Episcopal Church (United States)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Episcopal Church in the United States counts among its past members roughly three-quarters of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Over a quarter of all American presidents have also been Episcopalians.

  The church is a mainline Protestant denomination and a member of the worldwide Anglican Communion. It is divided into nine provinces, and its presiding bishop is Sean W. Rowe. In 2024, The Church of England Yearbook reported 2.4 million total members. In 2025 it ranked as the ninth-largest Protestant denomination in the country by adherents. It describes itself with a phrase that sounds like a contradiction: "Protestant, yet Catholic."

  That phrase hints at a church built from compromises. Its clergy were once required to swear allegiance to a British monarch, and then had to build a new institution in a republic. So how did a church tied to the English crown survive the American Revolution? Why did its first bishop have to look beyond England for consecration? What happened when the church faced racial segregation, the ordination of women, and questions about sexuality? And why is a church so closely tied to American power and wealth losing members?

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• 2. Split Loyalties

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  The first parish of the Church of England in America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Two years later, Virginia designated the church as its established church. That meant local governments paid tax money to parishes, and parishes handled some civic functions. New York followed in 1693, Maryland in 1702, South Carolina in 1706, North Carolina in 1730 and Georgia in 1758. The tower of the Jamestown church, built around 1639-1643, is among the oldest surviving Anglican structures in the country. The rest of that building is a modern reconstruction.

  From 1635 the vestries and clergy came loosely under the Bishop of London. After 1702 a missionary body called the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts began work across the colonies. On the eve of the Revolution, about 400 independent congregations were reported. Yet no American Anglican bishops existed in the colonial era.

  On the 4th of July 1776, Congress and several states began passing laws that made prayers for the king and the British Parliament acts of treason. For Anglican clergy this was a crisis. Their ordination oaths required allegiance to the king, and prayers for the royal family and Parliament. More than any other denomination, the war divided both clergy and laity into patriots, conciliators and loyalists.

  The numbers show a sharp regional split. Of the roughly three hundred clergy in America between 1776 and 1783, over 80 percent in New England, New York and New Jersey were loyalists. In the four southern colonies, fewer than 23 percent were. Loyalist clergy mostly kept their oaths and prayed for the king, or else suspended services. By the end of 1776 some churches were closing. Priests held services in private homes, and lay readers, who were not bound by the oaths, led morning and evening prayer.

  Patriot clergy in the South moved quickly to transfer their oaths to the American cause. They pointed to a precedent from the Glorious Revolution in England, and most kept their churches open. Many people assumed that High Church clergy were loyalists and Low Church clergy were patriots, an assumption that could be dangerous at the time.

  The war ended with congregations that needed bishops and had none. In 1783 the clergy of Connecticut elected Samuel Seabury as theirs.

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• 3. Bishops and Conventions

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  The Oath of Supremacy blocked Samuel Seabury's consecration in England, so he went to Scotland. There the non-juring bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church consecrated him in Aberdeen on the 14th of November 1784. The scholar Arthur Carl Piepkorn called him "the first Anglican bishop appointed to minister outside the British Isles." The first ordinations on American soil followed on the 3rd of August 1785 at Christ Church in Middletown, Connecticut.

  That same year, clergy and laity met in the first General Convention. They drafted a constitution, proposed a first American Book of Common Prayer, and began negotiating with English bishops for three more consecrations. In 1787, William White of Pennsylvania and Samuel Provoost of New York were consecrated by the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the bishop of Bath and Wells. Parliament had cleared the legal obstacles with the Consecration of Bishops Abroad Act 1786. James Madison, a bishop who was not the future president, was consecrated in 1790 as the first bishop of Virginia.

  American bishops therefore trace apostolic succession through two branches. One runs through the Scottish bishops who consecrated Seabury, and the other through the English bishops who consecrated White, Provoost and Madison. Every American bishop is ordained by at least three bishops.

  From the 28th of July to the 8th of August 1789, clergy from nine dioceses met in Philadelphia. They ratified a constitution and canons, reorganized into a House of Deputies and a House of Bishops, and adopted the name Protestant Episcopal Church. On the 17th of September 1792, at Trinity Church on Wall Street in New York City, Thomas John Claggett of Maryland was consecrated by all four existing bishops. He was the first bishop consecrated in America.

