Racism, Conservatism, and the Anglican Historical Record

Special to Virtueonline

By David Straw I www.virtueonline.org I May 18, 2026

Listen long enough in Anglican circles and you start hearing the same story. Conservatism means resistance. Tradition means injustice. The quiet suggestion is usually left hanging there. If you care about historic theology and biblical authority, you are probably on the wrong side of history.

Real history is messier than that. And much more interesting.

Some of the earliest and strongest opponents of slavery and racial exclusion were not progressives in any modern sense. They were Bible believing Anglican Christians. They were Anglicans shaped by Scripture, prayer, and a stubborn loyalty to biblical authority. Their courage did not come from new social theories. It came from Christian conviction.

From the abolitionist movement in Great Britain to the early interracial work of the Reformed Episcopal Church in the United States, traditional Anglican Christianity has shown a moral seriousness that modern critics often ignore.

None of this denies the failures of the church. Anglican history, like all Christian history, carries the marks of human sin and moral blindness. Christians were at times slow, cautious, and compromised. Some Southern Anglicans and evangelicals twisted Scripture, appealing to household codes or the so-called curse of Ham to defend slavery or delay reform. Those failures deserve honest acknowledgment. They should trouble us.

But they do not tell the whole story. And they do not justify rewriting history to fit modern expectations.

Evangelical Faith and the Birth of British Abolition

One of the strongest evangelical Anglican voices was The Reverend John Newton. He was the former slave ship captain whose conversion gave us “Amazing Grace.” His repentance changed his whole life. His writings and counsel shaped William Wilberforce and the wider Clapham Sect and showed how personal conversion and biblical conviction can fuel real moral reform.

The Clapham Sect founded schools, supported missions, and pushed for moral renewal across society. Their activism was not narrow. It was rooted in a Christian vision of human dignity. And it produced results that outlasted any secular political movement of their era.

William Wilberforce and the Cost of Obedience

William Wilberforce gives us one of the clearest examples. His long fight against the slave trade and then against slavery itself came directly from his evangelical Anglican faith. It did not come from modern ideology.

After his conversion in 1785, Wilberforce saw his political work as a divine calling. He described his life’s purpose as the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.

For more than twenty years he battled powerful interests in Parliament. The slave trade was deeply woven into British commerce. He and his friends kept going anyway. In 1807 Parliament abolished the British slave trade. In 1833, just days before Wilberforce died, slavery itself was abolished across most of the British Empire.

The cost was enormous. Britain paid about twenty million pounds to compensate slaveholders, roughly forty percent of the government’s annual spending at the time. Few modern nations have ever paid such a price for moral reform. Wilberforce rejoiced that his country was willing to bear it. The biblical truth that every person bears the image of God mattered more than money.

Samuel Wilberforce and the Defense of Orthodoxy

Wilberforce’s son The Rt. Reverend Samuel became one of the most influential Anglican bishops of the Victorian era. He served as Bishop of Oxford and later Winchester. Samuel defended orthodox Christian belief at a time when secularism and skepticism were gaining ground. He stood for Christian anthropology and biblical revelation even when facing new theories about human origins.

Father and son showed the same spirit. Christian faith should not be hidden away. It must speak to the moral and intellectual challenges of its time.

The Reformed Episcopal Church and Interracial Anglicanism

Across the Atlantic the Reformed Episcopal Church offers another strong example. The REC was founded in 1873 to preserve evangelical doctrine, biblical authority, and classical worship.

In the segregated South after the Civil War, the REC welcomed African American congregations when many other doors remained closed. Within a year of its founding, hundreds of Black communicants in South Carolina had joined and formed congregations that lasted for generations. This grew not from political theory but from missionary zeal, pastoral care, and a biblical view of human dignity.

Bishop Stevens and Faithful Formation

The story of Bishop Peter Fayssoux Stevens shows this commitment in action. His life is one of the more remarkable in American church history, and it deserves to be better known.

Stevens was superintendent of the South Carolina Military Academy, the school now known as the Citadel. In January 1861 he commanded a detachment of cadets on Morris Island who were ordered to fire on the Union steamship Star of the West as it attempted to resupply Fort Sumter. Many historians regard that as the first hostile military action of the Civil War. Later that same year he resigned his post to be ordained as a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church and was subsequently commissioned as a colonel in the Confederate Army.

After the war Stevens devoted himself to ministry. He began working among freed Black men and women in South Carolina and saw a genuine church forming among them. When he brought four Black men he had trained for ministry before the examining authorities of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, all four were turned away. Three times the applications were made. Three times they were rejected.

That refusal was the breaking point. Stevens resigned from the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1876 and affiliated with the newly formed Reformed Episcopal Church, which was willing to receive these men and their congregations. He became the first bishop of what is now the Diocese of the Southeast, a position he held for thirty years.

