Papers by Brent Sirota
Religion and American Culture, 2022
The consecration of Samuel Seabury as bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Connecticut in... more The consecration of Samuel Seabury as bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Connecticut in November 1784 is typically taken to mark the threshold that divides the magisterial pretensions of the old-world confessional state from the pluralism of the new-world denominational order. In such accounts, a chastened Anglicanism reluctantly sacrificed its royalism and claims to establishment in acquiescence to the pluralistic religious ecology of the republican United States. The Church of England, in this telling, possessed no native conception of the separation of church and state. The Americanization of Anglicanism, therefore, entailed the acceptance of ecclesiological premises foreign and inimical to its tradition— stemming largely from the intellectual world of the enlightenment and Protestant nonconformity. Such a narrative of denominational beginnings, this article demonstrates, fails to grapple seriously with the strain of antiestablishmentarian thought within Anglicanism itself. The separation of church and state necessarily implicated in Seabury’s securing of “a free, valid and purely Ecclesiastical Episcopacy” was neither an alien imposition nor a mere epiphenomenon of American religious liberty. The catholic tendency in Anglicanism had long developed its own conception of ecclesiastical independence, which rejected both state superintendence as well as religious voluntarism. The consecration of Samuel Seabury, this article argues, was secured and defended in an Atlantic milieu characterized by this dual-sided antipathy. By setting the events and controversies surrounding the Seabury consecration back into this broader Atlantic milieu, we will glean a clearer sense of the imperative of ecclesial separateness and distinctiveness that characterized American Episcopalianism in the early republic. American Episcopalianism in the nineteenth century, particularly that of the high church tendency, was remarkably free of the establishmentarian and political impulses of other denominations because it was founded in explicit rejection of them.
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The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680-1730, 2014
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British Protestant Missions and the Conversion of Europe, 1600–1900, 2020
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Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, Sep 2015
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Eighteenth-Century Studies 43:3, Mar 2015
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Historical Journal, Mar 2014
North Carolina State University The occasional conformity controversy during the reign of Queen A... more North Carolina State University The occasional conformity controversy during the reign of Queen Anne has traditionally been understood as a straightforward symptom of the early eighteenth-century ‘rage of party’. For all the pious rhetoric concerning toleration and the church in danger, the controversy is considered a partisan squabble for short-term political gain. This traditional interpretation has, however, never been able to account for two features of the controversy: first, the focus on ‘moderation’ as a unique characteristic of post-Revolutionary English society; and second, the prominence of the Anglican nonjurors in the debate. This article revisits the occasional conformity controversy with an eye toward explaining these two related features. In doing so, it will argue that the occasional conformity controversy comprised a referendum on the Revolution settlement in church and state. Nonjurors lit upon the practice of occasional conformity as emblematic of the broader malady of moderation afflicting post-Revolutionary England. From their opposition to occasional conformity, the nonjurors, and soon the broader Anglican high-church movement, developed a comprehensive critique of religious modernity that would inform the entire framework of debate in the early English Enlightenment.
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Books by Brent Sirota
Was the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty of Brunswick to the throne of Britain and its empire ... more Was the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty of Brunswick to the throne of Britain and its empire in 1714 merely the final act in the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688-89? Many contemporaries and later historians thought so, explaining the succession in the same terms as the earlier revolution-deliverance from the national perils of 'popery and arbitrary government'. By contrast, this book argues that the picture is much more complicated than straightforward continuity between 1688-89 and 1714. Emphasizing the plurality of post-Revolutionary developments, it explores early eighteenth-century Britain in light of the social, political, economic, religious and cultural transformations inaugurated by the 'Glorious Revolution' and its ensuing settlements in church, state and empire. The revolution of 1688-89 was much more transformative and convulsive than is often assumed; and the book shows that, although the Hanoverian Succession did embody a clear-cut reaffirmation of the core elements of the Revolution settlement-anti-Jacobitism and anti-popery-its impact on various post-Revolutionary developments in Church, state, Union, intellectual culture, international relations, political economy and empire is decidedly less clear.
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Book Reviews by Brent Sirota
Journal of British Studies, 2021
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Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 2019
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Church History: Studies in Christianity & Culture, 2018
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Papers by Brent Sirota
Books by Brent Sirota
Book Reviews by Brent Sirota