Why does Jamestown matter?
Joan Gundersen: In a general sense, Jamestown was the first colony that managed to hang on and sustain itself for the British. They actually had two colonies they founded that year [1607]. The other one packed up and went back -- that was up in Sagadohoc, Maine.

It's not that Jamestown was such a tremendous success in the first couple of years. They made about every mistake you can possibly make. But it survived, and they learned how to plant a colony.

It was also tremendously important from the point of view of Native people, because it's literally going to create a new world in their 'old world."

Within the first two decades, you have the beginnings of a whole range of institutions. For the church, clearly you have an official presence of the chaplain from the beginning, and worship was going to be a part of this community as it developed. The church's hold was pretty tenuous in the early years, simply because life expectancy was pretty low, and chaplains -- like everybody else -- tended to die.

Anne Conkling: I would love to have known the bishop who chose the young Robert Hunt from Old Heathfield, Sussex [England], to be the chaplain. Described by John Smith and others as a "courageous and religious Divine," he was a peacemaker among the factions on board the ships and after they arrived. Becalmed for weeks before they left England, the men argued constantly, and somehow he kept the peace.

When they arrived, it was Hunt who conducted the prayers as they planted the cross at Cape Henry — named for the young son of King James, the site of present-day Virginia Beach — claiming the continent of Virginia for Jesus Christ and Protestant Christianity.

Shortly after landing here at Jamestown, they held a service of Holy Communion giving thanks for a safe voyage, so their first corporate act in the new world was a service thanking God.

Joan Gundersen: They didn't have anywhere near the number of clergy that they needed at the time to make sure that there were sacramental offerings within reach of every person. From the moment the Church of England arrived and began to establish itself, the laity took larger roles.

There was the development, fairly early, of a parish structure that was a part of the government. And the church also almost immediately took on the welfare role, which means that it was caring for the poor, the hungry, the orphaned, the sick who cannot care for themselves. To the extent that this society cared for others, it was done through the church's outreach.

What was the ultimate purpose of the coming of this group to the New World?
Joan Gundersen: A little of everything. Remember that England was trying to survive in a world where it was a third-rate power. The great power was Spain and next was France, both Catholic countries. So it is hard to separate. You can't say that they did something for commercial or national reasons without also bringing in religion. It was part of the identity of what it meant to be English at that time.

So they saw themselves as part of establishing a Protestant empire?
Joan Gundersen: Very much so.

Anne Conkling: Sir Francis Drake sailed for Elizabeth and planted a cross in what is now California in 1579, claiming the land from the Pacific to the next sea. So when the men landed at Cape Henry, they simply completed that covenant to make us a Protestant Christian nation.

They could see a great missionary activity financed by merchants, bringing the "salvages" out of the arms of the devil and finding a place in the New World for all the castoffs in England: the poor, the street people, the Quakers, the Puritans, second sons who could never inherit because of primogeniture. Sweep the streets and jails out and deposit the refuse on the American shores. The merchants, the church, the crown, the ship builders, the politicians all wanted this exploration thing to work well. It was God, gold, glory.

Did they think of themselves as Anglicans?
Anne Conkling: The concept of Anglican as a denomination … to them it was simply "the church." In their minds there was no other.

Joan Gundersen: Occasionally they talked about the "Episcopal" church, because they had bishops -- not present, but theoretically there. And certainly the clergy were ordained by bishops.

You had this broad spectrum because of the context within which it was founded. There was a very strong Protestant wing still within the church, and there was a small group of separatists, but there continued to be a debate and a dialogue throughout the whole of the 17th century as the English Civil War and various stages of the struggles between High Church and Puritans went on.

The first settlers at Jamestown were all men in their 20s to 40s. What was their experience, and their parents' experience, of growing up in the church?
Joan Gundersen: They tended to be young, because that's who you're going to send. You're sending a lot of servants. By the time you get to 1619-1620, the sex ratio is still very skewed, but you are beginning to see an influx of women because the people who own the colony understand that that's going to stabilize the male population as well.

