hierarchy react so negatively to Rome denying the validity of Anglican orders?

    In the sixteenth century? That was just the strange kind of thing they did in those benighted periods. Rome should have recognized that it was a false church, that Anglican orders were legitimate, and repented. Not doing all of that would provoke a negative reaction.

    More recently? As Hector has said, things have moved on. As I understand it, the current occupant of the Lambeth see is arguably a liberal Catholic (a relatively conservative one, but a founding member of Affirming Catholicism), whose basic theology is liberal and catholic, with very little protestantism or reformed thinking there. Because of the way the English government has been selecting its bishops over the last decade and a half, a lot of ++Williams’ fellow travelers are in episcopal leadership positions, and so they both want to be progressive on social and theological positions, and have recognition from Rome and Orthodoxy. But they don’t necessarily reflect the majority of clergy or members.

    It’s hard to read these things, but I think you’ve got the numbers wrong here:

    Some Anglicans call themselves Protestants and many, many more do not.

    I think it is the other way around. some Anglicans do not call themselves Protestants, and many, many more do. Anglo-Catholicism has been in numerical decline for a while now. Certainly once you factor the Global South in to the mix the numbers would be hugely down the ‘is protestant’ direction. Even without that I think the numbers might be more even. TEC doesn’t really reflect what the rest of the communion is like even in the rest of the first world. It is both less protestant and more aggressively liberal than western Anglicanism generally.

    Also, the problem in the story is that not using the term Anglican confuses these ruins from those that might be found in the Protestant colonies, as opposed to Virginia, which was an established Anglican colony.

    Yes, but that assumes that Anglican (or early Church of England) is not Protestant, and I think that is simply wrong. It’d be like saying ‘not using the term Presbyterian/Lutheran confuses these ruins from those that might be found in the Protestant colonies’.

    Either one needs to name the branches of Protestantism individually to avoid confusion with each other, or if the point is that they weren’t Catholic, then ‘Protestant’ is fine.

  • david s

    I stumbled over a different line: “at 64 feet by 24 feet, it was an architectural marvel for its time.”

    Thinking of churches built in Europe or Latin America around 1608, I hardly think it would have been a marvel. Certainly not for its size. Wouldn’t the English settlers have been familiar with more marvelous architecture in their village or city parish churches in England?

    As a Virginian, I look forward to learning more of what this very important project uncovers. This is very important for Virginia history, and American religious history, as the story suggests.

  • SeekTruthFromFacts

    * The post uses the classic church history language — Reformed Catholicism

    The language is right, but you’ve missed the implication. Reformed (as in Calvin and Piper) = Reformed Catholics. Surely you wouldn’t deny they’re Protestant?

    * Has there ever been a time when Canterbury did not proclaim apostolic succession?

    Canterbury has always vigorously defended its apostolic succession (the Nag’s Head fable was fought vigorously) as ‘bene esse’ (a good thing) but not ‘esse’ (essential to its nature as a true church). Apostolic succession was not equal to ‘un-Protestant’, any more than ‘Catholic’ was. They were claiming to reform what had been corrupted, not start afresh. They were Reformers, not Anabaptists.

    E.g. Whitgift:
    “I find no one certain and perfect kind of government prescribed or commanded in the scriptures to the church of Christ”
    and early 18th century Archbishop Wake on Lancelot Andrews’ position:
    “You will there find one of the most tenacious assertors of the episcopal government nevertheless far from unchurching all the other reformed churches for want of it.

    I remember sitting in the respected church historian Diarmaid McCulloch’s lectures on the Elizabethan Settlement and he argued convincingly that it was nonsense to see the settlement as anything other than uncompromisingly anti-catholic (and he doesn’t present as overly sympathetic to classical protestant doctrine himself)…. you’d be hard pushed to say how it was halfway between Catholic and Protestant…. It might be fairer to say that it always saw itself as halfway between Rome and Geneva. … the thirty nine articles are strongly Reformed, and if memory serves, Calvin’s Institutes were common reading among ordinands.

