The Anglican Church in New Jersey. By Nelson R. Burr. Philadelphia: The Church Historical Society, 1954. pp. xvi-768. $10.00 (out of print).[1]
Nelson R. Burr, the celebrated church historian,[2] has written a history of the development of The Anglican Church in New Jersey. Burr’s text is the best known and most widely distributed book dealing with its subject, and while it does faithfully represent many aspects of the colonial correspondence of Anglican priests stationed in New Jersey, in general it does so uncritically. The effect of this authorial approach is that Burr has produced a credulous, often hagiographic, and frequently racist history that privileges the perspective of the privileged at the expense of marginalized peoples. It is a verbose testament to the power of survivor bias in the telling of church history and, while standing on the shelves of Episcopal church libraries throughout the state of New Jersey, it also stands as a warning to modern historiographers.
Burr’s text does not purport to cover exhaustively the entire history of the Anglican (and later Episcopal) Church in New Jersey, but focuses most closely on the colonial era, prior to the formation of the Episcopal Church (hence the title).[3] In choosing this focus Burr relies overwhelmingly on a particular corpus of documentary evidence, that is, on the records of correspondence between New Jersey priests and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (S.P.G.), a voluntary Anglican association founded in 1701 to send priests to the colonies and, by extension, expand the reach and influence of the Church. Copies of this corpus are housed in the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C. and in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, while digital scans of the bulk of the holdings are now available for viewing online.[4] As a reference to the New Jersey-related portion of this catalog of correspondence, and as a starting point for investigating the primary documents themselves, Burr’s book is invaluable. It oscillates between summary paraphrase and fine-grained detail, at times approaching the tenor of an annotated bibliography, both highlighting many of the key themes of the correspondence and providing careful and specific reference to particular letters. However, if one is reading for narratological style, the structure of the text leaves something to be desired. Though the chapters move somewhat chronologically, they are clearly a product of a thematic collation of notes on the primary texts, presented in thematically designated chapters. The unfortunate result is that paraphrases of information drawn from the S.P.G. correspondence appear repeatedly across multiple chapters, almost without awareness of the fact that the author is repeating himself. Thus the book at times resembles a reference text more than a history, and seems structured based on the assumption that the reader will not be digesting the whole text cover-to-cover as printed.
The more significant problem with Burr’s presentation of his source material is his apparent credulity regarding the institution of the Church as an agent of exclusive good. His narration maintains throughout a cadence of inevitability (and facile solidarity with the figures of the past), suggesting that pious Anglicans did right, others resisted, but that all things fell out essentially for good generally, and for the good of the Church particularly. In this he may be accurately representing the tone of the underlying sources, and the culture of the Church at the time of his writing,[5] but in doing so he reproduces institutional hagiography largely uncritically and rarely deploys a historiographic idiom that diverges in any appreciable way from survivor bias.
The clearest problem this bias creates for The Anglican Church in New Jersey appears in the Church’s treatment of the enslaved, and specifically enslaved Africans and African-Americans. Here Burr cleaves to the tone of his sources, which were written by priests who saw slavery as entirely justifiable within a “great chain of being,” while ignoring the actual data about slavery that the sources contain. Prolific enslavers, like Col. Lewis Morris and Col. Daniel Cox, who helped make draconian slave codes New Jersey law, are described in entirely glowing terms. Burr’s whitewash can perhaps best be seen in a subsection title which unironically asserts that “The Church Cherishes the Negro.” This brief section (pp. 224-228) paints a picture of benevolent concern and solicitude on the part of White Anglican priests. Almost without exception, the priests that he mentions as devoting attention to “the negroes” in this section in fact sought to create, buttress, and benefit from a slave society, while being active enslavers themselves. The letters Burr is working with, as he admits (p. 226), make frequent mention of the enslaved, but he is very selective in his presentation. Included in the New Jersey S.P.G. correspondence are plans for slave-worked plantations governed by priests,[6] reports of how Christianization is useful for suppressing slave revolt,[7] and mathematically challenged insistences that Anglicans are not significant enslavers.[8] But when Burr refers to these aspects of the correspondence, he justifies the enslavers, failing to indicate any appreciation for the crushingly oppressive injustice of the system the Church helped produce. Nor does he articulate precisely how enslavement constituted “cherishing.”
Burr’s approach to the relation of enslaved Black people to the Church appears to be consistent with his convictions regarding race and the Church in general. In The Anglican Church in New Jersey he indicates his belief not just that the Anglican (and Episcopal) Church is essentially only for White people, but rather that it is only for a narrow subset of White people. This prejudice can be seen in his commentary on the demographic tables in his conclusion (e.g. Table IV, pp. 483-84) ostensibly explaining the obstacles to Episcopal Church growth in New Jersey presented by immigration from “southern and eastern Europe” (p. 468).
Burr’s text, though useful as a compendium of topically organized references to S.P.G. correspondence pertinent to New Jersey, is less a critical historiography, and more a starry-eyed, but deeply flawed hagiography of the Church. While clearly knowledgeable of the Church’s responsibility for slavery and racism from the testimony of the SPG letter archive, Burr manipulates his narrative to keep that knowledge from his readers with a dexterity that approaches prestidigitation.
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, M.Div., Ph.D.
Lecturer, Department of Religion, Princeton University
Reparations Commission Research Historian, Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