The people who were the investors in the Virginia Company tended to be moderate puritans. They were within the Church of England, and there was a vision that is part of the founding of Jamestown that this was a counter to the [Roman] Catholic empire.

Anne Conkling: Conforming puritans -- with a small "p" -- were a big part of the Church of England. The puritan wing of Parliament had a heavy hand in the early Jamestown experiment.

So the church was a huge part of the overall cultural context.

Joan Gundersen: Books were expensive, and if you only owned three, one of them was going to be the Bible.

These clerics charted a middle road because their charge was everyone inside a geographical area. But the doctrine would be moderately puritan, until the middle of the century.

Anne Conkling: Think of it: In the New World a common man could own land, something that was not possible in England. Slowly society gives birth from the middle. The middle sort of stretches. The middle way in the church stretches. Reform and revolution in this case is not from the top or the bottom, but from the middle.

Some of what we see as quintessentially American ideals, such as separation of church and state, were not part of their worldview.

Joan Gundersen: Oh, no. In fact it's exactly the opposite. The history of the American religious experience starts from a point where they assume that you cannot have a community hold together unless it's all on the same point on religion [and moves] to a place where they come to the reverse conclusion that a multitude of religions is not a bad thing — in fact, that may actually keep a balance.

Anne Conkling: You can almost hear the men thinking out loud as they sat around the tables plotting the charter, sealed April 10, 1606. [It] is like the birth certificate of America: If we are to plant only one church, and everyone attends, obeys and pays, perhaps we can avoid the religious strife we have taken as our national memory and our pattern of dysfunctional behavior.

The instructions that came along with the charter are carved in stone on the monument at Jamestown Island: "Make yourselves of one mind ... for every plantation which our heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted out." One church, one mind. The national church idea of England came ashore with the 104 men and boys in May 1607, and it would set the American pattern.

Joan Gundersen: It was not until the American Revolution that most places began to separate church and state. The place that had the greatest amount of pain surrounding that separation was Virginia.

Anne Conkling: [In 1774] there  was a resolution put forth in the Virginia House of Burgesses by the  senior warden of Bruton Parish [in Williamsburg] calling for a day of "fasting,  humiliation and prayer" on June 1. Where my generation would have marched in the streets, that generation went to church to seek divine guidance. The churches of Virginia were packed that day.

They invited the chaplain to the House of Burgesses to deliver the talk [at Bruton]. A lot of people who came to the church  that day said that it was a day that changed their lives, because they had to make a choice: Am I going to go with revolution or am I  going to go home to England, or run to Canada or Connecticut, where there are plenty of Tories?

Think about the priests who in their ordination had promised to obey, not only our Lord Jesus Christ, but the king. What do they do? Do they take off their collar, or say we have a new way? A couple of the  clergy had their Continental uniforms under their vestments, and  chose from the pulpit to tear open their vestments and show the Continental blue and say, "My choice is made."

The Revolution was a very difficult time. [Bruton] parish went from being the only show in town to being a shadow of its former self. It was never completely abandoned, but once the Statutes of Religious Freedom were adopted in 1786, things really began to change. People who had always been required to attend and support the English church were free to go elsewhere. The Church of England went from 255 parishes down to 15. Parishes were defaced, used as taverns and stables -- anything to deface the word "England." Out of the ashes of Revolution rises the American Episcopal Church.

What does Jamestown have to tell us today?
Joan Gundersen: I think that it is a place that we celebrate the start of the Church of England tradition on this continent. It is the seed from which we all grew. It also should tell us that from the beginning laity were involved in a larger role than they were elsewhere, and that by necessity they learned to draw a larger circle, to include, and eventually the church becomes a balance between competing ideas.

A certain level of tension and conflict is natural. We need to understand and embrace the ways in which the church evolved here and our "local adaptations," in the wonderful words of the Articles of Religion.