    I’ve also been taught by McCulloch and came away with the idea that the Via Media was between Rome and Munster i.e. Geneva (or less geographically neatly, Strasbourg – people underestimate Bucer’s importance). McCulloch doesn’t give the English Reformers the label ‘Protestants’ though. He calls them ‘evangelicals’, because that’s what they called themselves, and he does not see a major confusion with the current use of the word. Remember that the C of E was officially represented at the Synod of Dordt, which formulated what we now know as the Five Points of Calvinism (TULIP).

  • http://2natures.blogspot.com/ Arimathean

    Responses so far have focused on changes in Anglican identity. But I think the real key here is a shift in understanding of the word “Protestant”. It originally meant little more than “not Roman Catholic”. At a time when the Catholic Church was big, powerful, and established, the new upstart churches all defined themselves against it. Even when they disagreed among themselves (e.g., Lutheran vs. Calvinist), they all accepted the “Protestant” label. Among Anglicans, even the High Churchmen who emphasized the historic episcopate, traditional worship, and continuity with the past did not eschew the “Protestant” label.

    It has been in relatively recent times that we have come to identify “Protestant” with “Calvinist”, leading to the ironic question of whether Lutherans – who are little different from Anglicans – can be called Protestants. The military solution to this semantic problem has been to create the “Liturgical Protestant” category for Anglicans and Lutherans.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    OK, everyone is locked into the 16th century when the story is for readers in the 21st.

    Meanwhile, Anglicans in international, ecumenical dialogues have always stressed their catholic orders and their status as linked (branch theory is the term) to the ancient churches of Rome and the East. Check ANY New York Times story about, oh, the ordination of women for how the press has dealt with that.

    I still believe that, in this story in particular, the word ANGLICAN in the lede, or non-Catholic (as in, the Southern Baptists are America’s largest non-Catholic flock), would have been less confusing than Protestant, alone.

    Clearly, many here have never been chewed out on the telephone by Episcopal bishops and/or their staff members when a copy desk has published a story in which Episcopalians are identified as Protestants.

    On the personal level, clearly no one here has been through an Episcopal confirmation class and heard dozens of references to “via media” status as uniquely different from mere Protestants and from Rome.

  • Mark Baddeley

    I take your point/s tmatt, but it’s a bit like the question ‘who gets to define who is a Catholic’? Does a bishop in the Episcopal Church (of America), let alone the leader of a catechist class, get to define what it means to be ‘Anglican’? Does ‘Anglican’ mean one thing in the U.S. and something else elsewhere in the world, possibly opposing things (is Protestant/is most definitely not Protestant and how dare you say that about us). The answer to that kind of question of who gets to define Anglicanism is itself fiercely contested.

    My focus on the 16th Century is that that is much closer to the suspected dating of these ruins than the 21st Century. That’s a journalism question in itself – if you’re dealing with something that has changed over time, do you talk about it in modern terms (is something other than Protestant for the TEC, if not the Anglican communion as a whole) that make best sense to the readers or in terms that reflect the reality at the point in time that you are talking about? Does the object being described (what the CoE was in that time period), or the one doing the knowing (the contemporary reader in the U.S.) determine the nature of the language used?

    That’s both a big theological methodology question, and a journalistic one, I suspect.

    My point is simply, I think the paper’s description here is entirely defensible. I’m not saying that your position is indefensible.

    In the sixteenth and early seventeenth century the Church of England was ‘Protestant’, and clearly aligned with Calvinism and (to do a lesser degree) Lutheranism on the continent. If the thirty nine articles were written today as the doctrinal statement of a church, no-one would seriously argue that they were a via media between Protestant and Catholic.

    In the present that’s just one strand within Anglicanism (albeit a very large one) and an ongoing debate continues as to whether that sixteenth century formation should continue to be the basis of Anglicanism. That’s a big change, and I can see the logic of writing about the past in terms that readers in the present ‘get’. But you do run the risk of serious anachronisms by doing so.

