Review: Glenn Robins 'The Bishop of the Old South: The Ministry and Civil War Legacy of Leonidas Polk'

In the Ordering of Priests in the PECUSA BCP 1928, alongside the traditional words at the laying on of hands - 'Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest', with the dominical words from John 20:23 - an alternative formula is provided:

Take thou Authority to execute the Office of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed to thee by the Imposition of our hands. And be thou a faithful Dispenser of the Word of God, and of his holy Sacraments; In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. 

Such a form of words was unsuccessfully sought by low church evangelicals in United Church of England and Ireland in the 1860s.  At disestablishment, the Church of Ireland - even with a numerically significant low church, evangelical tradition - refused to permit such a change to the Ordinal.

But it did happen in PECUSA, when the 1662 Ordinal was revised in 1792.  The inclusion of this alternative formula, and its distinctly low church concerns, witnesses to the strength of this constituency in the newly-formed PECUSA, part of a tradition whose story has - in many ways - been forgotten.

In The Bishop of the Old South (2006), Glenn Robins explores this lost tradition through the life and ministry of Leonidas Polk.  Polk was ordained deacon and priest in 1831, consecrated Missionary Bishop of the Southwest in 1838, and elected Bishop of Louisiana in 1841.  In many ways, he embodied a Southern Antebellum Episcopalianism which was to grow from very small numbers to become a significant factor in the religious culture of the South on the eve of secession.

From his evangelical conversion experience in West Point, to his first ministerial appointment in Richmond - "one of the few areas of evangelical strength in the Southern Episcopal Church" (p.41) - to his early pulpit ministry covering "the several major themes of evangelical preaching" (p.42), the evangelical foundations of Polk's ministry are obvious. As Robins notes:

his own conversion experience predisposed him to sympathize with the evangelical view of assurance, a position that boded well in the religious culture of the Old South (p.57).

His episcopal ministry flowed from this foundation.  Witnessing significant growth in the diocese of Louisiana - from 238 communicants in 1842 to 1,859 in 1861 - Polk also established a significant cultural place for Episcopalianism in the public square of the Antebellum South:

Bishop Leonidas Polk shaped a vision for Louisiana Episcopalians that merged evangelical principles with social conservatism ... Thus, Polk's significance as a religious leader was not based on a formal systematic theology but rather on his ability to plot a course for Southern Episcopalians so that they could not only survive but compete with the evangelical denominations of the Old South ... His evangelical zeal and social conservatism gave Louisiana Episcopalians a distinctly Southern as well as evangelical identity.  These pillars of the ministry ... made Leonidas Polk a representative figure in the Southern quest for a Christian society (p.73).

The account Robins gives of Polk's evangelical Episcopalianism is a reminder of why PECUSA needed an evangelical tradition in a culture profoundly influenced by, as Burke had put it, "the Protestantism of the Protestant religion".  Alongside the High Church and later Tractarian traditions, with their own particular significance in addressing the culture of the Great Republic (and see Robert Bruce Mullin's Episcopal Vision/American Reality on this), an Evangelical tradition was required to resonate with a popular culture shaped a low church, evangelical sensibility.

The departure of many evangelical Episcopalians to the REC in 1873 (less than a decade after Polk's death) was a body-blow to the tradition of low church Episcopalianism.  The black scarf, north-end expression of Anglicanism almost entirely disappeared from PECUSA, albeit that that Sunday Mattins expression remained mainstream well into the mid-20th century: but the clearest expression of evangelical Episcopalianism, able to speak into a religious culture shaped by low church, evangelical sensibility, disappeared.

The life and ministry of Leonidas Polk, then, is a sobering reminder of what PECUSA lost and of the consequences of this.

However, there is another aspect to the life and ministry of Leonidas Polk - planter, slave owner, Southern Nationalist, Confederate General.  The Peculiar Institution casts a long, dark shadow over Polk. 

Leonidas Polk emerged as one of the most significant proslavery clerics in the Gulf South region, and his efforts were virtually unmatched in his denomination (p.103).

This defence of slavery was dependent on an explicitly racialist ideology.  Slavery was justified by Polk because African-Americans were "a less fortunate and docile race" (p.215), and it was necessary for "a biracial social order" (p.106).  This determination "to build a slave society on religious ideals" resulted in a "complimentary nature between Southern Episcopalianism and Confederate identity" (p.150). 

As Robins highlights, however, this was a facade.  The slave power had little interest in the paternalism which Polk and others sought to articulate.  Even amongst Episcopalian planters, there was "hostility or ambivalence" (p.99) towards religious instruction for slaves, with a deep "fear of slave insurrection" (p.104), and a determination to enforce laws which "forbade teaching slaves to read" (p.111).  In the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, Bishop Meade's commitment to promote the religious education of slaves "was not reciprocated by most Episcopalians under his charge" (p.101).  The economic realities and racialist ideology of slavery meant that the Church's mission to the slaves - which Polk promoted - was inherently and fatally flawed from the outset.

Despite this, Polk was a spokesman for a Southern Nationalism in which he understood "slavery [to be] the defining characteristic" (p.218) and took up arms in its defence, believing in "the sacredness of the Confederate cause" (p.191).

Of course, it did not have be so.  An ordered Christian society, with respect for hierarchy and paternalistic obligations, did not require slavery.  This was evident in the emerging Dominion to the north of the American Republic and in the Kingdom across the Atlantic, polities shaped by Anglican political theology and in which evangelical social concern had a profound influence. Polk and those like him, in the absence of slavery, could have set forth such a vision as an alternative to Yankee plutocracy. They chose instead to promote the slave power.  The Peculiar Institution, rather than being a defining characteristic of an ordered Christian society, was its original sin. In the words of Eugene D. Genovese:

It is dangerous as well as wrong to obscure the genuinely tragic dimension of southern history - the extent to which courageous, God-fearing, honorable people rendered themselves complicit in slavery, segregation, and racism and ended up in defeat and degradation.

The Bishop of the Old South thus leaves the reader with two quite contradictory emotions, centred around a lost tradition and the Lost Cause.  There is great sadness at a tradition lost to PECUSA, an evangelical, low church tradition which would have enriched and furthered Episcopalian witness.  And then there is deep shame over the Lost Cause, that the vision of an ordered Christian society - a vision shared by Thomas Aquinas and Richard Hooker - should collapse into justification for an inherently evil economic and social system.