Anne Conkling: I really believe that in 200 or 300 years, if not sooner, the Reformation will be seen in many stages, and the "American Reformation" we are now experiencing will be an amazing new chapter. And we march on, adapting and being the leading edge of the gospel, with new ears to hear us and new wine for the feast! It's all in God's time, and when we reach the fullness of time, it will all be so clear.

-- The Rev. Jan Nunley is the Episcopal Church's deputy for communication.

Gaining perspective
A look at Jamestown, Virginia, then and now

[Episcopal Life] As Episcopalians join in commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in North America, some may wonder how that beginning relates to the complex religious and political world we know today. Episcopal Life's Jan Nunley engages two historians in a conversation about the significance of Jamestown to the development of the Episcopal Church and Anglicanism in America. Dr. Joan Gundersen is professor emeritus of history at California State University, a research scholar in women's studies at the University of Pittsburgh and co-author, with Dr. Edward Bond, of a forthcoming history of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. Historical interpreter Anne J. Conkling is a longtime docent at Jamestown and Williamsburg and a member of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg.

Why does Jamestown matter to Anglicans and Episcopalians?
Joan Gundersen: In a general sense, Jamestown was the first colony that managed to hang on and sustain itself -- very fragilely, for several years -- but to hang on, for the British. They actually had two colonies they founded that year [1607]. The other one packed up and went back -- that was up in Sagadohoc, Maine.

So it's essential that way. It was not the first place that the Book of Common Prayer was used or read within the continental bounds of the United States, because [English explorer Sir Francis] Drake had already done that. And it was done at Roanoke, but Roanoke didn't survive.

It's not that Jamestown was such a tremendous success in the first couple of years. They made about every mistake you can possibly make. But it survived, and they learned how to plant a colony.

It was also tremendously important from the point of view of Native people, because it's literally going to create a new world in their "old world."

Within the first two decades you have the beginnings of a whole range of institutions. For the church, clearly you have an official presence of the chaplain from the beginning, and worship was going to be a part of this community as it developed. The church's hold was pretty tenuous in the early years, simply because life expectancy was pretty low, and chaplains -- like everybody else -- tended to die.

Anne Conkling: I would love to have known the bishop who chose the young Robert Hunt from Old Heathfield, Sussex, to be the chaplain. Described by John Smith and others as a "courageous and religious Divine," he was a peacemaker among the factions on board the ships and after they arrived. Becalmed for weeks before they left England, the men argued constantly, and somehow he kept the peace.

When they arrived, it was Hunt who conducted the prayers as they planted the cross at Cape Henry -- named for the young son of King James, the site of present-day Virginia Beach -- claiming the continent of Virginia for Jesus Christ and Protestant Christianity.

Shortly after landing here at Jamestown, they held a service of Holy Communion giving thanks for a safe voyage, so their first corporate act in the new world was a service thanking God.

Gundersen: They didn't have anywhere near the number of clergy that they needed at the time to make sure that there were sacramental offerings within reach of every person. But what happened was that, from the moment the Church of England arrived and began to establish itself, the laity took larger roles. Because there wasn't anyone else, in many cases. They may have a copy of the prayer book. If there's not a minister, somebody's got to read the burial service. They are going to do family prayers, whether they are from those books or whether there are clergy to come in on Sunday or not. Literacy was pretty low in 17th-century Virginia, but widespread enough that there could be maintenance of leadership among laity.

There was the development, fairly early, of a parish structure that was a part of the government. And the church also almost immediately took on the welfare role, which means that it was caring for the poor, the hungry, the orphaned, the sick that cannot care for themselves. To the extent that this society cared for others, it was done through the church's outreach.

What was the ultimate purpose of the coming of this group to the New World?
Gundersen: A little of everything. There was clearly a group of people who were projecting a religious perception on the goals for it. There were plans early for a college to be aimed at the Indians; there was a certain amount of missionary effort done early.