  The General Convention still meets every three years. The House of Bishops has over 300 members, and diocesan conventions elect over 800 deputies, four laity and four clergy per diocese. Between conventions, a 40-member Executive Council oversees the national church. The presiding bishop is elected by the House of Bishops for a nine-year term and has no territorial see. The national headquarters sits at 815 Second Avenue in New York City, and Episcopalians simply call it "815." Below the nine provinces are 106 dioceses and 6,447 congregations.

  The church's name has been argued over for generations. Until 1964, "the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America" was the only official name. In the 19th century, high church members wanted it changed because it ignored the church's catholic heritage. Evangelicals objected, arguing that the word "Protestant" accurately reflected the Reformed character of Anglicanism. After 1877, alternatives were regularly proposed and rejected, including "the American Catholic Church." A 1961 poll in The Living Church favored "The American Episcopal Church." A compromise in 1964 added a preamble recognizing "the Episcopal Church" as a lawful alternate designation. The title page of the 1928 prayer book still reads "The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America," while the 1979 book, adopted after a three-year trial, says simply "The Episcopal Church."

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• 4. Race and Conscience

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  In 1955 the church moved its general convention from Houston to Honolulu because of continuing racial segregation in Houston. Three years later, at the 1958 convention, a coalition of liberal members passed a resolution recognizing "the natural dignity and value of every man, of whatever color or race, as created in the image of God." The House of Bishops sent a 2,500-word pastoral letter to be read at all 7,290 Episcopal churches, citing the Supreme Court's decision on integration in public schools. The Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity was founded in December 1959 to eliminate racial, ethnic and class barriers within the church.

  Southern church leaders blocked a strong stand on civil rights before 1963. One prominent opponent was Charles C.J. Carpenter, the bishop of Alabama. By 1963 many leaders felt freer to speak. Presiding Bishop Arthur Lichtenberger wrote a pastoral letter urging Christians to work "across lines of racial separation, in a common struggle for justice," and the House of Bishops endorsed civil rights legislation.

  Tension did not end there. At the 1964 General Convention, the House of Deputies rejected a resolution sanctioning civil disobedience under special circumstances. Thurgood Marshall, a deputy to the convention, led many African-American deputies in a walkout. In 1967 Presiding Bishop John Hines launched the General Convention Special Program. It redirected nine million dollars over three years, a quarter of the church's operating budget, to community organizations in urban ghettos. Conservative southern bishops balked at grants to groups they saw as radical, which limited its effect. A conservative group, the Foundation for Christian Theology, also opposed it.

  The divisions ran far deeper than the 1960s. In 1861 Bishop John Henry Hopkins wrote a pamphlet arguing that slavery was not a sin in itself. He held that it was objectionable and should end by agreement, not by war. G.W. Hyer answered him in 1863 and exposed a startling divide within the church, as within other American churches. Yet the Episcopal Church did not split into northern and southern wings after the war, as many other denominations did. Southern Episcopalians had formed the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America, but the North never officially recognized the separation. By the 16th of May 1866 the southern dioceses had rejoined.

  Black Episcopalians organized on their own. In 1856 James Theodore Holly founded the first society for African Americans in the church, which argued that Black members should take part in seminaries and diocesan conventions. Holly later emigrated to Haiti and founded the Anglican Church there. He became the first African-American bishop on the 8th of November 1874, and the first African American to attend the Lambeth Conference. Samuel David Ferguson was consecrated on the 24th of June 1885, the first Black bishop consecrated by the Episcopal Church to practice in the United States. The Union of Black Episcopalians traces its roots to Holly's society, and its modern form was organized by African-American clergy seeking full inclusion at every level.

  The General Convention first admitted women as delegates in 1970. Within four years, women would force a far sharper confrontation.

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• 5. Women at the Altar

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  On the 29th of July 1974, a group of women known as the Philadelphia Eleven were irregularly ordained as priests. The bishops Daniel Corrigan, Robert L. DeWitt and Edward R. Welles performed the ceremony, assisted by Antonio Ramos. On the 7th of September 1975, four more women, the Washington Four, were irregularly ordained by the retired bishop George W. Barrett.

