Christ and Class: The Protestant Episcopal Church in the South, 1760-1865

Christ and Class: The Protestant Episcopal Church in the South, 1760-1865 Ryan Lee Fletcher This dissertation examines the emergence, practices, religious culture, expansion, and social role of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the American South from 1760 to 1865. The dissertation employs three major research methodologies by: (1) centralizing the role of social class in the Episcopal Church\u27s history, (2) seriously considering the Episcopal Church\u27s distinctive theology, and (3) quantifying the connections that linked the Episcopal Church to the South\u27s economic structures. Archival research, periodicals, and published records related to the Protestant Episcopal Church provided the primary evidence used in the formulation of the dissertation\u27s interpretations and conclusions. Many historians of the early American South depict evangelical Protestants as the dominant religious movement in the region as the Protestant Episcopal Church stagnated and supposedly faded following the American Revolution. Christ and Class aspires to complicate such analyses by elucidating how the Protestant Episcopal Church\u27s potency in the South during the pre-Civil War period should not be measured by its inferior membership numbers in comparison to the region\u27s other denominations, but rather the institution\u27s vitality hinged upon the social power and devotion of its planter-class communicants