Remember that England was trying to survive in a world where it was a third-rate power and the great power was Spain and next was France, both Catholic countries. So it is hard to separate. You can't say that they do something for commercial or national reasons without also bringing in religion. It's part of the identity of what it means to be English at that time.

It's one of the hard things for an English Catholic. They were seen as automatically suspect because they had an allegiance to someone who did not recognize the Crown in England. The pope had told them that Elizabeth and James were illegitimate heirs to the throne. There are attempts [by Catholic monarchs] to invade England -- that's what the [Spanish] Armada was.

Remember that in the first part of the 17th century was the Thirty Years' War on the Continent, where Protestant and Catholic forces were battling. In this context it's hard to do anything that doesn't have an identity attached to it. What made it so hard for English Catholics was that, as much as they might have said they loved their country, they were in a bind because the pope told them they had an illegitimate monarch. They were automatically at odds with the legitimacy of the government.

So they saw themselves as part of establishing a Protestant Empire?
Gundersen: Very much so. If you read Richard Hakluyt, [the Rev.] Samuel Purchas and others who were the publicists for the colonization efforts in England, you will see this "glorious Protestant empire" in the language. That continues through the 17th century.

Conkling: Sir Francis Drake sailed for Elizabeth and planted a cross in what is now California in 1579, claiming the land from the Pacific to the next sea. So when the men landed at Cape Henry, they simply completed that covenant to make us a Protestant Christian nation.

They could see a great missionary activity financed by merchants, bringing the "salvages" out of the arms of the devil and finding a place in the New World for all the castoffs in England: the poor, the street people, the Quakers, the Puritans, second sons who could never inherit because of primogeniture. Sweep the streets and jails out and deposit the refuse on the American shores. The merchants, the church, the crown, the ship builders, the politicians all wanted this exploration thing to work well. It was God, gold, glory.

How did they see the religion of the Native peoples?
Gundersen: Not all Native religion was the same, but the English were interested in it only in the sense of being able to convert them.

There were sermons and statements that referred to the Roman Empire civilizing Britain as a precedent for colonization in America.

They said the same thing about Africans. And the Irish. That Irish experience is very pertinent to Virginia.

The people who initially tried to settle Roanoke, the Raleigh family, their major interests were in Ireland. There were those who retired from America back to Ireland and end[ed] up on "particular plantations," which were separate enclaves of settlers.

One of the reasons they set up the Virginia House of Burgesses was to get these "particular plantations" back under the [colonial] government. The Pilgrims in 1620 were going to be a "particular plantation" in Virginia, but by accident or design they ended up further north.

Ulster is where they got their training. And that's a problem, because Ireland had a kind of agriculture that could sustain that. So did the Spanish colonies -- the natives were used to creating a surplus of food.

In Virginia they had subsistence cultures. But the English expected that the Native peoples would supply them food, at a time when there was a tremendous drought. The English also didn't understand Native gender roles and who controlled the food, or grew it.

Did they think of themselves as Anglicans?
Conkling: The concept of Anglican as a denomination -- to them it was simply "the church." In their minds there was no other.

Gundersen: From the beginning, also, there was a wide spectrum of belief that rested within what they would just call -- not Anglican, just "the church." Occasionally they talked about the "Episcopal" church, because they had bishops -- not present, but theoretically there. And certainly the clergy were ordained by bishops.

Within it you had this broad spectrum because of the context within which it was founded. There was a very strong Protestant wing still within the church, and there was a small group of separatists, but there continued to be a debate and a dialogue throughout the whole of the 17th century, as the English Civil War and various stages of the struggles between "high church" and Puritans went on.

The first settlers at Jamestown were all men in their 20s to 40s. What was their experience, and their parents' experience, of growing up in the church?

