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A Test Of Identity: The Vestments Controversy In The Reformed Episcopal Church, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The religious culture of Anglicanism has, since the beginning of the 19th century, developed an extraordinarily rich and eclectic texture of liturgical symbol. The fact that symbol and ritual do bear such a weight of meaning for Anglicans suggests, in turn, that the savage conflict of evangelical and anglo-catholic in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the 1840s through the 1870s over vestments, relics, decorations, and even altar flowers, existed on more than the level of bad feelings or party crankiness. As it is, the very savagery of that conflict in those decades, along with its failure to achieve resolution until …