  • Julia

    Wouldn’t it depend on what the Anglican Church was like at the time the Jamestown Church was in use? Early on, churches in England were stripped of all statues and ornamentation and no “fancy” liturgical garb was allowed. Then there was a time when the Mass was considered “hocus pocus”. If these were the periods of time relevant to the Jamestown church, I don’t think it could be Anglo-Catholic – it was definitely Protestant.

  • http://kingslynn.blogspot.com C. Wingate

    The question, Tmatt, is whom you are trying to please. The alternative to “Protestant” here isn’t “Anglican”, at least if you are trying to say what the reports meant: it’s “neither Catholic nor Orthodox.” It just makes more sense to say “Protestant”, because the only people who are going to misunderstand that are people like these bishops who are hair-splitters for church political reasons– and they understand the story accurately too. The details of theology are anachronistic, but they’re also not relevant to the claim; it’s about polity, not theology.

  • Will

    . But I think the real key here is a shift in understanding of the word “Protestant”. It originally meant little more than “not Roman Catholic”

    I disagree. That is what it means NOW, as used in what we laughingly call the real world, by people who wouldn’t know justification by faith or sola scriptura if they fell over them.

    Tmatt: All right, I will progress to the SEVENTEENTH century, when suggesting that the Church of England was not Protestant would have invited attention from a “Protestant flail”.

  • Steve

    Aw, c’mon. Ever read the 39 Articles? Protestant. Once you buy into sola scriptura and reduce the sacraments to two, you’ve crossed the line and neither Romans nor Byzantines would recognize you as anything else than Protestant. And although Canterbury claims apostolic succession, they denied that Orders was a sacrament. Rome and most of the Orthodox always re-ordain Anglican clerics who convert,so apparently nobody much believes their claim except themselves.

    Anglicans did have 100 year resurgence of their 200 years-rejected Catholic side, but now, for all their pomp and circumstance, many (especially) High Church Anglicans and most Episcopalians are Unitarians in drag.

  • Bill

    I’m an Episcopalian and I certainly consider the denomination to be Protestant. Seriously, can an organization that has John Spong as a bishop be anything other than Protestant? It now has full inter-communion with the Lutheran Church and even the Moravian Brethren.

    Of course things change over time. In that period Strassburg and Salzburg were certainly considered German cities, but to call them that now that would be curious. Likewise, the first Christian house of worship in many a New England town is now the Unitarian church, which may or may not consider itself to be Christian.

  • JWB

    I find this disheartening. How would getreligion react to a newspaper columnist who responded to fairly politely-expressed and historically-informed disagreement from readers by getting huffy and claiming that obviously they didn’t know as much about the subject matter as he did? Does Mr. Mattingly really think “on the personal level” that “clearly” no one who has ever gone through a confirmation class in ECUSA could possibly disagree with him? Really? Is that a productive way to engage with disagreement?

    It only took a moment of archive searching to turn up a 2011 getreligion post (and there may be more, I didn’t keep looking) in which contemporary Episcopalians were characterized as a subset of Protestants, in Sarah Pulliam Bailey’s June 6 “No Mainline Protestants in GOP Field?” (to be precise, the reference to Episcopalians is in the block quote from the LA Times the post is constructed around, but I think it’s a fair reading that Ms. Bailey did not find that a problematic characterization in context).

  • tmatt

    It is true that sociologists group TEC in the “Seven Sisters” of liberal Protestantism.

    The key for me is the historical claims about “via media” and “branch” theory, which lead to the consistent claims of a status other than Protestantism and then the ancient Rome/East stream.

    From the answers here, it sure seems that Anglican leaders did not know what they were talking about when they protested JPII’s decision to lump them in with Protestants, without the third status granted in previous Vatican ecumenical statements.

  • Hector

    Re: From the answers here, it sure seems that Anglican leaders did not know what they were talking about when they protested JPII’s decision to lump them in with Protestants,

    TMatt,

    I’m not sure what you find confusing. The claim being made here is that:

    1) The Anglican communion can’t fairly be called a ‘Protestant’ body today
    2) It’s probably fair to call the Anglican community Protestant _in the 16th century_.