Gundersen: They tended to be young, because that's who you're going to send. You're sending a lot of servants. By the time you get to 1619-20, the sex ratio is still very skewed, but you are beginning to see an influx of women because the people who own the colony understand that that's going to stabilize the male population as well. Otherwise you have this kind of backflow [to England], and if they're actually going to have people stay, there has to be the ability for some of them to marry and have children.

The people who were the investors in the Virginia Company tended to be moderate puritans. They were within the Church of England, and there was a vision that is part of the founding of Jamestown that this was a counter to the [Roman] Catholic empire.

Conkling: Conforming puritans -- with a small "p" -- were a big part of the Church of England. The puritan wing of Parliament had a heavy hand in the early Jamestown experiment. Men like [John] Rolfe, [Sir Thomas] Dale, [Sir Edwin] Sandys, and [Sir George] Yeardley were all evidence of that. The apostle to Virginia was the Rev. Alexander Whitaker, the man who converted and baptized the young Pocahontas.

Gundersen: The first clergy that came were relatively puritan, but they were the only game in town, and they didn't push it too far because the leadership came from a pretty broad spectrum. The kinds of things that become local "culture wars" -- ministers didn't push very heavily on them in Virginia, as you see elsewhere.

Let me give you an example. Puritans didn't celebrate Christmas, and they kept a much stricter Sabbath on Sunday and more generally [as regards] amusement. But they're not going out on a limb and declaring the governor is apostate because he enjoys a round of cards. Quite frankly, with all of these young men around, there's a fair amount of drinking, there's a fair amount of card playing, there's a lot of swearing, there is taking the name of the Lord in vain. Some of this gets brought up to local county courts if it gets too raucous.

So the church was a huge part of the overall cultural context.

Books were expensive, and if you only owned three, one of them was going to be the Bible.

These clerics charted pretty much a middle road because their charge was pretty much everyone inside a geographical area. But the doctrine and so forth would be moderately puritan, until the middle of the century. As you got closer to Charles I's execution, you began to see people looking for refuge who were of the more Royalist stamp. They're from a "higher" church background, many of them came with a fair amount of money, and they came into leadership positions.

So there was a strong balance that kept this from going too far towards the rigid Puritan side. And the clergy that were there respected that; if they didn't, they didn't stay too long.

Conkling: Think of it: In the New World a common man could own land, something that was not possible in England. Slowly society gives birth from the middle. The middle sort [of] stretches. The middle way in the church stretches. Reform and revolution in this case [are] not from the top or the bottom, but from the middle.

Gundersen: Some of the people who voted for the death of Charles I -- the regicide -- ended up in Massachusetts Bay. There were also Puritan investors; they included a lot of people who were settling at the same time in Barbados and St. Kitts-Nevis, through the whole range of other islands in which there was fairly strong Puritan involvement, part of the early British Empire being formed in the 17th century.

There were Puritan enclaves in these island colonies as well as in New England. Once you get to 1630, most of that was diverted north. Before that, if you wanted to get out of town, one of the ways to do that was to sign on for overseas. So it could be marginal people that were involved because this was a good way to get out of town.

Certainly as they developed convict service as a force of labor for tobacco, and there were a number of convict servants -- the choice was basically hanging, or going to the colonies on a long-term service contract and having a contract sold once there -- those people included the dissidents in some of these various turmoils.

Some of what we see as quintessentially American ideals, such as separation of church and state, were not part of their worldview.
Gundersen: Oh, no. In fact it's exactly the opposite. The history of the American religious experience starts from a point where they assume that you cannot have a community hold together unless it's all on the same point on religion [and moves] to a place where they come to the reverse conclusion that a multitude of religions is not a bad thing -- in fact, that may actually keep a balance.

Conkling: You can almost hear the men thinking out loud as they sat around the tables plotting the charter, sealed April 10,1606, which is like the birth certificate of America: If we are to plant only one church, and everyone attends, obeys and pays, perhaps we can avoid the religious strife we have taken as our national memory and our pattern of dysfunctional behavior.