  In 1976 the General Convention permitted the ordination of women. It also recognized the ordinations of the 15 forerunners. The first woman canonically ordained to the priesthood was Jacqueline Means, on the 1st of January 1977, followed shortly by Tanya Vonnegut Beck. Both were ordained at All Saints Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. The first woman to become a bishop, Barbara Harris, was consecrated on the 11th of February 1989.

  The church tried to accommodate dioceses that objected. In 1994 the General Convention affirmed that there was value in the theological position that women should not be ordained. In 1997 it reversed course. It declared the canons on the ordination, licensing and deployment of women mandatory, and required noncompliant dioceses to report on their progress.

  In 2006 the General Convention elected Katharine Jefferts Schori as Presiding Bishop. She was the first woman to become a primate in the Anglican Communion. Her election was controversial across the wider communion because not all of it recognized the ordination of women.

  Three dioceses did not ordain women as priests or bishops when the Anglican Church in North America formed: San Joaquin, Quincy and Fort Worth. After their conservative majorities departed, all three began to ordain women. With the ordination of Margaret Lee on the 16th of October 2010 in the Diocese of Quincy, Illinois, women could be ordained as priests in every diocese of the church. The departures that changed those three dioceses had their own long history.

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• 6. Sexuality and Schism

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  At the 1976 General Convention, the church affirmed that homosexuals are "children of God" who deserve acceptance, pastoral care and equal protection under the law. Ellen Barrett became the first openly gay person ordained as a priest in 1977. Yet in 1991 the convention affirmed that "physical sexual expression" belongs only within the lifelong union of husband and wife.

  In June 2003 the church elected Gene Robinson, its first openly gay bishop. In October 2003, the primates of the Anglican Communion's 38 member churches convened an emergency meeting. Their communiqué warned that proceeding would "tear the fabric of the communion at its deepest level." During the ceremony Robinson wore a bullet-proof vest beneath his vestments, and he received numerous death threats after he became bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire.

  On the 14th of July 2009, the House of Bishops voted that "any ordained ministry" is open to homosexual men and women. This ended a moratorium passed in 2006. It came despite a plea from Archbishop Rowan Williams at the start of the convention: "I hope and pray that there won't be decisions in the coming days that will push us further apart." On the 10th of July 2012, the church approved an official liturgy for blessing same-sex relationships. It was not a marriage rite, though it included an exchange of vows.

  On the 29th of June 2015, at the 78th General Convention, the House of Bishops voted 129-26, with 5 abstentions, to remove the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby expressed "deep concern." In 2016, Anglican leaders temporarily suspended the Episcopal Church from key positions in the global fellowship. After the 2018 convention, all couples asking to be married in the church were given access to the new liturgies, though clergy may still decline to perform them. In 2022 the 80th General Convention affirmed access to gender affirming care. The Rev. Cameron Partridge, who transitioned in 2001 and was ordained in 2005, was the first openly transgender priest to preach at the Washington National Cathedral.

  Departure followed. In Cleveland, Ohio, four parishes with about 1,300 active members left, citing "divergent understandings of the authority of scripture and traditional Christian teaching." Four dioceses voted in 2007 and 2008 to leave: Pittsburgh, Quincy, Fort Worth and San Joaquin. Twelve other jurisdictions, serving an estimated 100,000 persons, formed the Anglican Church in North America in 2008. By 2017 it claimed over 1,000 congregations and 134,000 members. The Diocese of South Carolina voted to withdraw in 2012.

  The national church refused to accept any diocesan withdrawal. Presiding Bishop Schori wrote to South Carolina that a diocese "cannot, by its own action" leave, since that requires the consent of General Convention. In 2009 she had told bishops not to sell parish property to departing groups. The litigation that followed cost all sides tens of millions of dollars. One estimate puts the Episcopal Church's share at over $42 million and the separatists' at roughly $18 million, for a total above $60 million.

  The South Carolina case ended in mixed results. The departing diocese mostly won on appeal in the South Carolina Supreme Court, and multiple parishes kept their property. Other church and diocesan property stayed with the Episcopal Church. In 2019 a federal court ruled that the name "Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina" legally belonged to the Episcopal Church. The departing diocese became the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina.