    I’m an Episcopalian who would strongly resist being referred to as a Protestant today, but I don’t think the claim is necessarily so problematic when referring to a 17th century church. If you were referring to modern Anglicans then, yes, it would be wrong to call us Protestant without qualification.

    Re: Once you buy into sola scriptura and reduce the sacraments to two, you’ve crossed the line and neither Romans nor Byzantines would recognize you as anything else than Protestant.

    I’m not sure why either the opinion of Rome nor Byzantium much matters, in defining whether we are Protestant or not. Many of us don’t consider ourselves Protestant, which is all that matters.

    “Not under the authority of Rome” does not = “Protestant”, unless you consider every heresy, heterodoxy and schism prior to 1517 to be Protestant as well.

    For what it’s worth, I believe there are seven sacraments, and I don’t believe in ‘sola scriptura’. While I don’t consider the 39 Articles to be either normative or inspired, and therefore it doesn’t especially matter to me, it’s worth pointing out that they don’t actually specify whether there are two sacraments or seven: they actual wording of the text is carefully ambiguous.

  • Robert

    Given that, as far as I know, the word ‘Protestant’ doesn’t occur in any of the Anglican formularies, it’s hard to see how the word can apply to Anglicanism. Catholic and Reformed, yes; Protestant, no, in my humble opinion.

  • Mark Baddeley

    Robert, you might want to read again the comment at #5. Anglicanism derives from the Church of England, and the Queen of England still swears to uphold the Protestant Reformed religion established by law. That mightn’t be one of the ‘fomularies’ but it’s clearly pretty darn significant for the question of whether this creature is ‘Protestant’ or not.

    TMatt, I agree with Hector. You’ve already acknowledged that in the present there is debate within Anglicanism over whether or not it is Protestant. Not all Anglican leaders protested JPII’s decision. Some did. Some did not. Continuing to raise examples of that debate in the present isn’t germane to the question of the post. The question is: What do you call the ruins from an earlier period?

    Saying that historically the Church of England was protestant (and still in law in England continues to be Protestant, if not always in practice), doesn’t mean that anyone is saying that those present day Anglican leaders don’t know what they’re talking about when they claim that Anglicanism is something other than Protestant. It just means that they are taking a side in a present day debate within Anglicanism about the nature of Anglicanism. They’re playing the game of ‘my form of Anglicanism is what true Anglicanism is’ and all Anglicans know that game.

  • james

    No one is happy without a delusion of some kind. If global Catholicism (1.2 billion), global Orthodoxy (300 million), the media (like the NY TIMES), polls (like Pew, Gallup, etc.), the Queen of England (who promises to uphold the “Protestant Reformed religion” as titular head of the Church of England), and millions of Anglicans — all identify Anglicanism with Protestantism (albiet a liturgical form), why begrudge some Anglicans/Episcopalians (a small minority among Christians everywhere)the right to call themselves “Catholic” (so long as they know how to use the word “Catholic” properly in the Orthodox and Catholic worlds).

  • Chris Atwood

    One thing to note here is that the “Episcopalians are not Protestant” idea is part of a larger tendency for the term “Protestant” to become somehow suspect, particularly among the highly committed. As was pointed out, even Lutherans now sometimes challenge the “Protestant” designation, and this is coming from within the Lutheran churches (from the ordained and/or internet active, somewhat overlapping communities). But it’s important to note that this is something that is taken as positive. And in fact, the use of Protestant as a term of self-description by non-Episcopal and non-Lutheran Protestants is also declining rather rapidly. Apparently, Protestant is acquiring something of the sense of “stuffy, ‘white-bread’, old-fashionedly triumphalist, nineteenth century non-Catholics”. I assume that once all the Lutherans on the internet agree that they too are not Protestants (just like all the Episcopalians on the internet), it will be time for the Calvinists (or at least those on the internet) to say that they are not Protestants either; “after all, unlike Protestants we have infant baptism and creeds,” etc.