The instructions that came along with the charter are carved in stone on the monument at Jamestown Island: "Make yourselves of one mind ... for every plantation which our heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted out." One church, one mind. The national church idea of England came ashore with the 104 men and boys in May 1607, and it would set the American pattern.

Gundersen: It was not until the American Revolution that most places began to separate church and state. The place that had the greatest amount of pain surrounding that separation was Virginia.

Conkling: [In 1774] there was a resolution put forth in the Virginia House of Burgesses by the senior warden of Bruton Parish [in Williamsburg] calling for a day of "fasting, humiliation and prayer" on June 1. Where my generation would have marched in the streets, that generation went to church to seek divine guidance. The churches of Virginia were packed that day.

They invited the chaplain to the House of Burgesses to deliver the talk [at Bruton]. A lot of people who came to the church that day said that it was a day that changed their lives, because they had to make a choice: Am I going to go with revolution or am I going to go home to England, or run to Canada or Connecticut, where there are plenty of Tories?

Think about the priests who in their ordination had promised to obey, not only our Lord Jesus Christ, but the king. What do they do? Do they take off their collar, or say we have a new way? A couple of the clergy had their Continental uniforms under their vestments and chose from the pulpit to tear open their vestments and show the Continental blue and say, "My choice is made."

The Revolution was a very difficult time. [Bruton] parish went from being the only show in town to being a shadow of its former self. It was never completely abandoned, but once the Statutes of Religious Freedom were adopted in 1786, things really began to change. People who had always been required to attend and support the English church were free to go elsewhere. The Church of England went from 255 parishes down to 15. Parishes were defaced, used as taverns and stables -- anything to deface the word "England." Out of the ashes of Revolution rises the American Episcopal Church.

Gundersen: [Virginia] would not be the last to separate -- state-church finance goes on into 1820 in some of the New England areas -- but what they've done is to allow ways for "dissenters," i.e. Episcopalians, to opt out of the financing of the Congregational churches there.

In the 18th century, religious diversity became increasingly complicated because of ethnic groups that were welcomed in and a growing wave of revival that split internally a number of the already-present religious groups. For example, Congregationalists split between Separatists and Regular congregations; there are New Light and Old Light Presbyterians; Baptists are Regular or Separatist. And in the Church of England, it's the Methodist Episcopalians. But we didn't split until after the American Revolution; we managed to hold within one body until after that.

So you have multiple factions. The Church of England tried to be inclusive to the extent that when the Huguenots came there were special ethnic parishes that spoke French and used French translations of the Book of Common Prayer, and their clergy were dually ordained. The same thing happened for some of the German Lutheran groups. There was a parish in Virginia that had mostly German settlers. The people in Virginia contacted the Lutherans in Pennsylvania. One of the sons of the leading Lutheran pastor was willing to be ordained as an Episcopal priest and to be sent back -- we're not sure whether he was doing Lutheran services or Anglican services, because he was serving both congregations in this parish. The Anglicans were willing to do that kind of drawing the circle bigger in certain ways.

So the separation of church and state grows out of increasing competition between multitudes of different religious groups within the colonies and finally a recognition that the only way to have peace is to get the church out of being government-financed. Churches could be lobby groups on moral issues and other things, but they were not to be on the board of directors of the state.

It's born out of the experience of religious conflict, and it's not something that people adopted easily in most places. One place that was doing this early was Rhode Island, and it was considered "the sinkhole of New England" because of that. It was an uneasy learning that it works better if you separate these in the American context.

There's the outworking of a communications revolution, too, much as we have today.

Print is a communications revolution. It makes it much easier to circulate material and put it in the hands of others. You can do it with manuscripts, but you can't replicate it as you can in print. Even when literacy is low, it's a larger audience. Something like a newspaper gets read aloud in a tavern. When you go to church, whether you read or not, they read the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible, and the phrases become a part of what you know.