It would be a mistake to read Stevens as a civil rights champion in any modern sense. He was a product of antebellum South Carolina and fought for the Confederacy. He was a complicated man. But gospel conviction can work in complicated men. Over the following decades he built twenty-seven African American churches, many of which are still in use today. He taught mathematics at two historically Black colleges. He founded what eventually became Cummins Memorial Theological Seminary to train Black clergy in Scripture, theology, preaching, and pastoral care. He worked alongside the Reverend Frank Crawford Ferguson, himself a former slave, as a partner in that ministry.

When Bishop Stevens died in 1910, his pallbearers were the Black ministers of his church. That image says a great deal.

The REC Today and the Ongoing Witness

That legacy continues. The Diocese of the Southeast in the REC is one of the most racially diverse jurisdictions in Anglicanism. Its congregations, clergy, and bishops include both White and African American leaders. Their unity rests on shared faith, sacraments, and gospel mission.

The contrast with the Episcopal Church is worth noting directly. Despite decades of resolutions, task forces, diversity offices, studies, and making racial justice a centerpiece of its public identity, the Episcopal Church remains one of the whitest mainline denominations in America. The gap between its institutional apparatus and its actual demographic reality is something TEC’s own leadership has had to acknowledge. The machinery of progressive racial ideology has not produced the fruit it promised.

The REC and the Anglican Church in North America more broadly tend to be significantly more racially and ethnically diverse than the Episcopal Church. This includes strong Nigerian congregations and whole dioceses connected to the Church of Nigeria as well as growing Hispanic ministries. These facts challenge the idea that theological conservatism must be abandoned to achieve real inclusion.

Orthodoxy, Ideology, and the Modern Debate

Some Anglican voices, shaped by mainline seminaries and elite university divinity schools, have argued that historic Christian orthodoxy is mainly an obstacle to racial justice. They seem to believe the church can only address racism by loosening its theological commitments and adopting modern ideologies.

History tells a different story. The British abolitionist movement, the influence of John Newton, the perseverance of William Wilberforce, and the early interracial witness of the Reformed Episcopal Church all came from deep fidelity to Scripture and evangelical conviction. Not from theological innovation.

Genuine diversity in the Church has historically come not from changing ideologies but from the biblical conviction that all people bear the image of God and that the Gospel unites what sin divides.

Conclusion

Anglican history gives us both encouragement and caution. Fidelity to Scripture and evangelical conviction has again and again produced moral courage, racial reconciliation, and a more diverse witness to Christ. At the same time it reminds us that sin remains even among sincere believers. Repentance is always needed.

Bishop Stevens is a good place to end. He was not a saint in any simple sense. He was a former Confederate officer from a slaveholding society who broke with his own church when it refused to receive men he had trained for ministry. Gospel conviction did that. Not ideology. Not institutional pressure. The biblical vision of human dignity, rooted in creation and redemption, turned a man who fired the first shots of the Civil War into someone whose pallbearers were Black ministers he had spent his life serving.

That is not a story modern categories handle well. It is, however, a true one.

Postscript

A word of clarification, lest anyone misunderstand what I’m saying. I am not arguing that ethnic inclusion is the chief goal of the Church. I also believe that the way this discussion has been framed in recent decades has harmed the Church immensely.

My point is that the mainline’s hypocrisy is hard to miss. It talks endlessly about anti-racism and inclusion, yet its churches remain overwhelmingly white and increasingly older. That contradiction is not the main problem. It is a symptom of a much deeper one.

Much of mainline Christianity today is built less on historic Christian orthodoxy and more on the shifting sands of modern progressivism. When that ideological foundation starts to crack, whether on race, sexuality, Scripture, or whatever issue comes next, the whole structure begins to wobble. We have been watching that collapse play out for decades in their membership numbers.

Now, genuine acceptance of all people without partiality is not merely a good thing. It is a godly thing. It always has been. It flows naturally from the gospel itself: one new humanity in Christ, the Great Commission to all nations, James’ warning against favoritism, and Paul’s great declaration that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free… for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28, ESV). None of that is new. None of it is a modern DEI add-on.

The real strength of the Reformed Episcopal Church and the ACNA is not their racial composition. It is their fidelity to Christ and to the faith once delivered to the saints. Where that fidelity is strong, the gospel does what the gospel has always done. It creates real unity across ethnic lines. Not as a program. Not as a metric to prove anything. As fruit.

Orthodoxy first. The rest follows.

The Rev. David Straw is Rector of Trinity Anglican Church (REC/ACNA) in Evansville. A church planter who has helped plant three Anglican churches, he was ordained to the diaconate in 2007 and to the priesthood in 2008. He is a graduate of Wesley Seminary. He and his wife have been married for nearly 35 years and have four children.