The concept, however, did not disappear with L’Enfant. As early as 1792, the Rt. Rev. Thomas Claggett, the first Episcopal bishop of Maryland, along with Episcopalian Joseph
Nourse, Washington’s first Registrar of the Treasury, felt the need for an Episcopal church in the newly forming capital city. Their conception of this church was not as one as a part of the Fed- eral City, but overlooking the City from a hill named Mt. St. Alban (Feller & Fishwick, 1965). The religious and political make-up of the first Congress was necessarily heavily attached to the An- glican faith because it was the national heritage assumed from Great Britain (Bratenahl, 1911; Tiffany, 1903; Brauer, 1953). Despite the name change from Anglican to Episcopalian made at the first American (Epsicopalian) General Convention in 1785, and despite the parallel constitu- tion the Episcopal General Convention ratified for itself in 1789, the Protestant Episcopal Church was considered an English institution (Tiffany, 1903), and anti-British feelings still rang high.
The religious atmosphere at the time valued personal relationships with God rather than social or communitarian relationships founded on common religious belief associated with in- stitutional religion. Thomas Paine, in 1793, wrote The Age of Reason in which he exemplified the religious/political feelings of his day. His book was written to “combat atheism by defend- ing what he believed to be the ‘true religion’” of using one’s own mind and reason to determine belief (Brauer, 1953, p. 89). To Paine, Protestantism was as bad as Catholicism in that they
both demanded creeds of belief. Creeds beget superstition and, according to Paine, the only way to combat the superstition of religious institutions was to use the brain God gave man to discover God through God’s other creations found in nature.
The age of the empirical had a stronghold on the new American nation. Although it took a while to gain real strength, the “nature and science” thinking that begin to take hold at the end of the eighteenth century was aided by the rhetoric of the revolution and national creation: Each person was created equal under the law of the Creator and each person had entitlement to use reason to access religious truth—individually attained (Brauer, 1953). The umbilical at- tachment to the state was severed for churches in the New World and this gave the individual churches both the opportunity and tedium of finding financial backing in order to function. It is no wonder that L’Enfant’s great Church idea was lost in the religious freedom rhetoric of the time. The concept of an Episcopal church acting as the stage for national ceremony was not met with firm approval of the ‘right’ men. The strongmen of the time, those with access to great libraries, the printing press, education, and political power—Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (and other such men)—had had enough of institutional religion. Although many of these men understood religion as a source for moral good for a moral society, and clearly made statements claiming such, religious freedom for the common man was seen as freedom from forced or assumed national religion.
Despite the claim made that the majority of the Declaration of Independence signers were Episcopalian (Feller & Fishwick, 1965), the truth is that there was little fervency in their church affiliations. That the first Congress found it expedient to elect a Chaplain and that the first Chaplain was Episcopalian, was not a reflection of the power of the Episcopalian faith. In
fact by 1811 the Episcopal Church, as such, almost disappeared altogether.22 The planted seed of a national church lay dormant for almost a century.
Post-Civil War changes are more than well documented. The age of reconstruction, the robber baron, the trans-Atlantic railroad, pacification of the Native-American (formerly referred to as Natives or Indians), reconstruction of the South, and the finishing touches of the west- ward plunge all became part of American history. Less known, yet obviously important to this project, is the growth of Washington, D.C. and the necessary connection to New York City as the birthplace of the first Episcopal bishop of Washington. The role of wealth and its attendant privileges as well as its tiny social circle are all important in the birth of WNC. Likewise, the post-Civil War period of American religious history had a profound impact on the reception of the public, both good and bad, in building a national cathedral, no matter how noble its mis- sion.
That there was any form of the Episcopal Church by the end of the Civil War is a testa- ment to the precious few men who kept trying to maintain and bring new life to the faith. The Nourse family, over the decades and generations, had maintained the land at Mt. St. Alban for ecclesiastic purposes. A small church and boy’s school, St. John’s School, was built on the Nourse land just prior to the Civil War. As part of a lasting legacy, Joseph Nourse’s granddaugh-
22
For example, when the bishop of Virginia died in 1813, only seven priests representing fourteen parishes even showed up to elect a new bishop and half the parishes in Maryland and Delaware were vacant. There were no seminaries to educate new priests, if any men had decided to answer the religious calling. Between the differing bishops there was little spiritual fraternity, only social politeness, due to power games. In the south, either no bishops were named at all, or if named, not ever even consecrated. In fact, in Georgia, the church never bothered to accept the 1789 General Convention constitution (Tiffany, 1903). The first Chaplain, Samuel Provoost, resigned from his bishopric after his wife died in 1801. When faced with Provoost’s resignation, the House of Bishops al- most refused to accept the unprecedented action of resignation, but decided instead to stand ready to “conse- crate…any person who may be presented to them with the requisite … religious, moral, and literary character” (p. 394). The saddest moment came when in 1808 only two bishops attended the General Convention in Baltimore and only seven dioceses were represented with either priest or lay persons.
ter, Phoebe Nourse, at her death in 1850, left a small box containing forty gold dollars inscribed with the instruction that the money was “the beginning of a fund for a free church at Mt. Al- ban” (Feller & Fishwick, 1965; Satterlee H. Y., 1899, p. 69).23 This money acted as impetus for building the still standing St. Alban’s church that almost seemed to act as placeholder for the later cathedral built next to it. Meanwhile, the nation had to survive its own growing pains.