Between Community and Catholicity: Monastic Tendencies in Antebellum American Episcopalianism.

The founding of the Episcopalian mission that would become known as Nashotah House in the Wisconsin territory in 1841 represented an altogether new phenomenon in American Protestantism: a mission station operated by a brotherhood of celibate men living in community with one another. The monastic pretensions of this mission placed it within the ambit of the ongoing catholic revival in the Church of England. And while the backlash against these monastic elements in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States closely resembled the ecclesiastical politics of the British world, the controversy over the Nashotah mission was fraught with peculiarly American anxieties as well. For Nashotah, and the other monastic forms that followed in its train, took their place amidst a host of communal experiments that were then dotting the American wilderness. The controversy over Nashotah, this article claims, reveals a heretofore overlooked set of interchanges between ecclesiology and communitarianism in American life. Mapping these will allow us to consider the discourses about group life which comprised an understudied aspect of American romanticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]