Virginia Episcopalian Magazine Fall 2013 Issue | Page 28

Civil War
and the Life of the Diocese

The Confederate Episcopal Church
Julia Randle
In 2013 we stand at mid-point of the
sesquicentennial commemoration
of that U.S. conflict with many
politically and emotionally charged
names: Civil War, War Between the
States, the War of the Rebellion, the
War for Southern Independence, the
Late Unpleasantness, to name a few.
This year alone, event planners have
worked overtime to re-create battles
fought 150 years ago: Chancellorsville,
Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Chickamauga
and more. The web and print burgeon
with new popular and scholarly
literature on the topic. Opinions on this
multi-year observance run the gamut,
from desire to celebrate the high
tide of the expression of “Southern”
civilization, to a desire to sit in
judgment on the Confederacy and all it
represents, to a wish to ignore the war
altogether and “let the past die,” with
every possible emotion and viewpoint
in between.

But what does this historical
commemoration have to do with the
Episcopal Church in the Diocese of
Virginia? How does a church interact
with a cataclysmic historical event
fraught with terrible suffering, carnage
and contradictory emotions among
its members? Again, a whole range of
opinions exists, some of which have
been expressed to me directly and
frankly: comfort, as well as discomfort,
with looking at the Church’s role
at that time; fear of, or desire for,
a call to remove parish memorials
to Confederate States of America
communicants; unhappiness over, or
joy experienced from last February’s
diocesan apology for its role in slavery.

This article, and more Virginia
Episcopalian articles on the subject
throughout the remainder of the
sesquicentennial, begins and ends
with an entirely different agenda: to
study and understand what the Civil
26

Virginia Episcopalian / Fall 2013

Courtesy of Virginia Theological Seminary
Archives; Painting by John Neagle 

Until 1926, the presiding bishop of the
both Episcopal Church of the United
States and of the Confederate States
was the senior bishop in order of
consecration. Bishop William Meade,
pictured here, filled that role at the
November 1861 gathering of the
Confederate States dioceses which
confirmed the constitution of the
Protestant Episcopal Church in the
Confederate States of America.

War actually meant to the life of the
Episcopal Church in the Diocese of
Virginia. What challenges in mission
and ministry did the war pose to laity,
clergy and bishops in this Diocese?
What steps did the Church take to meet
those challenges? What were the dayto-day effects in church life at both the
parish and diocesan level? In this quest
for understanding, the secular world
of the Confederate States of America
and war are the landscape, while the
Church, Diocese and people, are the
object of inquiry.

At a basic level of church life,
the Civil War produced change of
the underlying organization of, and
nomenclature within, the Episcopal
Church in both the Confederate States
of America and in the Diocese of

Virginia. Southern Episcopal bishops
argued that the secular creation of
the nation, the Confederate States of
America, changed the status of the
Southern dioceses of the Protestant
Episcopal Church in the United
States, requiring th