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• 7. Establishment Pews

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  In the 1970s, a Fortune magazine study found that one in five of the country's largest businesses and one in three of its largest banks was run by an Episcopalian. The church has long carried a reputation as the religious institution closest to the American establishment. In the Gilded Age, the banker J. P. Morgan, the industrialist Henry Ford and the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner helped shape a distinctive upper-class Episcopalian ethos, especially around preserving the arts and history. Their philanthropy gave the church a quasi-national importance.

  Families such as the Vanderbilts, Astors, Du Ponts, Whitneys, Morgans, Fords and Mellons are Episcopalian, while the Rockefellers were mostly Baptists, though some were Episcopalians. The Boston Brahmins and the Old Philadelphians were often associated with the church. Two of the nation's oldest schools, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, were founded by Episcopal clergy or tied to the church.

  Science offers a parallel. Harriet Zuckerman's study Scientific Elite found that between 1901 and 1972-72 percent of American Nobel laureates came from a Protestant background. Most were Episcopalian, Presbyterian or Lutheran.

  A 2014 Pew Research Center study ranked Episcopalians as the third wealthiest religious group in the country, with 35 percent in households earning at least $100,000. Roughly 70 percent lived in households earning $50,000 or more. Pew's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study found that 67 percent of adherents held a bachelor's degree or higher, the second highest share of any religious group in America. In recent years, the church has also drawn many working-class Hispanic immigrants.

  The church's reform instincts have a history too. In 1886, Henry C. Potter, the Bishop of New York, addressed his clergy on the question of labor. The Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor formed in 1887, and many Episcopalians joined the Social Gospel movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

  Politics once matched the wealth. People jokingly called the church "the Republican Party at prayer," and Episcopalians were often linked to the Rockefeller wing of the party. Today 38 percent of members call themselves moderate, 32 percent liberal and 28 percent conservative. In a 2025 Pew study of 627 Episcopalians, 57 percent identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents, 37 percent as Republicans or Republican-leaning, and 6 percent as neither.

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• 8. Shrinking Pews

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  In 1925 the Episcopal Church had 1.1 million members. By the mid-1960s that number had risen to over 3.4 million, its peak. Between 1970 and 1990 it fell from about 3.2 million to about 2.4 million. In 1986 the church changed its definition of membership to count only active baptized members, where before it had counted all baptized members. Once that change is accounted for, numbers were broadly flat through the 1990s, with slight growth in the first years of the 21st century.

  The measures disagree. As of 2023, the church reported 1,547,779 active baptized members, of whom 1,394,769 were in the United States. A 2001 survey by ARIS and Barna found that 3.5 million Americans called themselves Episcopalians, a gap between those on membership rolls and those who identify with the church. In 2025, Pew Research found about 1 percent of 267 million US adults, around 2.67 million, self-identified as mainline Episcopalian or Anglican.

  Average Sunday attendance in 2018 was 962,529, with 933,206 in the United States and 29,323 outside it. That was 24.7 percent lower than in 2008.

  In 2025, the interim executive officer Molly James attributed the decline primarily to falling birth rates, saying Episcopalians simply have fewer children than in the mid-20th century. The numbers support her. In 1965 there were 880,000 children in Episcopal Sunday school programs, and by 2001 only 297,000. Other theories hold that the church failed to reach beyond ethnic barriers in an increasingly diverse society.

  Conversion has offset some losses. Roughly 48 percent of Episcopalians are converts. Of those, 93 percent were raised in another Christian denomination: 37 percent came from mainline Protestantism, 29 percent from Roman Catholicism, 24 percent from evangelical Protestantism and 3 percent from another Christian tradition. In the years before 2012, over 225,000 Roman Catholics became Episcopalians.

  The church's map is uneven. In data from 2000, the District of Columbia, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Virginia had the highest rates of adherents per capita. New York had the most adherents overall, over 200,000. Outside the mainland, the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti was the largest single diocese in 2013, with 84,301 baptized members, slightly over half of the church's foreign membership.

  In 2024, the church reported online attendance for the first time. It counted 413,034 people in the pews on an average Sunday, and 121,545 more worshipping online.

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