  • Daniel

    Forget “protestant” – the real scandal in this story is that the settlers were referred to in the article as “British.” No “Brits” in 1607, pal!

  • james

    “The first (insert flock here) church in America.”
    “…oldest US Protestant church.”

    Considering the number of early Catholic churches founded
    in continental America (St. Augustine in 1565, comes to mind and/or the Franciscan friars who set up missions during the 1590′s along the Florida coast and Carolinas), one would think the Episcopal Church would be proud of the honor of having constructed the first Protestant church in the English colonies. After all, America was named after a Catholic (Amerigo),traditionally “discovered” by a Catholic (Columbus), was surrounded by Catholic French and Spanish missions and forts — it’s a minor miracle that English Protestants survived long enough to construct a church, never mind reach the Virginia shore!

  • Xander

    I agree with others than in historical context, “Protestant” doesn’t raise any eyebrows at all for me, even if it might in a contemporary context.

    But I wonder if it is at all relevant that the church in question is in Virginia, which historically has always leaned to the Protestant side of the Anglican [i]via media[/i]. Virginia churchmanship has always been associated with a low church, evangelical-leaning approach. I note that even now, the website of the Diocese of Virginia describes Anglicanism as “Protestant, yet Catholic.”

  • james

    “…the website of the Diocese of Virginia describes Anglicanism as “Protestant, yet Catholic.”

    Xander,

    I would think almost all Protestant churches could describe themselves as “Protestant, yet Catholic,” especially if they accept the early Catholic church councils and the fixing of the ecumenical creeds (100-451). This would include even evangelical churches. To a degree, they could even say they are “in part” Roman Catholic if they accept the Apostles Creed, the early baptismal creed of the Church of Rome. The only notable Protestant church that could not say it is Catholic is the Mormon Church, the Church of the Latter Day Saints, since they started from scratch in 1830, jumping from Christ’s Resurrection and post-resurrection appearances in the New World to Joseph Smith’s revelation in the Book of Mormon.
    They bypass all the early ecumenical creeds.

  • Jay

    I realize that tmatt was briefly an Episcopalian in his unique journey from Baptist to Orthodoxy. However, I share the view that he’s making a mountain out of a molehill.

    As an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian of 30+ years — now a Continuing Anglican — the people I attended church with would all consider themselves Protestants. Certainly the low church Anglicans, the theological descendants of the first Protestant rulers, Edward VI and Lady Jane Grey, would consider themselves Protestant.

    Yes, there are American Anglo-Catholics who consider themselves to have a stronger tie to Catholicism than the Calvinist wing of Protestantism. But in a year or two it will be hard to call them Anglican or Church of England, because with the Ordinariate they’re mostly becoming Anglican Rite Catholics.

  • Xander

    “I would think almost all Protestant churches could describe themselves as “Protestant, yet Catholic,” especially if they accept the early Catholic church councils and the fixing of the ecumenical creeds (100-451).”

    James, if you’re talking about Lutherans, Reformed Christians, Methodists or United Church Christians, I’d agree that most would claim the “catholic” (almost always lower-case c) descriptor, even if they didn’t use it much. Baptists and other more evengelical Protestants (who often do not accept any creeds) are quite another story on this score, I think. Many is the time I’ve heard Baptists question how we Presbyterians can possibly say we believe “in the holy catholic church” or “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” Even if others would use “catholic” to describe them, they would not, I think accept the description themselves — at least not at face value.

    But be that as it may, my point was not that the Diocese of Virginia (which, it should be noted, is not the diocese that includes Jamestown, though it once was) described itself as Catholic. It was that the diocese described itself as Protestant.

  • Dee

    I did not stumble over the Anglican=Protestant usage, but I stumbled over the fact that this was being asked. I never thought there was any doubt. Like many others here, I’m Protestant and Anglican. How do we know that “many, many more” Anglicans do not consider themselves Protestant? This would be very disturbing news in my church.