Travel, though, is still difficult, and that has implications for the church, doesn't it?
Gundersen: The church is a truncated church on this side of the Atlantic. The bishop of London was not our bishop. He got a charter that gave him some role in supervising clergy and sending out pastoral letters to the colonies. But there were times that the bishop of London does not have that charter -- no one does. The bishop of London doesn't seek it.

Outside of Virginia, Maryland and South Carolina, the biggest authority is not the bishop of London but the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a mission organization. They decided whether to yank the money from a missionary and where they would be assigned. They actually had more direct control in those colonies.

There's a fair number of people who were sent from the colonies for ordination in England. Sometimes they're immigrants and sometimes they are Virginia-born.

That's one of the things that this church has to invent, is the role bishops will play as they're reinventing the church after the American Revolution -- not as a part of the political structure. They talked about "spiritual" bishops. Initially the constitution for the church had a clause that in case there were not three bishops in the House of Bishops, they would meet with the House of Deputies.

We knew what we needed -- ordination. Confirmation was introduced later as an important part of the life cycle of the Episcopalian. But what was absolutely necessary for the church to replicate itself was ordination.

The bishops were not "monarchical?"
Gundersen: It's usually, you do this with a committee, you and three other people, and so on. The idea of a bishop being somehow the final spiritual and temporal authority in a diocese takes a long time to take hold.

Now at this point the Enlightenment is starting to dawn in Europe, although Deism hasn't really gotten traction yet as a philosophy?
Gundersen: It's getting some traction by the 18th century, and while it has some intellectual appeal for some of the people, as a widespread phenomenon among the general population it doesn't have a lot of staying power. You will find sermon after sermon preached by Church of England ministers that talked about the rationality of God's book of creation and how right reason will give evidence all around you.

You heard increasingly that God gave the mind and there is no conflict, if one looks at the Scriptures, between them and the unfolding of nature. At this point what you will see is proof of God from nature, and if one looks at creation, you will see God's hand at work. They worked together very well.

What they were suspicious of in the Church of England was too much emotion. That's what the revivals were doing -- replacing rationality with emotion. They saw "enthusiasm" as leaning to excess, and excess represented disorder and chaos. [By contrast] what they represent is orderliness and eminently reasonable religion.

Within the Episcopal orbit in the 18th century, there was a revival as well that brought in the "fruits of the Spirit" and some more of the sense of being touched directly by God. These will become increasingly a line of division and debate in the 19th century, to the point that you have what amounts to open war between evangelical and "high church" bishops -- where the evangelicals try to purge the House of Bishops, if they can, of "high church" bishops. They don't quite succeed, but they get a couple of them on other issues. In the 1840s and '50s, the House of Bishops is not a friendly place to be.

It sounds as though the status quo for the American Episcopal Church historically is conflict, with an abnormal period of peace in the early 20th century.
Gundersen: High church-low church, which was one of the major divides, got pushed aside. The evangelical versus the high church in the 19th century played itself out before the turn of the century. There was a period of calm after the 1928 prayer book and a period where the tensions in the church have more to do with race and gender than they do with theology.

What does Jamestown have to tell us today?
Gundersen: I think that it is a place that we celebrate the start of the Church of England tradition on this continent. It is the seed from which we all grow. It also should tell us that from the beginning laity were involved in a larger role than they were elsewhere, and that by necessity they learned to draw a larger circle, to include, and at the same time that eventually the church becomes a balance between competing ideas.

A certain level of tension and conflict is natural. We need to understand and embrace the ways in which the church evolved here and our "local adaptations," in the wonderful words of the Articles of Religion.

Conkling: I really believe that in 200 or 300 years, if not sooner, the Reformation will be seen in many stages, and the "American Reformation" we are now experiencing will be an amazing new chapter. And we march on, adapting and being the leading edge of the gospel, with new ears to hear us and new wine for the feast! It's all in God's time, and when we reach the fullness of time, it will all be so clear.